When the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling
recently announced his intention to reform the British prison system, I couldn’t have agreed more. British prisons are badly in need of reform. Since their ‘privatisation’ – that is, the wholesale of buildings and inmates to G4S, – prisons on the island have become even more overcrowded, insulting of the dignity of the inmates, and completely oblivious of any rehabilitating function that they might be supposed to have. Much like in Britain’s motherland, the US, the prison system seems to have reverted to the gruesome pantomime of a Medieval vision of hell on earth. While the British government keeps waving the supposed superiority of Western culture
uber alles, its prison system has completely lost touch with those Enlightenment ideas of human dignity, that have contributed so much to the most decent aspects of our Western civilisation.
One would have expected Grayling to meditate cautiously on his role, possibly to read a book or two by people like Beccaria or Voltaire – Foucault might be too much for a Tory MP, – and finally to burst out in a beautiful announcement on the priority of human dignity over everything, even over the stiff rigour of the law. One would have expected Grayling to comment on the despicable regression of British prisons towards a Victorian model of workhouses, or on the highly dangerous passage of the most controversial of all State powers – the power to kidnap and enslave civilians, legally defined as ‘imprisonment’ – from the hands of the State to those of a private commercial company. In short, one would have expected Grayling to follow the claim of the Latin poet Terence that ‘I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me’ – and to act consequently.
But none of this happened. The Justice Secretary announced that prisoners have been having it too easy for too long. He said – and it is worth to quote the horror of his words in full – that “it is not right that some prisoners appear to be spending hours languishing in their cells and watching daytime television while the rest of the country goes out to work.” Prisoners will be denied TV, access to the gym even the possibility of wearing their own clothes. They will have to ‘earn’ these ‘privileges’ by working longer hours under the conditions of hyper-exploitation which characterise work inside prisons. They will have to crawl out of the pit of their worthlessness as painfully as they can.
It is hard to write anything after such words. Grayling’s pronouncements is so wrong on so many levels that challenging it intellectually is between superfluous and impossible. Grayling completely brushes over the delicate question of the legitimacy of the power of the State to kidnap its own citizens, and marches arrogantly towards the assumption that detention is the natural consequence for any disagreement between citizens and the laws of their State. He assumes that prisoners deserve nothing. That, by breaching the law, they have forced the State to lock them behind bars. ‘Look at what you made me do!’ shouts the abusive husband to his wife, while waving a broken bottle of beer. ‘Look at what you made us do!’ seems to be shouting Grayling, as he accuses his kidnapped fellow-citizens of being mere scroungers, ‘enjoying’ the ‘easy life’ of those who have been deprived even of the right to enjoy their life.
Perfectly in line with the astonishing illogicality of most articles appearing daily on newspapers such as the Daily Mail, the Sun or the Evening Standard, Grayling’s discourse is an obscene exhibition of complete logical non-sequitur. This wouldn’t be troubling, if only the ability to produce discourses endowed with complex sense wasn’t one of the defining characteristics of our species, as opposed to the rest of the animal kingdom. By relinquishing reason in favour of the barbarous pathos of declarations such as these, people like Grayling and certain journalists don’t merely produce low political propaganda at the expense of suffering humans such as prisoners, migrants and the poor. They threaten the very basis of our humanity, by functioning as active agents of our regression to our cousins the chimpanzees. If their insult to reason was to be considered a crime – just as stealing a bottle of water was considered a crime during the riots of 2011 – it would most definitely be a crime against humanity.
Whatever is left of humanity in this grim beginning of millennium is fast sinking below the Enlightened standards which painfully emerged after the darkness of the religious centuries, stretched almost uninterruptedly from the fall of the Roman Empire to the 18th century. Today, barbarism knocks back at our door, not under the bogey-man mask of the dangerous-brown-immigrant, but as the inner collapse of our own human dignity and reason.
Voltaire used to remark that the level of civilisation of a country can always be measured by the state of its prisons. One could only wonder what he would make of today's Barbaritannia.
