Eastern State Penitentiary

The cruel desire to improve another human being

In his stupendous last novel, RESURRECTION, Tolstoy asks the question, “by what right do people punish others?” It is especially in prisons that the question comes to mind. The French Revolution began with the storming of a prison. The repressive Soviet system , when it ended, brought an end to the huge network of prisons called the Gulag Archipelago, though we know that Putin has kept in place the most repressive of prisons. All over the world, we human beings seem to have devised social systems which involve feeling it is right to lock up huge numbers of our fellow-mortals.

We - I mean those who inhabit Western “democracies” - like to think we are so different from the Chinese or the Russians , who enslave and imprison their population so freely., Yet Keir Starmer’s Government is priding itself on the numbers of people it wants to send to prison, making Britain have one of the highest proportions of citizens to prison-numbers . Only the Turks rival us British - on our side of the Atlantic. But the country, of course, which locks up the highest proportion of its citizens is the Land of the Free - the United States of America.

Two years ago, I spent some hours walking round what is left of the prison camp near Weimar, known as Beech Wood or Buchenwald. It was a horrifying experience, but this was because I was confronted with deliberate cruelty inflicted on prisoners of war, or enslaved labourers who were worked to death. The punishments were dire , but the worst punishment was just being there and being aware of the mindset of the prison guards . Yet, as in the prison camps of the Gulag so vividly described by Solzhenitsyn, there was something here - the human spirit, both in its capacity for cruelty and evil, and in its discovery, in the darkest places, of goodness and hope.

The horror-experience of visiting Buchenwald is therefore complicated, but upsetting in a good way - or so it felt, when I caught my bus back to the - oh, so near! - centre of Weimar with its Bauhaus Museum, its Goethehaus, its parks, and its gracious river Ilm. Whereas a visit to the most famous early prison in America, built with the best of intentions by self-righteous people fills me with greater gloom than any building I ever entered into my life. It is far more depressing than Buchenwald. Built like a fairy castle, it is a monument to the appalling consequence of priggery and self-righteousness

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I am standing in Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.