The Habitual Prisoner
| Date | 01 April 1952 |
| Author | Margery Fry |
| Published date | 01 April 1952 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1952.tb00229.x |
‘r1-m
HABITUAL
PRISONE~R
THE
Criminal is no longer regarded as a single social species and the
study
of
his natural history-dating back to the time of Lombroso-
is
now seen to involve the investigation of a wide variety of human
types, whose one common characteristic is that they have been
convicted of breaking the law (even this single classification gets
complicatcd as we look closer-the boy who rode his bicycle on
the foot-path and was fined half a crown in the juvenile court
hardly qualifies as
a
criminal-yet when we search
for
the boundary
line of law-breaking serious enough to rank as crime we may find
ourselves entangled in some such description as
“
fingey-printable
offences
”).
‘
The fortress-like wall round a gaol,
or
the imaginary
line marking the bounds of a prison camp tie up strange bunches
of human beings; the pacifist whose convictions reject all form
of
conscription may walk at exercise with a reprieved murderer,
the half-witted anaemic mother whose incompetent neglect of her
children has amounted
to
cruelty may shoulder the woman of
strong maternal feelings, but slender civic conscience, who has
nourished hers on the coupons of half a dozen stolen ration books.
No one investigation can cover these varied characters. When
we begin to consider the weaknesses which have led to their offences
the clues carry us far back outside the gaol and we find each group
of prisoners is linked to a class of free citizens with the same
vulnerability-crime is not disease, but the analogies between them
are often illuminating.
If
you look
for
the causes
of
malady
amongst the patients of
a
prison hospital you are forced to con-
sider the origins of cancer, of tuberculosis,
or
rheumatism in the
population as a whole. Violence, jealousy,
a
recklcss desire for
adventure
or
a luxurious life are certainly not peculiar to
Her
Majesty’s guests. They bring misery with them wherever they
exist, but in some cases, their damaging effect
is
not
of
the kind
with which the law can deal.
For
the purposes of research into
their origins and nature the distinction between the anti-social
behaviour which qualifies
as
“crime” and that which remains
unpunished is of little importance.
But
200
years
ago
an inquiring man of science would have
found one disease appearing mainly amongst prisoners-the gaol
fever which was itself a result of incarceration. And today, as
Dr.
Norval Morris shows in his recent book,’ there
is
a class of
men and women (very few of the latter) conditioned by prison to
prison, by crime to crime, till the first varied origins of their fight
with society are almost lost in the uniformity of their present
I
The
Habitual
Criminal,
by
Norval Morris.
155
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