PART ONE
Cradled on the Sea: Positive Images of Prison and Theories of Punishment
My good, my gentle friend, my cell! My sweet retreat, mine alone, I love you so! If I had to live in all freedom in another city, I would first go to prison to acknowledge my own, those of my race.
âJean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
CHAPTER I
A Thousand Leagues Above: Prison As a Refuge from the Prosaic
By âworldâ I mean the whole complex of incidents, demands, compulsions, solicitations, of every kind and degree of urgency, . . . which overtake the mind without offering it any inner illumination.
âPaul ValĂ©ry
Toward the end of Aleksandr Solzhenitsynâs novel The Cancer Ward, Oleg Kostoglotov is released from the hospital where he has been confined and goes to buy a shirt in a department store. While looking over the shirts, he hears a man ask the clerk, âDo you have a size twenty-five shirt like this one, with a size fifteen collar?â Oleg reacts with horror and righteous indignation to the small-mindedness that he feels this question reflects:
It staggered Oleg like an electric shock. He turned in amazement and looked at this clean-shaven, smooth man in the good felt hat, wearing a white shirt and tie, stared at him as though the man had struck him.
Men had endured the agony of the trenches, bodies had been heaped in mass graves, others had been buried in shallow pits in the icy Arctic, people had been arrested time and again and sent to camps, they had frozen in barred railroad cars, men had broken their backs working with pick and shovel to earn the price of a tattered padded jacket, and this sniveling fop remembered not only his shirt size, but his collar size?
This last fact shattered Oleg. He could not have imagined that a collar had its own separate size. Suppressing a groan, he turned his back on the shirt counter. A collar size, no less! Why such a refined life? Why return to this life? If you had to remember your collar size, youâd have to forget something. Something more important!1
The cancer ward as depicted by Solzhenitsyn is not, of course, a prison, but it resembles one in important respects. Solzhenitsyn himself calls attention to the parallel, for he describes Oleg as thinking: âEmerging from these hospital gatesâhow did this differ from emerging from prison?â2
The incident of the collar size illustrates the former captiveâs rejection of the trivial preoccupations that he finds in freedom. We see a similar reaction in a book by a very different kind of prisoner: an American who spent more than thirteen years in a Florida state penitentiary for breaking and entering, petit larceny, and burglary. During an interval of freedom, James Blake writes to a friend:
Another kind of nostalgia Iâve been fighting is the Brotherhood-Of-The-Doomed feeling I had in the penitentiary and no longer have, with nothing to put in its place. Iâve been trying hard to isolate and name this virus, and think I have. Thing is, itâs better than many things the world of electric toothbrushes has given me.3
In an earlier letter, written inside prison, he attempts to explain what attracts him to a life of confinement. Again, the words resonate with those of Oleg Kostoglotov: âLife has indeed been reduced to its simplest terms, a state of affairs not completely unpleasant. So many of the trimmings that go with life outside have often been merely confusing to me. The food here is simple but entirely adequate, as are the pleasures.â4 Blakeâs words suggest a parallel between the allure of imprisonment and that of monastic lifeâa point that others have made explicitly.5
In a letter written just after returning to prison for another crime, Blake elaborates his vision of life outside prison as meaningless, frenetic activity:
Your concern over my welfare is indeed gratifying, . . . but the basic misconception of most civilians about convicts is that they suffer, when actually they are comparatively blithe and carefree. Certainly theyâre not as harried as the gnomes I see on New York streets, scuttling and scurrying into subways like apprehensive White Rabbits.6
By contrast with this negative image of life in freedom, Blake names prison with a symbol of the eternal: âIâm still trying to make it here and resisting the awful temptation to go back to the peace and quiet of the Rock.â7
The image of prison as an island of calm amidst the hurly-burly also appears in Shakespeareâs King Lear. Here too we see a variation on this theme: prison as a place of endurance amidst ephemerae. Toward the end of the play, just after Lear and Cordelia are reunited, Cordelia asks: âShall we not see these daughters and these sisters?â Learâs reply constitutes one of the loveliest carceral fantasies in literature. It suggests that he, who has been greatly troubled by possessions, and who suffers from guilt over his treatment of his youngest daughter, can look forward with rapture to an austere existence.
No, no, no, no! Come letâs away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds iâth cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, Iâll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So weâll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and weâll talk with them tooâ
Who loses and who wins, whoâs in, whoâs outâ
And take upon âs the mystery of things,
As if we were Godâs spies: and weâll wear out,
In a wallâd prison, packs and sects of
great ones,
That ebb and flow byâth moon.8
The prisoners are still and endure, while those in freedom come and go.
Like James Blake and Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn imagines prison as a calm place in the midst of motion. In The First Circle, he depicts the sharashka (a special prison for intellectuals) as an ark resting on the water. He suggests that by virtue of their seclusion and relative stillness, the prisoners enjoy a truer perspective on life than they could attain from the outside world, which is rushing by: âFrom here, from the ark, . . . the whole tortuous flow of accursed history could easily be surveyed, as if from an enormous height, and yet at the same time one could see every detail, every pebble on the river bed, as if one were immersed in the stream.â9
Elaborating on his metaphor, Solzhenitsyn conceives of the prisoners as floating on the river, hence âweightlessâ in that they are free of prosaic concerns:
Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satiated. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for their children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony.10
Whereas this excerpt depicts prison as a calm but passionless abode, elsewhere Solzhenitsyn portrays prison as the place where one can engage life at its most profound level. In the following passage he describes the thoughts of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin on the occasion of his wifeâs visit to the prison:
Seen from the outside [his life] appeared an unhappy one, but Nerzhin was secretly happy in that unhappiness. He drank it down like spring water. Here he got to know people and events about which he could learn nowhere else on earth, certainly not in the quiet, well-fed seclusion of the domestic hearth. From his youth on, Gleb Nerzhin had dreaded more than anything else wallowing in daily living. As the proverb says, âItâs not the sea that drowns you, itâs the puddle.â11
The broadening experience of imprisonment is contrasted with the narrow âseclusion of the domestic hearth,â with wallowing in the quotidian, with drowning in a puddle.
In addition to the symbol of calm amidst motion, another image used to express the theme of prison as a refuge from the prosaic is that of a high place. Thus, in Stendhalâs novel The Charterhouse of Parma, the prison is constructed so far above the ground that Fabrizio refers to âthis airy solitude.â12 On the first night of his incarceration, Fabrizio spends hours at the window, âadmiring this horizon which spoke to his soul.â13 In prison, he finds the happiness that had eluded him in freedom: âBy a paradox to which he gave no thought, a secret joy was reigning in the depths of his heart.â14 Endeavoring to account for this paradox, Fabrizio reflects: â[H]ere one is a thousand leagues above the pettinesses and wickednesses which occupy us down there.â15
We see the same theme of prison as a cloister in Solzhenitsynâs depiction of the meek Baptist, Alyoshka, in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. When the protagonist, Shukhov, tells him that prayer is ineffectual, since it cannot shorten oneâs sentence, Alyoshka remonstrates: ââYou mustnât pray for that.â Alyoshka was horror-struck. âWhat dâyou want your freedom for? What faith you have left will be choked in thorns. Rejoice that you are in prison. Here you can think of your soul.ââ16 Shukhov reflects: âAlyoshka was talking the truth. You could tell by his voice and his eyes he was glad to be in prison.â17
A variation on the theme of prison as a refuge from the commonplace appears in Graham Greeneâs novel The Power and the Glory, which concerns a Mexican priest imprisoned during a period of religious persecution. The following passage occurs following the priestâs release from prison, while he is hearing confessions in relative safety:
The old woman prattled on and on, . . . prattled of abstinence days broken, of evening prayers curtailed. Suddenly, without warning, with an odd sense of homesickness, he thought of the hostages in the prison yard, waiting at the water-tap, not looking at himâthe suffering and the endurance which went on everywhere the other side of the mountains. He interrupted the woman savagely, âWhy donât you confess properly to me? Iâm not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night . . . remember your real sins.â18
Here we see the priestâs nostalgia for prison as a place where serious things happen, where people suffer and acknowledge grave sins. To the trivial preoccupations of his civilian penitent, he opposes prison as an embodiment of what is âreal.â
I have said that prison is often pictured as a refuge from the trivial or prosaic. But what is it a refuge for? Two principal themes emerge from the literature: prison as the quintessential academy and prison as a catalyst of intense friendship. The image of prison as an academy appears in Solzhenitsynâs novel The First Circle. Early in the book, Gleb Nerzhin elaborates on the ways that prison has developed his understanding of life. He says that as a free man he read books on the meaning of life or the nature of happiness but understood those works only superficially. âThank God for prison!â he exclaims. âIt gave me the chance to think.â19
Nerzhin goes on to tell a fellow prisoner that an understanding of happiness comes from recognizing that it does not depend on external blessings: âRemember that thin, watery barley or the oatmeal porridge without a single drop of fat? Can you say that you eat it? No. You commune with it, you take it like a sacrament. . . . [I]t spreads through your body like nectar. . . . Can you really compare the crude devouring of a steak with this?â20 Compare the similar insight that Tolstoy attributes to Pierre in War and Peace: âWhile imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.â21
The black American prisoner Samuel Melville perceives what he has learned in prison in much the same light:
for the first time since i was a small boy i have no money and no keys in my pockets, you canât imagine the rehabilitating effect of that! from the muslims i am learning to fast and control my own body, from reading thoreau and some of the eastern teachings i can live on much less than even prison allows. . . . and i am tripping all the time, not with the frenzy of acid but with the confidence of my liberation from superficialities.22
Whereas these prisoners regard prison as a place where they have gained wisdom, Malcolm X portrays his confinement as a catalyst of learning in a more concrete sense. In a chapter of his autobiography entitled âSaved,â he describes how he taught himself to read with understanding while in prison and how this ability opened up a new world to him. He believes that prison enabled him to study more intensively than would have been possible in college, where there are âtoo many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.â He asks: âWhere else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?â23
Malcolm X views prison as a catalyst of learning in that it provides an environment free from worldly concerns. Other prisone...