Execute or imprison?

This is an extract from a book.

As a magistrate I performed prison visits in order to afford prisoners access to independent oversight. Notable was the attitude of condemned prisoners (those awaiting execution) about property. They were nearly always concerned with extracting a solemn promise from me that their property, or specified items of property, was to be handed over to a particular person upon their execution. Sometimes the subject matter of such concern would be something as mundane as a blanket worth just a few dollars. It was obvious to me that property is of huge significance in the African psyche and has strong links to spirituality. It is therefore not uncommon for a sangoma to advise, for instance, that the reason that misfortune has befallen a consultant is that ancestral spirits are angry on account of the fact that lobola has not been paid.

I also picked up a particular phenomenon that does not appear well represented in criminology. A long term prisoner gave me a story that was incredibly detailed and had what judicial officers term "the ring of truth" about it, on account of its detail and objectively verifiable factors. According to him he was still in prison because of an illicit deal, involving the sale of cattle and gold, which had gone wrong between him and the governor of the prison. He was able to furnish dates and full details of the governor's house where, according to him, clandestine meetings had occurred. The story covered a saga that had occurred over a three year period and he was able to provide complex details on all its aspects including the nuances that attach to stories that are true.

In all aspects he appeared to be what courts refer to as a "credible and reliable witness". Testing his story only induced him to clearly and calmly reveal even more supportive details. The point he was making was that he had been due for release many years earlier but was being kept incarcerated by the governor manipulating the system so as to ensure that he, the governor, could get away with having cheated him on their deals. A more convincing story was hard to find.

I called the prison officials, whom I always excluded from such interviews, so that a prisoner was free to divulge information, and asked them for his file. Only then did the truth emerge. His story was an incredibly fanciful invention of the mind which was blocking out the true reasons for his situation. The man had originally been convicted of a particularly horrendous double murder, involving the use of an axe, and sentenced to death. Fortunately for him he was reprieved, at the last moment, by the then British Governor and the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Of this he had served about 10 years by the time I saw him. His mind had long since blocked out the horrendous events he had experienced in committing the murders, his trial, sentence and reprieve, and substituted it with the story he was now advancing.

I then discovered that this phenomenon was quite common to long term prisoners with similar histories, i.e., the psychological blocking out (hysterical suppression) of the terrible true reason for their incarceration.

For society the problem that arises is that, once the phenomenon takes hold of such a prisoner, he his utterly convinced, in his mind, that he is innocent and being victimized. He is in no different a position to a person who is actually innocent, and being unlawfully kept in prison. Both "know" that they are innocent. It can be strongly argued therefore that their continued long term incarceration, on both a subjective and objective test, constitutes "cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment" as understood in jurisprudence, and a human rights perspective. Put differently, to keep a human being in prison who neither knows, understands or accepts that he is guilty of anything, is cruel, inhuman and degrading. Facts are awkward things.

This has serious implications for the abolitionist camp that opposes the imposition of capital punishment and sees life imprisonment as acceptable. In terms of the phenomenon I discovered, long term imprisonment is cruel, inhuman and degrading once a prisoner's mind suppresses the reason for his/her incarceration. It therefore cannot be a credible substitute for capital punishment.

Now if you can't kill people as a punishment - and you also cannot keep them in prison for too long - what then? To this day I have not found an answer to these "awkward facts".

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