Throw the book at them

Literature has featured in sentencing for the wrong reasons, but
could reading be a novel punishment, asks Richard Easton

In Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel Old Mortality, the merciless royalist General Claverhouse wishes an unusual punishment to befall his prisoner, our brave hero, the wronged Presbyterian Henry Morton:

“Did you ever read Froissart?”

“No” was Morton’s answer.

“I have half a mind,’ said Claverhouse, “to contrive you should have six months’ imprisonment in order to procure you that pleasure.”

And on 27 January this year that is exactly what US District Court Judge Ann Aiken of the federal court in Portland, Oregon, did when sentencing eco-saboteur Rebecca Rubin for her part in fire bombings involving the underground Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. Judge Aiken included in Rubin’s five-year prison sentence an order that she read two books – Malcolm Gladwell's latest work David and Goliath and Nature's Trust by University of Oregon environmental law professor Mary C. Wood – to persuade her of the benefits of non-violent protest.

US courts are, perhaps, more creative (if pedagogic) punishers than their English counterparts: a Michigan juror convicted of contempt of court for posting ‘it’s gonna be fun to tell the defendant they’re guilty :P’ on Facebook was, in 2010, ordered not only to pay a fine of $250 but to write a salutary five-page essay on the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of trial by one’s peers.

But should English courts follow US District Court Judge Aiken and order criminals to read a good book or two?  Can reading make one a better person? Is a novel a novel punishment?

The law has traditionally been concerned less with the beneficial effects of books than their corrupting influence: from the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books to the Lady Chatterley trial, judges have scrutinised books mainly to determine whether they create bad people.

But perhaps the law ought to acknowledge even fiction's capacity to inspire goodness, especially as important legal principles might themselves have a novelistic heritage. In her 2007 Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt proposes that modern human rights legislation has its roots in the 18^th-century novel, chiefly the epistolary fiction of authors such as Rousseau and Richardson, whose novels enraptured Europe. Delving into a character's private world – her thoughts, letters and intimacies – caused hearts to glow empathically, and fostered 18th-century man's appreciation of others' common humanity, and, ultimately, their status as rights' holders.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in his masterful The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) agrees with Hunt. Pinker's counter-intuitive thesis that cruelty and violence have, in fact, declined over the course of human history is supported by his view that the ‘Reading Revolution’ (the sharp rise in literacy rates and the voracious consumption of novels and satires that followed the printing press's invention) created, in part, the expansive and empathic world-view that has led to the waning of human aggression.

More recently, David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at New York's New School for Social Research found in their October 2013 study 'Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind' that high-brow literary fiction – but not pot-boilers, airport novels or non-fiction – increased participants' empathic responses in standardised settings.  The two experimenters point to prisons as obvious places where literary fiction's good work could be felt.

Might reading, then, reduce recidivism by curbing offenders' aggressive impulses and increasing their consideration for others' feelings? Brazil appears to believe so. Four of the country’s toughest federal prisons have implemented the ‘Redemption through Reading’ programme: Brazilian lags who read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy or science can yearly shave up to 48 days off their sentences. Prisoners have four weeks to read each book and to write an essay that must 'make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,' according to a notice in Brazil's official gazette in June 2012.  Sao Paulo lawyer and head of a book donation prison project Andre Kehdi said of 'Reading through Redemption' that 'a person can leave prison more enlightened and with an enlarged vision of the world'; 'without doubt they will leave a better person,' he concluded.

So will English judges be peppering community orders and suspended sentence orders with ‘specific activity requirements' to read Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice and Robinson Crusoe?  Probably not. Once imprisoned, though, this country’s criminals may benefit from the Prison Reading Groups' endeavours to bring literature to jailbirds. The organisation's recent report, 'What Books Can Do Behind Bars', on its work between 1999 and 2013 to widen the narrowed cultural and intellectual life of inmates goes some way to proving Victor Hugo's maxim: 'he who opens a school door, closes a prison'. 

But before judges sentence defendants to two novels’ hard labour or prisons embark on Chekov-based rehabilitation programmes, a cautionary tale: on 20 January, an ex-schoolteacher killed his friend in the Sverdlovsk region of Russia following a drunken argument over whether poetry is superior to prose. 'The literary dispute soon grew into a banal conflict, on the basis of which the 53-year-old admirer of poetry killed his opponent with the help of a knife,' said the regional branch of the federal investigative committee.

Now that’s literary criticism. SJ

Richard Easton is a solicitor at GT Stewart Solicitors

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