WHITE MARS (31 page)

'Well, now, it all sounds very mysterious,' said Tom, in rather grumpy fashion.

'On the contrary, Tom,' said the old man, laughing. 'Like all good radical plans for mankind's happiness, it contains nothing that most sensible people don't already know.'

Belle began to talk. She said that her educational regime was now running smoothly. It included, as yet informally, the education of parents in the pleasure of being parents, of reading to and listening to their progeny. The Becoming Individual classes she had established received a good response from the children. She had been interested to perceive - here she shot a stern glance at Tom - how most children had what she called 'a religious sense of life'.

'No one denies that,' Tom interrupted. 'It's the divine aspect of things, Belle - what you have called the phylogenic aspect of things. Your charges have but recently evolved from the molecular state of being. Of course they are full of wonder. I'm delighted you give it expression.'

She nodded and continued. She loved her children and was concerned that the best possible teaching might not help them prevail in the rough and tumble of terrestrial life (assuming they ever returned to Earth, as she personally did not intend to do). There had been much discussion about punishment for crime; the right conclusion had been reached - that care and consultation were more effective than punishment. She wanted Crispin to talk for a moment about the bad situation on Earth.

15

Java Joe's Story

Crispin Barcunda spoke. 'As Governor of the Seychelles, I was plagued by petty crime. Muggings, theft, aggression against tourists, hot-rodding, break-ins and murder, which sprang from these sometimes rather petty incidents. And we had drug barons and their victims. Often the crimes were drug- or alcohol-related.

'In short, the Seychelles was a paradigm in small of the rest of the world. Except it was a tropical paradise...

'Only I didn't see it as a paradise, I can tell you. Fast as we locked the little buggers up, others sprang to take their place. Our prisons were pretty savage places, sordid, old-fashioned, with frequent floggings of delinquents for deterrent effect.

'Only we know floggings don't deter. They just keep the middle classes happy. Of the little buggers they make big buggers with a grudge against society. I will tell you how we changed all that.

'It says a great deal for the human race that goodness survives even in the worst places of confinement. Among faces that bear the expressions of rats and snakes, cold, merciless, vindictive, you meet faces that beam decency and kindness.

'Such a good face belonged to a prisoner called Java Joe. Maybe he had another name, but I never heard it. Just an ordinary black man who happened to be released from a jail sentence on the day I made a very popular speech. I had addressed my audience in Victoria town square by our famous clock tower, exhorting
them
to value themselves and turn from crime. I had called them, I blush to say, the noblest creatures of the universe.

'As I was resting up from this hypocrisy, this ex-prisoner, Java Joe, was shown into my presence. He was perfectly polite. He even made himself obsequious. Yet he carried himself with pride. He had come, he said, especially from Crome Island to hear me speak. I asked him if prison had reformed him.

'His answer was simple. Delivered without reproach, it was simply, "Hell's for punishment, not reformation, isn't it?"'

Crispin tugged the ends of his moustache in order to contain a smile.

'Java Joe had come to me with a suggestion, he said. He told me he had read a remarkable old book when he was held in solitary confinement in prison. Java Joe emphasised that he was not a fussy man, but the state of what he called "the bogs" in the prison was a disgrace, planned and intended to humiliate all who had to use them. He repeated this latter phrase. This made a passage in this old book he was able to read all the more impressive.

'"What was the book?" I asked him.

'Joe was uncertain whether it was a history or a fiction. Maybe he did not understand the difference between the two types of writing, which is little enough, I grant you. Part of the book concerned the building of an ideal house, called Crome.

'The architect of Crome, Joe told me, was concerned with the proper placing of his privies. By which he meant, in plain English, sir, begging my pardon, the bogs. And here Java Joe began to quote verbatim from the book: "His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground."

'Java Joe eyed me closely to make sure I understood this elaborate language from the ancient book. Seeing I appeared to do so, he continued to quote: "It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando (the architect, sir, you see) was moved only by material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual reasons. For, he argues, the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe."'

' "Are you trying to be satirical at my expense?" I roared. But plainly he was not. He explained that to counteract these degrading effects, the author of the strange book advised that the privies in every house should be nearest to heaven, that there should be windows opening on heaven, that the chamber should be comfortable and that there should be a supply of good books and comics on hand to testify to the nobilty of the human soul.

'"Why vex me with this recitation?" I demanded. "Is it not more appropriate that the privies in our prisons should be down in the bowels of the earth?"

'Java Joe explained to me that he had thought much about this wonderful place, Crome, while passing his motions. He saw it all as a metaphor - although he did not know that particular word. From this vision of the good house his suggestion had evolved. Here he paused, searching my face with that good-natured gaze of his. I prompted him to go on.

'"Us shits," he said, "should be kept separate as far as possible from the sewers of your prisons. We've never been far from their stink in all our lives. We should be placed in a good place with a view of heaven. Then we might be able to stop being shits."'

Crispin looked about him to see what effect his story was having before he went on. 'Was there anything in what Java Joe said? Maybe there was more sense than in all the rhetoric of my speech in the town square. I decided to act.

'We had an empty island or two in the Seychelles group. To the north was Booby Island, a pleasant place with a small stream on it. What was to be lost? I had it renamed Crome Island and shipped a hundred of my criminals there, to live in daylight rather than darkness.

'What a howl went up from the respectable middle classes! That men should enjoy themselves in pleasant conditions was no punishment for crime. This experiment would kill the tourist trade. It would cost too much. And so on...'

'Let's get to the end of the tale, Crispin,' said Tom, with some impatience. 'Obviously the experiment wasn't a failure, or you would not be telling us about it.'

Crispin nodded cordially, saying merely, 'We can learn from failure as well as success.'

'Come on then, Crispin,' said Sharon. 'Tell us what happened to your criminals. I bet they all swam away to freedom!'

'They were marooned on an island round which fierce currents ran, and could not escape, my dear. They dug themselves latrines, they built a communal cookhouse, they built houses. All using just local materials. They fished and grew maize. They sat about and smoked and talked. They were prisoners - but they were also men. They regained their self-respect. A supply ship protected by armed guards called once a week at Crome Island, but no one escaped.

'And after their sentence was served, very very few reoffended. They had done what I could not manage to do, and reformed themselves.'

'What about Java Joe?' I asked.

Crispin chuckled. 'He went to live voluntarily on the island; the convicts christened him King Crome.'

At this juncture Paula Gallin came and sat down at a nearby table, escorted by Ben Borrow. They were deep in conversation but, after they had ordered two sunglows, began taking an interest in our discussion, which certainly was not private.

'We hope,' said Belle, 'to follow that example Crispin has offered. Earth is a planet full of prisons. It must never happen here. At one time, in a brief period of enlightenment, the British government permitted me to teach reading and writing to prisoners. The majority of people in prison, I found, were young bewildered men. They were ignorant and brutalised, two elements the penal system encouraged. Many had been brought up without a family. They had mostly been "in care". They were truants from school, fly boys. Most of them hid deep misery under a hard shell.

'In a word, the prisons - not only the one in which I worked - were filled by the products of poverty, unemployment, underprivilege and depression. The politicians were locking up the victims of sociopolitical crimes.'

'Excuse me, you surely go too far there,' said Hal Kissorian. 'We are mistaken in expecting politicians to remedy matters that are beyond political scope. That there are the rich and successful and the poor and unsuccessful, and every shade in between, is surely a natural and ineradicable phenomenon.'

I saw he glanced at Sharon for approval of his little speech. She gave him an encouraging wink.

Belle became so stern that her beads shook. 'There is the case of nurture as well as genetic inheritance. Prison and punishment do not reconcile these unfortunate and malevolent youths with society. Quite the reverse. They leave prison only to reoffend more expertly. Of course I am speaking only of the reformable majority. A different case can perhaps be made for the mad and the really dangerous.

'It is when we come to consider the state of affairs beyond the prison walls that we see how unenlightened we have become. Judges are now constrained by their governments to deliver fixed sentences of a number of years for various crimes. Mandatory sentencing deprives the judges of administering justice according to the facts of the case. Thus both sides of the law become machine-like. Quantputers might as well take over, as no doubt they shortly will.

'How did mandatory sentencing become the rule? Firstly, because it speeded up the legal process, much as the banishing of juries has done. Then, later, it simplified the introduction of computerisation, to cut costs.

'All this because of the rise in crime. More and more people become imprisoned, and in consequence more violent and skilled in violence. Of course, the real crimemongers escape the law, as seems to be the case with the swindlers within EUPACUS. Our isolation here lasts so long because, to my mind, the law cannot indict the culprits.

'Most governments attempt to solve the increasing crime rate by building more prisons. They can't adopt Crispin's scheme of marooning them on a desert island to create their own society-'

'As we are marooned here-' Kissorian interjected.

'-so they continue to build prisons whose one objective is to maintain security, not to re-educate or train the inmates in various trades. So I'll come to my point at last.

'All that is being done is worse than useless. Criminals are the activists of unjust societies. Our Dayo's relatively innocent scam with his musical composition was a case in point; he strove merely to become equal, no more than that, in what he feels is a society unjustly prejudiced against his kind. Behind every young thug there are several depressed people, usually women, living out their short lives, battered and afraid and probably slow-witted. Undernourished certainly. And certainly harmless, within the meaning of the word. Hopeless, too. The cure for crime is not punishment but its reverse, love, caritas...

'We need a revolution that no politician would countenance - fundamental changes in society, with really good education for our children from the earliest age onwards. With a rebuilding of family life and the arts and pleasures of citizenship. Community work was a good start towards a caring society, but it did not go far enough.

'The civilised countries must increase taxes and invest extra revenues in rebuilding slums and lives, and listening to those who have had no say. In a very few years, I guarantee, the exorbitant cost of crime prevention would be diminished. A better and happier and more equable culture would result. And it would be found to be self-sustaining.'

Sharon clapped her pretty hands. 'It's wonderful. I can see it already.'

But Kissorian asked, 'What happens to the abortion issue in this happier world of yours?'

It was Crispin who answered. 'An unwanted child tends to retain his unwanted feeling all his life. Of course, that may turn him into a philosopher. It's more likely he will turn to rape or arson or become the driving force of a security company, wielding a big stick.'

'So you're pro-abortion?'

Belle said quietly, 'For reasons I hope we've made clear, we're pro-life. Which means at this stage of existence that we reserve the right of women to control their own bodies and to abort if they are driven to take such a grave step.'