Prisons should be nicer places? Nonsense

Now that post-Marxian vacuous liberalism is over, it is surely about time that we revived the vigorous writings of Thomas Carlyle and made him fashionable once again. He is too little read and admired these days, perhaps partly on account of his arguably controversial treatise ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849) — which, while well intentioned, may nonetheless these days ruffle one or two feathers on our university campuses, or within the BBC. But there was of course a lot more to Thomas Carlyle than simply a benign, if misguided, wish to abolish slavery while keeping a few blacks on as indentured house servants. He was very astringent on celebrity culture, economics, the French revolution and, perhaps most importantly, prisons.

Indeed, his treatise on prisons occurred to me when I was reading both last week’s unnecessarily humane leader column right here, and also a newspaper article about some of our violent criminal untermensch who had been kind enough to share on a social media site photographs of their very agreeable lives inside a prison in Dorset. Perpetually zonked out of their empty skulls on cannabis flown in via a drone, or on vodka which they got from God knows where, enjoying slap-up suppers of sirloin steak, injecting each other with body-building drugs, partying like it’s 1999, a collection of extremely violent grinning and gurning shaven-headed, tattooed imbeciles incarcerated for machete attacks, robberies and so on.

I could describe these people in more detail to you — but I will defer to another, more accomplished writer, because he does it much better. We have Thomas Carlyle to hand, who in 1850 had been enjoined to visit one of the new supposedly model prisons in London — and he shared with his readers the following description of its appalling inmates:

Miserable distorted blockheads, the generality; ape-faces, imp-faces, angry dog-faces, heavy sullen ox-faces; degraded underfoot perverse creatures, sons of indocility, greedy mutinous darkness, and in one word, of STUPIDITY, which is the general mother of such.