A popular essay on subjects of penal law, and on uninterrupted solitary confinement at labor, as contradistinguished to solitary confinement at night and joint labor by day, in a letter to John Bacon / by Francis Lieber.

  • Lieber, Francis, 1800-1872.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A popular essay on subjects of penal law, and on uninterrupted solitary confinement at labor, as contradistinguished to solitary confinement at night and joint labor by day, in a letter to John Bacon / by Francis Lieber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    85/96
    to acknowledge that the Auhurn system is a great improvement upon the old physically and morally filthy mode of imprison- ment, because it removes, in a considerable degree, the danger of contamination, makes a greater degree of cleanliness pos- sible, introduces a spirit of order into the. prison, teaches the idle to work, keeps the prisoners more healthy and saves the state a great item in the budget of crime, are nevertheless opposed to it on the following grounds: 1. The Auburn system acknowledges with us, insulation as the fundamental principle of all sound prison discipline, which is not sufficient, indeed, to constitute it, but without which none is possible; but it does not carry through this vital prin- ciple; it stops short of its true effect. The convict in an Au- burn penitentiary is kept at night in a solitary cell, which, however, does not make it physically impossible to commune with his neighbors; the prisoner, therefore, must be strictly watched. At day the inmates are jointly engaged in large numbers at different sorts of labor, e. g. smithery, cooperage, stone-blasting and cutting, &c. They are strictly watched and must not converse with one another, else they are severely punished; they are not even allowed to take their eyes from the work before them. It is said they do not talk. That they cannot hold long conversations equal in their effect to that frightful degree of contamination which infests the old prisons, where criminals of all sorts are huddled together without labor, or, if with labor, by no means prevented from free intercourse, will be readily admitted. Still we say they do talk, and in a degree which is dangerous, both as to farther contamination, and inasmuch as it prevents that state of calm resignation, which alone can be obtained by uninterrupted solitude, and without which no deep-rooted and steady reform is possible with nearly all, if not all convicts—men whose whole train of thoughts is to be broken and led into an entirely different channel from that in which it flowed while they pursued their criminal path. The fact that I have brought no evidence to show that per- petual silence cannot be maintained at Auburn, in my transla-