Sri Aurobindo
The Harmony of Virtue
Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910
Passing Thoughts
Academic Thoughts1
The European Jail1
The European Jail — is a luminous commentary on the humanitarian boasts of the Occident and its pious horrors2 at Oriental barbarities.
To mutilate, to impale, to torture, how shocking, how Oriental!
And we are occasionally reminded that if we had independence, such punishments would again be our portion.
England forgets that to half hang a man, draw out his entrails and burn them before his eyes was an English practice in the 18th Century.
France has forgotten the wheel and galleys3.
But these things have gone out.
What of the penal system?
It strikes us as the4 refined and efficient organisation of the methods of savages, who5 have indeed progressed and have learned that the torture of the soul is a more terrible revenge than the torture of the body, to murder the human nature a greater satisfaction than to slay the animal frame.
Ancient nations punished their enemies by death, slavery, 
torture, humiliation and degradation.
The jail system is an organisation of these four principles.
Physical death has been reduced to a minimum, it is now only a punishment for murder and rebellion.
A century or more ago, every crime almost was punished with death in England.
The principle was — your life for my shilling, your life for my handkerchief.
It is now — your life for the life you have taken, your life for the mortal fear you put me into of the loss of my power6, emoluments and pleasures.
The organisation of slavery7 is the first principle of the system.
I take my enemy, put him on a dog's diet, load him with chains, set guards to beat and kick him into obedience and diligence, and make him work for my profit for a period fixed by myself, careless whether his nature is brutalised or his life shortened in the process — for he is my slave to do my will with, and if I do not kill him for taking my shilling or my handkerchief, it is because I am civilised and merciful, not a barbarous Oriental.
For the same reason, I do not inflict physical torture on him, unless he is unwilling or unable to do the amount of work8 I have fixed for him, or either deliberately or accidentally remembers that he was a human being or behaves9 like the brute I have successfully laboured to make him.
Even then I torture according10 to his physical capacity and take care not to maim or kill this serviceable animal.
Degradation and humiliation are as well organised as the slavery.
It is done, not11 once in a way but driven in daily, hourly, momently, in every detail of his dress12, food, conduct, discipline.
In every possible way I brand in upon his soul13 that he is no longer such a14 one, no longer possessed of the name, rights or nature of humanity, but my slave, beast and property — of myself and of my servants15.
It is my object to wipe out every trace of the human in him and I stamp my foot daily on anything in him that may remind him of such human qualities as modesty, culture, self-respect, generosity, fellow-feeling.
If everything else fails, I have the exquisite rack of mental torture, called solitary imprisonment to shake his reason or destroy his manhood.
And if in the end I have not succeeded, if he comes out a man and not a brute or idiot16, it is not my fault, but his, I have done my best.
This is the European prison system, and it is inflicted on all alike with machine-like efficiency.
The curious thing is, that 
it is inflicted in part even on undertrial prisoners, who may be perfectly innocent.
This also is probably directed17 by the finer feelings of the modern civilised accident18 and intended mercifully to prepare his19 gentle and easy descent into Inferno20 around them.
Circa 1910