Jens Bjørneboe, “Behandling av unge lovovertredere” (excerpt), ©1968, 1976 by Pax Forlag A/S. Originally published in Dagbladet, December 1959. Vi som Elsket Amerika, 1970. Samlede Essays: Politikk, 115-119. English translation ©1998 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer
What effect does it have on a young person to be locked up in a cell?
Naturally it can be tempting to put children and youth in prison, and it's certainly done, too. Not long ago a fourteen-year-old boy was sentenced to prison and around the same time a fifteen-year old. Recently the Attorney General has issued orders for more frequent use of prison sentences for young lawbreakers, and today every tenth young boy in Oslo has a police record.
No, that isn't a misprint. One in ten. And unfortunately it's not the statistics which are at fault. It is either with the youth or with the authorities that something is wrong.
Should it indeed be the youth there is something wrong with, then it is our fault, for after all we brought them up. And consequently all talk of “punishment” falls away. It such a case we should be the ones to be punished; it is the teachers and parents who should be punished, since of course it's not the young people's own fault that we brought them up wrong. It should be intelligible even to the authorities that in such a case one should punish those who are guilty. So far as I can see, that is completely logical.
But yet the Attorney General gives orders for more prison sentences for young people, and he is surely a decent man. And the police have begun jailing fourteen-year-olds. At the same time the public screams for more punishment for lawbreaking youth. And that both the police and the public are decent folk is of course quite certain. Despite all these excellent people's proposals for more and more punishment, juvenile crime blithely goes on rising.
It is especially Verdens Gang which has lent the grateful and indignant public space in its columns to give expression to their morals and their demands for punishment; amid the sex murders and the naked girls on the front page and the shiny cars and the lives of Hollywood movie stars on the following pages, more and more of the public's moral voices have made themselves heard in this excellent paper. Morality spoke up and demanded more police, more imprisonment and longer sentences. One ends up with the feeling that every boy on a motorcycle is a aspiring bandit.
But despite all this loving attention our youth wander further down their own jungle paths. In deep immorality and tight pants. For a number of years I've been a teacher, and I have taught pupils from the age of seven or eight up to their early twenties. During this time I myself have never experienced that it was necessary or right to punish a pupil. And I too have had “difficult” pupils.
In reality the problem does not lie in the one who is to be punished; the true problem lies in a quite different place: The need to “punish” others seems to be an ineradicable part of human nature. It is extremely odd, but we punish and punish! Where we've gotten this right to punish others is a different question. But the need is there. You have to assume that people with an especially strong desire to punish apply for jobs with the penal authorities. And it is in this light that one must regard the public's cries for more punishment and the Attorney General's order for more use of prison sentences. Just as there are geniuses in violin playing and geniuses in painting, there are also geniuses in the desire to punish. You find them in reform schools and in the prison system. (In a future article we shall touch on the problem of recruitment of prison officials and guards, just as we shall also look a bit at what role the reform schools play in the education of future prisoners.) Home, school, reformatory and the prison system are all parts of the same complex of problems: Juvenile crime.
Not with my best moral will can I believe that there is something wrong with youth. It is an absurd thought that there should be something wrong with a whole generation. But that they are neglected, rootless and without well-grounded ideals is of course true and correct; and it is true and correct that they look at us with mistrust and suspicion. If they didn't do so to a great extent, then something would indeed be seriously wrong with them. You can't drum into a whole generation through film and print that the meaning of life is sex, cars and money—without its having its effects. And you can't solve the problems which have arisen, the problem of rootlessness, nihilism and lack of ideals, by calling the police. You can't solve anything whatsoever with the aid of longer and harsher prison sentences. Least of all can you cure spiritual poverty and desperation by such means.
Alas, alas, here there is something wrong with Mr. Attorney General's train of thought. More prison sentences cannot be used as counterweights against the spiritual emptiness which the young people of today have inherited from the Attorney General's own generation. It would have been more honest to propose flogging. For imprisonment, deprivation of freedom, is in fact torture, and the frightful thing about it lies in its permanence.
Only a few days of being shut in works a substantial change in a person, and the younger one is, the faster it happens. In psychiatry there is a technical term, which I myself only know in German, it's called Zuchthausknall, and I got it from old Bleuler's text in the field. Zuchthausknall is the designation for the momentary insanity which breaks out after a few days' incarceration in a solitary cell, it is an acute mental illness which is evoked by the enormous agony which any moderately sensitive person experiences when locked up in a few square meters for any length of time. In Norwegian prisoners' jargon it's called “trashing the cell”, and it consists of a person's trying to achieve contact with the surrounding world by throwing the whole inventory in the cell against the steel door. Of course everybody knows that it won't do any good, but the condition is a sickness, and is probably called forth by the claustrophobia, the terror of the closed space, which lies latent in us all. Out in the prison corridor it is experienced as prisoner number such-and-such “making a racket,” but from inside it feels somewhat different: The prisoner first sees the walls of the cell come closer and closer, the cell becomes smaller and smaller around him, it becomes harder and harder for him to breathe, as he is gradually filled with a dread which surpasses all bounds. Once the dread has arrived, then it's just a question of time until the breakdown follows, and this breakdown consists in pure insanity, one becomes senseless from dread.
I have seen grown, strong men who experience the psychological torture of being shut in as so horrible that they don't shrink from any physical pain to get transferred from the cell to the hospital, to get out of the cell. Judges and jurors should be called to the operating rooms where they're being sewn together after their suicide attempts. I myself know people who have been capable of sitting with a razor blade and cutting themselves up for hours in order to achieve one of two things, either to die, or to be taken to the hospital. I know a prisoner who got hold of matches and who tried to burn out his eyes in order to escape from being shut in. He held the half-open matchbooks right against his eye, lit them, and let them explode right into his eyeball. But such mutilations are a later phenomenon; the first thing one does is to “trash the cell”. What methods of treatment they use in Norwegian prisons to cure this psychosis in the prisoners, by chaining, shutting in solitary, etc., I shall come back to in a future article. For they are not sufficiently well known to the public.
Now they're sentencing fourteen- and fifteen-year olds to prison. They want more use of imprisonment.
I don't know how fourteen-year olds feel when they're locked in behind a steel door, for I myself was an elderly gentleman of seventeen before I was put in a cell, but if I remember aright, I howled like a dog for about twelve hours. And the effect? I can at any rate confess that it didn't make me any nicer. On the contrary I probably got a bit nastier.
It is justified to ask: How does it look inside a judge who pronounces a jail sentence over a fourteen-year-old? Has he himself been a father? Has he been a teacher? Does he lack such an elementary experience as having been in prison himself? Is he not clear that even a short time's incarceration leaves incurable defects in a person, that only a month or two behind the steel doors marks a person for life? And how do things stand with the moral public?
Once in a book I proposed—in wild irony—that the police should take over the upbringing of the young. That is in fact the direction we are headed today. The police!? What in the world have the police and the prison system to do with pedagogical and medical questions?