According to his warder, Oscar Wilde was a reasonably compliant prisoner. He kept his cell neat and clean, and “he faithfully obeyed the laws, and conscientiously observed the rules.” Yet this general capitulation was not enough: “I understand he was punished once for talking. . . . twenty-four hours’ bread and water is the usual punishment for talking.” Such violations were of course predictable: “it would be almost a miracle for one to serve two years’ imprisonment without once being reported.” The impossible demands of the regulations, the warder believed, were part of their purpose: “Some of the rules are made with no other object than to be broken, so that an excuse may be found for inflicting additional punishment.”[81]
Such is the nature of prison discipline: The authorities do not employ punishments for the sake of enforcing the rules; they create regulations for the sake of inflicting penalties. The very emphasis on “discipline” arises in the context of, and for the sake of, suppressing the individual will. If we remove all the moralizing talk of crime and justice, of either punishment or reformation, if we strip the prison down to its mechanics and ignore the pronouncements of its defenders, then the picture that emerges is one of a conflict of wills: the state, the penal institution, and its deputies on the one side, the prisoner on the other. The one commands; the other obeys — or resists.
And what is true in the prison is also true of the prison. Prison continued the work of society, begun outside its walls. Throughout the nineteenth century, as the mode of punishment shifted away from hanging and toward incarceration, the law came to focus increasingly on the habits, manners, and morals of the lower classes. Prosecutions increased markedly, not for offenses against persons or property but for those against abstractions like decency or public order. Thousands were gaoled for drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution.[82] Most of the prisoners at Reading Gaol, for example, were imprisoned for minor offenses: half were serving less than two weeks and only 1% were in for a year or more. Eighty percent were gaoled for public order offenses, and a considerable number had been transferred to Her Majesty’s Prisons simply for violating Work House rules.
More striking still, a large number of inmates were incarcerated not only for crimes caused by poverty, but for crimes more or less coextensive with poverty, such as vagrancy.[83] These figures are in keeping with the overall pattern. By 1900, 30% of the men in English prisons were “without fixed abode and with no regular means of subsistence”; about half of these had been charged under the Vagrancy Act.[84] The Victorians spoke of the “criminal class,” a term they meant literally to refer to a group with its own culture and institutions, distinct from the body of respectable tradesmen or manual labourers.[85] Foucault has suggested, rather provocatively, that the prison, especially through its attendant cycle of recidivism, functions to produce this class, in something like the manner that the factory produces the proletariat.[86] Once established, this group serves as a very useful reminder of the parameters of responsibility and decorum within which the respectable workers must remain and of the consequences should they transgress.
It is thus not only the prisoners that the prison controls, and it is not only the inmates that it confines and disciplines. In effect, the criminal justice system did not simply use punishment to deter crime; rather it defined crime and devised penalties so as to narrow the compass of existing freedom. As Wilde wrote of capitalism more generally, “the man who is poor is in himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient.”[87]
- “A Criminal with a Noble Face”: Oscar Wilde’s Encounters with the Victorian Gaol by Kristian Williams
