If symptoms
persist...
LAST week I went to prison — not for correctional purposes but as an `expert', to determine whether there were ex- tenuating circumstances in a case of incestuous rape.
Prison always makes me feel uneasy. It isn't just the fierce dogs on short leashes on the other side of the gate, or the prisoners in blue dungarees with scars on their faces, an earring and tattoed knuck- les. No, it is the uncertainty about whom I am serving, the state, the patient or Mammon. I like to have my motives clear.
It is very easy on the in (as prisoners call it) to see things exactly the way the warders want you to see them. They are flatteringly obsequious and jovial, treat- ing you as an honorary member of their mystery, at the same time recognising your superior social status. Sometimes they are witty and cynical. A friend of mine had just completed a morning sick parade during which he had been refused all requests for sleeping pills and new shoes — the whole reason for attendance, from the prisoners' angle.
`They didn't look very happy after sick parade this morning, sir,' said a warder. Another drew himself up to attention and saluted.
`That shows you're doing a good job, sir.'
Prison doctors are a special breed, too. I once found one with his head in his hands, his elbows on his desk, in a state of deep despair. There had just been a suicide in the prison.
'I don't know what's worse,' he said. The suicide or the forms to fill in afterwards.' The incestuous rapist was brought in with a cup of warm grey tea. I can best describe him as tearful weed. He was going to plead guilty and his sentence would be four years, according to his solicitor.
I shook his hand, damp and trembly. Was he Mr Jones, Jones, or Prisoner No.
4749B?
`I shouldn't have did it,' he said, the rims of his eyes growing pink. 'I've lost everythink what I had.'
Extenuating circumstances? He came from a poor family. His father, who had never worked because of a 'cardiac heart' (but was now 93 years old), had been something of a voyeur in his time. There were 16 children, two of whom had died young; the rapist spent his childhood sharing a bedroom with seven brothers and sisters, two to a bed. His brother had been convicted of indecent exposure. His wife was a harridan.
Is to understand all to forgive all, or even to forgive half? Fortunately, that was for the judge to decide. What, then, was the point of my report? I hadn't done more than ask a few commonsense ques- tions and suggested a possible explana- tion of doubtful intellectual validity.
On the other hand, I was able to charge a fee which, while not handsome, would buy me a dinner or two. Doctors in prisons, I concluded, were servants neith- er of the state nor of the patient, but wholly of Mammon, and a terrible weight lifted from my shoulders.
Theodore Dalrymple
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