At its best, any prison is so unnatural a form of segregation from normal life that—like too-loving parents and too zealous religion and all other well-meant violations of individuality—it helps to prevent the victims from resuming, when they are let out, any natural role in human society. At its worst, the prison is almost scientifically designed to develop by force-ripening every one of the anti-social traits for which we suppose ourselves to put people into prison. (I say ‘suppose’, because actually we put people into prison only because we don’t know what else to do with them . . . ) Prison makes the man who is sexually abnormal, sexually a maniac. Prison makes the man who enjoyed beating fellow drunks in a bar-room come out wanting to kill a policeman . . .
Probably we cannot tomorrow turn all the so-called criminals loose and close the jails—though, of course that is just what we are doing by letting them go at the end of their sentences. No, Society cannot free the victims Society has unfitted for freedom. Doubtless, since the Millennium is still centuries ahead, it is advisable to make prisons as sanitary and well-lighted as possible, that the convicts may live out their living death more comfortably. Only keep your philosophy straight. Do not imagine that, when you have by carelessness in not inoculating them, let your victims get smallpox, you are going to save them or exonerate yourselves by bathing their brows, however grateful the bathing may be.
What is to take the place of prisons?
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