Thinking about life: Cruel and unusual

BOSTON, April 8 (UPI) -- Charles Dickens published his novel "A Tale of Two Cities" as a serial running from 1857 to 1859. The cities are Paris and London and the novel is set in the time of the French Revolution.

Before he began writing this book Dickens considered various ways of handling his theme and also various possible titles. One title he thought of using was "Buried Alive," a reference to the fate of the character Dr. Manette who is imprisoned for years in solitary confinement in the Bastille. After the prison is stormed by a revolutionary mob Manette is release but turns out to have lost his memory and his sense of identity. In freedom Manette gradually returns to a nearly normal mental state but toward the end of the novel he becomes again the pathetic person he was when first released.

There seems no doubt that when Dickens described the effects of solitary confinement on Manette he was remembering the prison he had seen in Philadelphia 16 years earlier. In "American Notes," written in 1842, the running head at the top of one of the pages of Chapter 7 is "Buried Alive."

In that chapter Dickens wrote as follows: "The system here is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong (and that) those who devised this system of Prison Discipline do not know what they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers ... there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creatures. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse that any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity has not roused up to stay."

Dickens went on to describe the prisoners: "On the haggard face of every man (there was) a kind of horror, as if they had been secretly terrified."

One man fell into a strange silence; another wept and, wrote Dickens: "I never saw such a picture of forlorn affliction and distress of mind."

There was a sailor who was about to be released after 11 years ("Eleven years of solitary confinement!"). That man did not look at the visitors but stared at the walls and ceilings. He did not reply when spoken to but constantly plucked at his own flesh. Neither the prison governors nor the guards saw anything strange in his behavior, which was undoubtedly symptomatic of a dreadful mental illness, caused, as Dickens realized, by the experience of "solitary."

Solitary confinement was also the topic of a recent news item written for The Boston Globe of March 11 by Margaret Burnham, a lawyer and a political scientist. In her article she describes how John Todd, a prisoner in a "supermax" jail in Massachusetts, has sued the Department of Correction, arguing his rights have been violated, not by solitary confinement as such, but by the fact that in Massachusetts only men are placed in solitary. Women are exempted from that form of punishment.

The Massachusetts prison is modeled on the federal supermax jail in Illinois where prisoners are held in solitary confinement for virtually 24 hours a day, with no chance to either work or study, and in some cases for as long as 10 years.

Burnham writes: "Some inmates attempt suicide to escape from this existential death, but, in a Kafkaesque twist, those who try but don't die are punished with more supermax time in heightened isolation."

As a result of Todd's challenge the Massachusetts Appeals Court ordered the Superior Court to try his case. The Appeals Court agreed the reason given for punishing men more harshly than women, namely, that women are less violent, "improperly relies on gender stereotypes."

Burnham believes, or hopes, the end result will not be that women end up in solitary but that the punishment itself will be abolished.

The fact that an incredibly cruel punishment has survived ever since Dickens described it 160 years ago is surely no cause for pride. And the fact a cruel practice will be abolished, if it is abolished, not because it is cruel, but because it is politically incorrect, just shows that the human world is a pretty absurd place.