Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Six. The Chandernagore Manuscript
Passing Thoughts [2]
The European Jail
The European jail is a luminous commentary on the humanitarian boasts of the Occident and its pious horror1 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 eighteenth century.
France has forgotten the wheel and the galleys2.
But these things have gone out.
What of the penal system?
It strikes us as a3 refined and efficient organisation of the methods of savages against their enemies, savages who4 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 powers5, emoluments and pleasures!
The organisation of penal slavery6 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 daily work7 I have fixed for him, or either deliberately or accidentally remembers that he was a human being, or else behaves8 like the brute I have successfully laboured to make him.
Even then I torture him according9 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 not done10 once in a way, but driven in daily, hourly, momently, in every detail of dress11, food, conduct, discipline.
In every possible way I brand in upon my victim’s soul12 that he is no longer such an13 one, no longer possessed of the name, rights or nature of humanity, but my slave, beast and property and the slave, beast and property of my servants14.
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 an idiot15, 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 machinelike efficiency.
The curious thing is that it is inflicted in part even on undertrial prisoners who may be perfectly innocent.
This also is probably dictated16 by the finer feelings of Europe17 and intended mercifully to prepare their18 gentle and easy descent into the Inferno19 around them.