Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Penal Reform

Leafing through old notebooks, one is apt to come upon some very curious pieces of writing. Since I've been taking advantage of my unemployment to carry out a lot of the donkey-work of my fiction writing - wordprocessing and so on - I have had occasion recently to be looking through my stack of notebooks, and just now came across a short piece that seemed, at first, entirely unfamiliar to me. In fact, I thought it must have been written by someone else, and that for some reason I had copied it out in order to edit it for them, or something of the sort. However, I soon realised that this was, indeed, something I had written, which had become quickly buried under the shifting sands of my memory. Slowly I was able to unearth the dim recollection of having applied for a position as prison correspondent with a newspaper. The piece in question had been part of my application. Needless to say, I didn't get the job, but anyway, here's what I wrote, which I was able to read as if the words of a stranger:

Penal Reform

With recent advances in research on human genetics, the age-old debate on free will is receiving fresh attention. It is not unthinkable that this will prove the most important debate in human history. If human beings really are no more than complex, reactive machines then an individual can no longer be held responsible for his actions, and concepts such as behavioural reform and rehabilitation become, to a lesser or greater extent, obsolete. The pronouncement of the death of free will, if it comes, will necessarily raise new questions. Is it constructive, or even justifiable, to punish a person for something over which she had no effective control? Is social reform even possible? Perhaps the conclusion that free will is dead will be used to justify genetic methods of rehabilitation that treat human beings like machines in need of repair.

The assumption behind any philosophy of behavioural predetermination is that the mind is ultimately a closed system. As a means of considering the validity of such a philosophy we could view the closed system of prison as both a symptom of and a symbolic microcosm of the social system at large. If we are unable to think our way out of the system in which we find ourselves, we are doomed to cyclical patterns of behaviour resembling addiction.

My own interest in penal reform, unlikely as it may sound, stems from my artistic calling as a writer of horror fiction. Many of the issues that perplex me with regard to art seem to parallel issues of penal reform. Are the horrors I generate in a piece of fiction a symptom of morbidly addictive patterns of thinking? Can I, in fact, use creativity as a means to break out of those patterns?

Perhaps this last question is the most pertinent. If a denial of free will precludes any possibility of humane forms of rehabilitation, the only viable alternative must be the use of creativity and imagination – the positive declaration that there is free will. The human prisoner must first imagine a world beyond the closed system that imprisons him; only then can he hope to inhabit it.

Many of us are familiar with the lateral thinking test which is comprised of nine dots arranged in a square with the challenge to obliterate each dot by drawing four straight lines without doubling back or taking one’s pen from the paper. As long as the mind sees the dots as a square the task is impossible. It is only when the mind breaks out of this system by carrying one line into the blank outside the square that there is room for the challenge to be met.

Of course, all this is theoretical, but I have worked with one organisation that attempts to put this theory into practice. Using drama as a tool, Wolf and Water Arts Company encourages people to imagine themselves out of their addictive systems. Wolf and Water have run projects of this kind in prisons and areas of conflict such as Kosovo. Although my own work with the company was limited to other areas, perhaps it was from my time with them that I first came to see drama and similar forms of creativity as a possible means of escape from behavioural loops that make places like prisons necessary. It seems to me this is an idea worth further investigation.