Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Part VI · Chapter 6 13 (2/2)

When the reformed central prisons were introduced in France, it was believed that the principle of absolute silence could be maintained in them. But it is so contrary to human nature that its strict enforcement had to be abandoned.

To the outward observer the prison seems to be quite mute; but in reality life goes on in it as busily as in a small town. In suppressed voices, by means of whispers, hurriedly dropped words, and scraps of notes, all news of any interest spreads immediately throughout the prison. Nothing can happen either among the prisoners themselves, or in the cour d’honneur, where the lodgings of the administration are situated, or in the village of Clairvaux, or in the wide world of Paris politics, that is not communicated at once throughout all the dormitories, workshops, and cells. Frenchmen are too communicative to admit of their underground telegraph ever being stopped. We had no intercourse with the common-law prisoners, and yet we knew all the news of the day. “John, the gardener, is back for two years.” “Such an inspector’s wife has had a fearful scrimmage with So-and-So’s wife.” “James, in the cells, has been caught transmitting a note of friendship to John of the framers’ workshop.” “That old beast So-and-So is no longer Minister of Justice; the ministry was upset;” and so on; and when the word goes out that “Jack has got two five-penny packets of tobacco in exchange for two flannel jackets,” it makes the tour of the prison very quickly. On one occasion a petty lawyer, detained in the prison, wished to transmit to me a note, in order to ask my wife, who was staying in the village, to see from time to time his wife, who was also there⁠—and quite a number of men took the liveliest interest in the transmission of that message which had to pass through I don’t know how many hands before it reached me. When there was something that might especially interest us in a paper, this paper, in some unaccountable way, would reach us, wrapped about a little stone and thrown over the high wall.

Confinement in a cell is no obstacle to communication. When we came to Clairvaux and were first lodged in the cellular quarter, it was bitterly cold in the cells; so cold, indeed, that I could hardly write, and when my wife, who was then at Paris, got my letter, she did not recognize my handwriting. The order came to heat the cells as much as possible; but do what they might, the cells remained as cold as ever. It appeared afterwards that all the hot air tubes were choked with scraps of paper, bites of notes, penknives, and all sorts of small things which several generations of prisoners had concealed in the pipes.

Martin, the same friend of mine whom I have already mentioned, obtained permission to serve part of his time in cellular confinement. He preferred isolation to life in a room with a dozen others, and so went to a cell. To his great astonishment he found that he was not at all alone. The walls and the keyholes spoke. In a short time all the inmates of the cells knew who he was, and he had acquaintances all over the building. Quite a life goes on, as in a beehive, between the seemingly isolated cells; only that life often takes such a character as to make it belong entirely to the domain of psychopathy. Kraft-Ebbing himself had no idea of the aspects it assumes with certain prisoners in solitary confinement.

I will not repeat here what I have said in a book, In Russian and French Prisons, which I published in England in 1886, soon after my release from Clairvaux, upon the moral influence of prisoners upon prisoners. But there is one thing which must be said. The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as “the criminals” proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as preventive of antisocial deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them. Everyone knows that absence of education, dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdirected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others are the causes which bring this class of people before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature⁠—each one of them⁠—which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it exists. Incarceration in a prison of necessity entirely destroys the energy of a man and annihilates his will. In prison life there is no room for exercising one’s will; to possess one’s own will in prison means surely to get into trouble. The will of the prisoner must be killed, and it is killed. Still less room is there for exercising one’s natural sympathies, everything being done to prevent free contact with all those, outside and inside, with whom the prisoner may have feelings of sympathy. Physically and mentally he is rendered less and less capable of sustained effort, and if he has had already a dislike for regular work, a dislike is only the more increased during his prison years. If, before he first came to the prison, he was easily wearied by monotonous work which he could not do properly, or had an antipathy to underpaid overwork, his dislike now becomes hatred. If he doubted about the social utility of current rules of morality, now after having cast a critical glance upon the official defenders of these rules, and learned his comrade’s opinions of them, he openly throws these rules overboard. And if he has got into trouble in consequence of a morbid development of the passionate, sensual side of his nature, now, after having spent a number of years in prison, this morbid character is still more developed, in many cases to an appalling extent. In this last direction⁠—the most dangerous of all⁠—prison education is most effective.

In Siberia I had seen what sinks of filth and what hotbeds of physical and moral deterioration the dirty, overcrowded, “unreformed” Russian prisons were, and at the age of nineteen I imagined that if there were less overcrowding in the rooms and a certain classification of the prisoners, and if healthy occupations were provided for them, the institution might be substantially improved. Now I had to part with these illusions. I could convince myself that as regards their effects upon the prisoners and their results for society at large, the best “reformed” prisons⁠—whether cellular or not⁠—are as bad as, or even worse than the dirty prisons of old. They do not reform the prisoners. On the contrary, in the immense, overwhelming majority of cases they exercise upon them the most deteriorating effect. The thief, the swindler, the rough, who has spent some years in a prison, comes out of it more ready than over to resume his former career; he is better prepared for it; he has learned to do it better; he is more embittered against society, and he finds a solid justification for being in revolt against its laws and customs; necessarily, unavoidably, he is bound to sink deeper and deeper into the antisocial acts which first brought him before a law court. The offenses he will commit after his release will inevitably be graver than those which first got him into trouble; and he is doomed to finish his life in a prison or in a hard-labor colony. In the above-mentioned book I said that prisons are “universities of crime, maintained by the state.” And now, thinking of it at fifteen years’ distance, in the light of my subsequent experience, I can only confirm that statement of mine.

Personally, I have no reason whatever to complain of the years I spent in a French prison. For an active and independent man the restraint of liberty and activity is in itself so great a privation that all the remainder⁠—all the petty miseries of prison life⁠—are not worth speaking of. Of course, when we heard of the active political life which was going on in France, we resented very much our forced inactivity. The end of the first year, especially during a gloomy winter, is always hard for the prisoner. And when spring comes, one feels more strongly than ever the want of liberty. When I saw from our windows the meadows assuming their green garb, and the hills covered with a spring haze, or when I saw a train flying into a dale between the hills, I certainly felt a strong desire to follow it and to breathe the air of the woods, or to be carried along with the stream of human life in a busy town. But one who casts his lot with an advanced party must be prepared to spend a number of years in prison, and he need not grudge it. He feels that even during his imprisonment he remains not quite an inactive part of the movement which spreads and strengthens the ideas that are dear to him.

At Lyons, my comrades, my wife, and myself certainly found the warders a very rough set of men. But after a couple of encounters all was set right. Moreover the prison administration knew that we had the Paris press with us, and they did not want to draw upon themselves the thunders of Rochefort or the cutting criticisms of Clémenceau. And at Clairvaux there was no need of such restraint. All the administration had been renewed a few months before we came thither. A prisoner had been killed by warders in his cell, and his corpse had been hanged to simulate suicide; but this time the affair leaked out through the doctor, the governor was dismissed, and altogether a better tone prevailed in the prison. I took away from Clairvaux the best recollection of its governor, and altogether, while I was there, I more than once thought that, after all, men are often better than the institutions they belong to. But, having no personal griefs, I can all the more freely and most unconditionally condemn the institution itself as a survival from the dark past, wrong in its principles, and a source of immeasurable evils to society.

One thing more I must mention, as it struck me perhaps even more forcibly than the demoralizing effects of prisons upon their inmates. What a nest of infection is every prison⁠—and even every law court⁠—for its neighborhood, for the people who live near it! Lombroso has made much of the “criminal type” which he believes he has discovered amongst the inmates of the prisons. If he had made the same efforts to observe the people who hang about the law courts⁠—detectives, spies, petty solicitors, informers, people preying upon the simpletons, and the like⁠—he would probably have concluded that his criminal type has a far greater geographical extension than the prison walls. I never saw such a collection of faces of the lowest human type as I saw around and within the Palais de Justice at Lyons⁠—certainly not within the prison walls of Clairvaux. Dickens and Cruikshank have immortalized a few of these types; but they represent quite a world which revolves about the law courts and infuses its infection far and wide around them. And the same is true of each central prison, like Clairvaux. It is an atmosphere of petty thefts, petty swindlings, spying and corruption of all sorts, which spreads like a blot of oil round the prison.

I saw all this; and if before my condemnation I already knew that society is wrong in its present system of punishments, after I left Clairvaux I knew that it is not only wrong and unjust in this system, but that it is simply foolish when, in its partly unconscious and partly willful ignorance of realities, it maintains at its own expense these universities of corruption, under the illusion that they are necessary as a bridle to the criminal instincts of man.