Topsy-Turvy
UTOPIA-FANCIERS will recollect Samuel Butler's topsy-turvy Er•ewhon, where lawbreakers were treated as sick, and the unhealthy were punished. Liberal-minded citizens could almost go along with the first, but the second merely sounded too clever by half. The nineteenth century was inclined to regard the whole busines of poverty, crime and disease (and lunacy) as interrelated. Mayhew made it abundantly clear that the work- house and the infirmary were only another kind of prison. The first a punishment for failure; the second as a kind of charitable corollary. Restraint, severity and austerity were the lot of those unfortunate enough to fall from grace financially, physically or mentally..
How far we have moved from this outlook is conjectural, for many of us still feel that depri- vations, whether of liberty, civil rights, a decent standard of living, drink and tobacco, or merely being sent to bed without supper, are aspects of rough justice (the kind oddly designated poetic) without which society and its sub-units will not function smoothly. Hence the fascination. of reading Sington and Playfair ranging around the world to uncover examples of penal enlighten- ment and see if they have anything to offer old- fashioned Britain. They themselves are in rayonr of abolishing the prison system altogether, and they argue this case eloquently in their first chapter. Some countries appear to be moving slowly in this direction, not with the intention of leaving the convicted criminal at large, but of establishing that prison is a place of reform, not retribution, by making the cells, or rather rooms, comfortable, by allowing the prisoner to wear his own clothes, keeping his diet `up to the best hos- pital standard,' giving him `heterosexual freedom' (this is done in Mexico, Sweden, Poland and the Soviet Union at experimental prisons) and even using the device of weekend imprisonment.
Compare this magnanimous treatment with Jan de Hartog's Houston, Texas, hospital. Weighting heavily for novelist's hyperbole, it yet remains a disturbing, nightmarish account of a badly-run, ill-equipped lazar-house with modern pretensions. Mr. and Mrs. de Hartog worked at the Jefferson Davis Hospital as volunteer orderlies in the Emergency Room, and became closely acquainted with the grotesque squalor of a so-called charity hospital in the heart of a Texan boom-town. The building itself ('the final outcome of the deliberations of faceless com- mittees: a colossal compromise') is the symbol of communal indifference to individual misfor- tune. The place smelt like a stockyard or a Nazi concentration camp. Bleeding patients were re- ferred from one department to another. `After four months you have to go to O.B. This is Emergency.' Houston 1963, in Mr. de Hartog's words, was 'a remnant of the Middle Ages.' Had we but world enough and time, what hideous archaisms could we not uncover in our affluent societies, cheek by jowl, like 'old J.D.' with the most expensive stadium in the world, with the tallest office block or the finest theatre.
ANDREW ROBERTSON
Previous page
