MY JAIL EXPERIENCES-VIII

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09415777229, 094055338

E-mail- [e-mail];[e-mail]

 

 

 

MY JAIL EXPERIENCES-VIII

 

 

 Everyone who has any experience of jails knows that they are the most starved of all departments. The hospitals are comparatively the most expensive of public institutions. In the jails everything is of the simplest and the crudest type. In them there is extravagance in the spending of human labour, there is miserliness in the spending of money and materials. In hospitals it is just the reverse. And yet both are institutions designed to deal with human diseases jails for mental and hospitals for physical. Mental diseases are regarded as a crime and therefore punishable; physical diseases are regarded as unforeseen visitations of nature to be indulgently treated. As a matter of fact, there is no reason for any such distinction. Mental as well as physical diseases are traceable to the same causes. If I steal, I commit a breach of laws governing healthy society. If I suffer from stomach-ache, I still commit a breach of laws governing a healthy society.

One reason why physical diseases are treated lightly is because the so-called higher classes break the laws of physical health perhaps more frequently than the lower classes. The higher classes have no occasion for committing crude thefts and, as their lives would be disturbed if thefts continued, they being generally law-givers, polish gross stealing, knowing all the while that their swindles which pass muster are far more harmful to society than the crude thefts. It is curious, too, that both institutions flourish because of wrong treatment. Hospitals flourish because patients are indulged and humored; jails flourish because the prisoners are punished as if they were beyond recall. If every disease, mental or physical, were regarded as a lapse, but every patient or prisoner were to be treated kindly and sympathetically, not severely or indulgently, both jails and hospitals would show a tendency to decrease. A hospital no more than a jail is a necessity for a healthy society. Every patient and every prisoner should come out of his hospital or jail as a missionary to preach the gospel of mental and physical health. But I must stop the comparison at this stage.

The reader will be surprised to learn that the parsimony in prisons is exercised on the ground of economy. Although all labour is taken from prisoners, e.g., drawing water, grinding flour, cleaning roads and closets, cooking food, the prisoners are not only not self-supporting, but they do not even pay for their own food. And in spite of all their labour, the prisoners do not get the food they would like nor the manner of cooking they would appreciate; this for the simple reason that the prisoners who do the cooking, etc., are not as a rule interested in their work. It is for them a task to be performed under unsympathetic supervision. It is easy enough to see that, if the prisoners were philanthropists and, therefore, felt interested in the welfare of their fellow prisoners, they would not find themselves in prisons. If, therefore, a more rational and more moral system of administration was adopted, the prisons would easily become self-supporting reformatories instead of, as they are now, expensive penal settlements. I would save the terrible waste of labour in drawing water, grinding flour, etc. If I was in charge, I would buy flour from outside, I would draw water by machinery and, instead of having all kinds of odd jobs, I would devote the prisons to agriculture, hand-spinning and hand-weaving. In the small jails only spinning and weaving may be kept. Even now weaving there is in most of the central prisons. All that is necessary is to add carding and hand-spinning. All the cotton needed can be easily grown in connection with many jails sic.

This will popularize the national cottage industry and make the prisons self-supporting. The labour of all the prisoners will be utilized for remunerative and yet not for competitive purposes, as is now the case in some respects. There is a printing press attached to the Yeravda Jail. Now this press is largely worked by convict labour. I regard this as unfair competition with the general printing presses. If the prisons were to run competitive industries, they would easily be made even profitable. But my purpose is to show that they can be made self-supporting without entering into such competition and, at the same time, teach the inmates a home industry which on their discharge would give them an independent calling, thus providing for them every incentive to live as respectable citizens. I would moreover provide for the prisoners as homely an atmosphere as is consistent with public safety. I would thus give them all facility for seeing their relatives, getting books and even tuition. I would replace distrust by reasonable trust. I would credit them with every bit of work they might do and let them buy their own food, cooked or raw. I would make most of the sentences indeterminate, so that a prisoner will not be detained a moment longer than is necessary for the protection of society and for his own reform. I know that this requires a thorough reorganization and the employing of a different kind of warders from the ex-military men that most of them are now. But I know, too, that the reform can be initiated without much extra cost. At the present moment, the prisons are rest-houses for rogues and torture-houses for ordinary simple prisoners which the majority is. The rogues manage to get all they want; the simple untutored prisoners do not get even what they need. Under the scheme which I have endeavoured to sketch in its barest outline, the rogues will have to be straight before they feel comfortable, and the simple innocent prisoners will have as favourable an atmosphere as is possible to give them in the circumstances. Honesty will be remunerative and dishonesty at a discount. By making the prisoners pay for their food in work, there will be little idleness. And by having only agriculture and cotton manufacture, including what handicrafts may be required for these two industries, the expensive supervision will be considerably lessened.