In
these countries, accordingly, the system will not be practical
unless the principle of classifying prisoners in biological and
psychological categories is conjoined with it; for without this we
shall not get rid of the impersonal system which is the vice of
our present penal law, and under which, even in our prison
administration, we treat the prisoner as a mere symbol, to which
we can apply the three conventional rules of the cell, hard
labour, and instruction.
But I am strongly opposed to, or accept simply as accessory
(even for the seclusion of prisoners before trial, after the
preliminary examination), cellular isolation by itself, which has
reached the height of absurdity and inhumanity in cases of
imprisonment for life.
As Mancini said in 1876, discussing the draft of the Italian penal
code, ``the punishment of hard labour for life, which is
substituted in the draft for the capital sentence, differs
substantially in its severity of privation and misery from all
other modes of imprisonment. It must be undergone in one or two
special prisons to be erected within the country. It would be the
saddest and most terrible thing which the imagination of man could
conceive.
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