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,
