The New Yorker recently ran a major piece on solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. In a sidebar feature, they consulted the opinion of one Mr. Charles Dickens:
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; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than 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 the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
That Charles Dickens held such a view is a testament to his profound sense of the essential unity of humanity; and that he held such a view away back in 1842 is a testament to his remarkable modernity. Charles Dickens: We love you!
Posted by: David Paul | October 29, 2009 at 09:37 AM