Perpetual imprisonment

“ In prison there is at least a community of punishment, and the sense of this goes far to relieve the tedium of incarceration; for, bad though it be, many a one has found it preferable to the perpetual and dreadful solitude to which liberty condemned them. ”

“ Justice GRAY, 'that at the present day imprisonment in a state prison or penitentiary, with or without hard labor, is an infamous punishment.' That case is decisive of this, and the order appealed from must be affirmed. ”

“ A short historical retrospect will show that it is only in comparatively modern times that 'Imprisonment' became the recognized method for the punishment of crime, and that prison reform, in the sense of moral improvement by imprisonment was formulated as a political duty, and became an earnest pre-occupation of statesmen and philosophers. ”

“ I believe I speak not from my own experience only, which has been limited to seven years, but from that of many of our oldest wardens, when I raise my voice against long sentences and in favor of a parole system. The long weary years in prison unnerve—unman, and often break a man down physically and mentally and there is no compensating good to be gained. The shame of detection—the disgrace of his trial and sentence with the humiliation of the first weeks of imprisonment constitute the man's greatest punishment. ”

“ The detention or the seclusion of a person, whether at home or elsewhere, contrary to his will, and at the sacrifice of his individual liberties and civil rights, appears to us tantamount to false imprisonment, and an act opposed to the principles of English liberty, whether it be perpetrated by relatives or strangers, if done without the knowledge and sanction of the law and of its administrators. ”

“ If in the wisdom of the members of the legislature the crime calls for imprisonment in the penitentiary, then the ordinary sentences run one, two, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and life, according to the hazard of the legislature, the whim of the court, the gamble of the jury, or the feeling and means of expression of the unthinking and pitiless crowd who awe courts and juries with their cries for vengeance.
Neither does punishment affect any two alike; the sensitive and proud may suffer more from a day in jail or even from conviction than another would suffer from a year. ”

“ Assuredly, let us not forget that prisons contain incorrigible and corrupt recidivists, the residuum of large towns who must undoubtedly be isolated from other men; but they also contain offenders resembling in great part men of their own class living outside.... If it was a question of making these men good scholars, good workmen, good soldiers, should we accept the method of prolonged cellular isolation? And how can that which is condemned by the experience of ordinary life become useful on the day some tribunal pronounces a sentence of imprisonment? ”

“ When we have agitated, until capital punishment is abolished, and we have had a commemorative celebration, with emblematical banners, and an hundred guns on the Common, [Pg 210] nothing will be further from our thoughts, than a dissolution, sine die. One of our chief arguments in favor of abolishing capital punishment, is the greater hardship of a life-long imprisonment. ”

“ Society looks on complacently at the repeated sentencing of the habitual criminal and watches without alarm the never failing phenomenon of how each successive imprisonment only serves to deprave him more profoundly ”

“ There was another point which I vividly realized since the very first weeks of my imprisonment, but which, in some inconceivable way, escapes the attention of both the judges and the writers on criminal law—namely, that imprisonment in an immense number of cases is a punishment which strikes quite innocent people far more severely than the condemned prisoners themselves. ”

“ Are we to end by discovering that everybody is a criminal, and ripe for jail? or shall we be driven to the realization that the fundamental idea of imprisonment for crime is itself the most monstrous of crimes—and try something else? What else is there to be tried? Are we to leave criminals to their liberty among the community? ”

“ So behold a son at twenty-one years of age devoted by a father to imprisonment for life. But stop a minute; the mad statutes, which by the threefold temptation of Facility, Obscurity, and Impurity, insure the occasional incarceration and frequent detention of sane but moneyed men, do provide, though feebly, for their bare liberation, if perchance they should not yield to the genius loci, and the natural effect of confinement plus anguish, by going mad or dying. ”

“ I can conscientiously say, that the mere reading in the Times newspaper the account of your cruel sufferings, my poor countrymen of Kirkeaton, has given me more pain than a years' imprisonment would have done, if I could have known that you were enjoying a fair equivalent for your honest industry. Talk of imprisonment indeed! why it is a perfect Paradise compared with the wants and privations which you are doomed to endure. The situation of a prisoner in this jail, let him be confined for any thing less than high treason or murder, is heaven upon earth compared to your lot. ”

“ They are, a fallacious scale of moral responsibility; absolute ignorance and neglect of the physio-psychological types of criminals; intervals between verdict and sentence on the one hand, and between the sentence and its execution on the other, with a consequent abuse of pardons; disastrous practical effects of corruption and of criminal association in prisons; millions of persons condemned to short terms of imprisonment, which are foolish and absurd; and a continuous, inexorable increase of recidivism. ”

“ The effects of the imprisonment are to vitiate its inmates, to extend their acquaintanceship with each other, to corrupt the prisoner charged with an offence of which he may be innocent, and to confirm in guilt the young and inexperienced offender. ”

“ I had long viewed these places, particularly the crowded prisons of the metropolis, as mansions of misery, in which were often united in the same person the whole dismal catalogue of human woes. The deprivation of liberty alone is a heart-rending punishment to every human being, however luxuriously he might be provided for in his prison, and however little may be the effect of that imprisonment upon his dearest connections. ”

“ We may imagine, if we pause a moment, with the fearful story of that historic prison in our minds, the condemned men, merrymaking up to the last and receiving curious and dissolute visitors in their imprisonment, having their reckless carousing broken in upon by that awful message, and halting a moment, with an icy terror striking in upon their nerves, to realise that this, then, was the last chapter in their lives. ”

“ As imprisonment becomes more reformatory, it may become less irksome and so less preventive; in improving the criminal it may injure society. Granting that it is desirable to reform the prisoners if possible, how is it to be accomplished? ”

“ There will be criminals, was the theory, and they must be punished. They must therefore be secured in jails, and the object of imprisonment is intimidation from crime, not the improvement of criminals. ”

“ Any person connected with a big penal settlement will tell you that there is never any certainty as to the moral result of a term of imprisonment on any given prisoner.
To some natures, the punishment may be both a deterrent and an excellent lesson, while to others the educational value may be great and the deterrent effect almost nil; but in one class of prisoner—the class to which Eva Herrick belonged—imprisonment wakes only the worst and basest of all emotions, a desire, perforce stifled during the period of punishment, for revenge. ”

“ Did the law ever suppose that the court, after having sentenced a man to eight hundred years’ imprisonment, or even to two hundred and eighty years’ imprisonment, should go on, and sentence him to twenty years, or even to seven years more?—when the court must know that it would be imposing sentences to be executed centuries after the prisoner would be dead, and after he would have left his prison, not to return to this world, but to go to another. ”

“ My business in this book was to show that penal imprisonment is an evil, and its perpetuation a crime; that it does not reform the criminal but destroys him body and soul; that it does not protect the community but exposes it to incalculable perils; and that the assumption that a criminal class exists among us separate and distinct from any and the best of the rest of us is Pharisaical, false and wicked. ”

“ The fact, however, that imprisonment brutifies and destroys instead of reforming is beginning to glare at us in a manner so disconcerting and undeniable, that we feel something has to be done; and in accordance with our ancient habit and constitutional predisposition, that something turns out to be compromise. We sentenced for murder, but put obstacles in the way of carrying the sentence out. On the same principle, we will now retain prisons, but make them so agreeable that convicts will not mind being committed to them. ”

“ When I say that every State prison is to be a reformatory, I except, of course, from its operation, those sentenced for life for murder, or other capital offenses, and those who have proved themselves incorrigible by repeated violations of their parole. ”

“ He who is forced upon his knees has the attitude, but never the feeling, of prayer.
I am satisfied that the discipline of the average prison hardens and degrades. It is for the most part a perpetual exhibition of arbitrary power. There is really no appeal. The cries of the convict are not heard beyond the walls. The protests die in cells, and the poor prisoner feels that the last tie between him and his fellow-men has been broken. ”

“ Society is coming to realize, as it never did before, that the true purpose of imprisonment is to reform, and not to punish; that our criminals and law-breakers are susceptible to the same methods as our children, and that our proceedings against them should be corrective, rather than retaliatory. ”

“ Of course there are men who come out of prison planning to do evil. They are those who have not learned their lesson, and to whom imprisonment has proved merely a deterring influence instead of a reforming one. Some men deliberately go to the first saloon to celebrate their discharge and some may be found in the old haunts the first night of freedom. ”

“ The chief object of imprisonment should be reformation. Ignorance and reformation do not affiliate. Some will argue that if prisoners are educated and treated so humanely they will have a desire to return to the prison, in fact, make it their home. Experience teaches us that, treat a human being as a prince, and deprive him of his liberty, and the greatest burden of life is placed upon him, and he is rendered a pitiable object of abject misery. There is no punishment to which a human being can be subjected which it is possible to endure, that is more to be dreaded than confinement. ”

“ Especially am I sensible of the claim upon me of those voiceless fellow men of mine still behind the bars, who cannot help themselves, who have honored me with their tragic confidences, who have believed that I would do my utmost to let the truth be known and show the world what penal imprisonment really means. ”

“ Surely, the groans of the weak, sacrificed to the cruel ignorance, and indolence of the powerful; the barbarous torments lavished, and multiplied with useless severity, for crimes either not proved, or in their nature impossible, the filth and horrors of a prison, increased by the most cruel tormentor of the miserable, uncertainty, ought to have roused the attention of those whose business is to direct the opinions of mankind. ”

“ Every confinement of the person is imprisonment, whether in a common prison or a private house, or even by forcibly detaining one in the streets or highways. The law punishes false imprisonment as a crime, besides giving reparation to the party injured, through an action of trespass. ”

“ No one who lays any claim to enlightened opinion upon subjects of this character believes any longer that arrest and incarceration in a penal or corrective institution is a final answer to the social obligations of the community in behalf of the so-called casual vagrant, the wandering citizen, the itinerant wage-worker, or petty criminal, as they are miscalled. It may be true, perhaps, that a three or six months’ imprisonment is the only present available means for “straightening up a drunk” or getting some “evil spirit” out of a young man’s heart. ”

“ Peace was conducted back to the gaol by the warders, one of whom unlocked the door of one of the refractory cells, and the wretched prisoner was thrust into the dark and cheerless receptacle.
Without doubt even a temporary or short imprisonment in a dark cell is a terrible punishment to most men. ”

“ For beside the hindrance and restraint of liberty, it hath many more displeasures and very sore griefs knit and adjoined to it.
ANTHONY: That is, cousin, very true indeed. And those pains, among many sorer than those, thought I not afterward to forget. Howbeit, I purpose now to consider first imprisonment as imprisonment alone, without any other incommodity besides. For a man may be imprisoned, perdy, and yet not set in the stocks or collared fast by the neck. And a man may be let walk at large where he will, and yet have a pair of fetters fast riveted on his legs. ”

“ A prison system which has the negative value of hindering men from becoming worse is worthy of high consideration, and if the chief object of imprisonment is the punishment of criminals the cellular system will not be easily surpassed. On the other hand, if the purpose of imprisonment is not only to punish but also to prepare the offender for the duties of society, the system of solitary confinement will not effectually accomplish this task. ”