Loneliness is Punishment

Imagine four walls around you, dirty and smeared with feces. Imagine a ceiling low, pressing the humid, stagnant Summer air on you. Imagine the noises, screams, obscenities and pleas wailing from afar. Imagine you, alone, imprisoned, in solitary confinement, for life.


Loneliness and personal space is something I treasure, but I only came to realize that these very things can be and are being used to punish humans and torture them to insanity after reading this in NYTimes from March 11.

According to this article, in 1831, following his visit to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where "officials were pioneering a novel rehabilitation method based on the Quaker principles of reflection and penitence...solitary confinement", the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

“Placed alone in view of his crime [the prisoner] learns to hate it, and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for any thing better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.”

"Prisoners are humans," reads the mural on the walls of the Welikada Prison, Colombo. This notion, in spite of its simplicity and goddamn obviousness, did not strike me as important until one sunny afternoon somewhere in mid-2010. A leisurely walk down Green Path- before its coronation and renaming by His Infernal Majesty, in the days when Green Path was just that, a green path speckled by the colors of street artists- led me to the Colombo Art Gallery.

The exhibition that day, was by prisoners of Welikada. Posters and paintings, sketches and wood carvings filled a small hall in the east of the building. I remember walking with a group of Catholic nuns from the Rotary Institute, marveling at the depth of feeling these artists had captured in their work. I remember a middle-aged man standing next to me, dressed in a neat white sarong and shirt. My memory might be fooling me, but I remember a bushy black mustache and kind, expressive black eyes beneath a wrinkled forehead. He stood tall, with his arms behind his back, nodding his head to the side to agree with my immature critique of art, and telling me the modest price of each piece. Posters drawn on cheap white Bristol board and detailed sketches made with blue carbon ink on white A4 papers were priced at around a Rs. 100 or so.

"We can't afford art supplies," explained someone who was there. When I was ready to leave, I fell into a conversation with someone who was at the counter, an organizer of the event and a volunteer involved in rehabilitation work. I remember him making my head buzz with the pathetic situation of the prison system, a problem, I now understand, not limited to Sri Lanka but also affecting the US, where budget cuts have started to threaten the living conditions of inmates.

But I need not explain that the situation in Sri Lanka is far worse. When corruption sweeps into overcrowded prisons in a state with an extremely slow judicial system, mayhem is unleashed. Administration is slack and the division between the police and the Dept. of Prisons create more problems than solutions. Disease, abuse and a myriad of other problems are rampant, and saddest of all is that children under the age of 5 live with their offending mothers in these hellholes. But at least, prisoners in Sri Lanka are fortunate in that "solitary" confinement is made impossible.

He also told me of a few programs that his organization had undertaken- separate wards, painted in pink, for pregnant women, a preschool for children, training and classes in sewing, hair cutting and masonry, and religious programs. Even though these may not have the impact of much-needed policy changes, even a small step in the right direction matters.

He also handed me a newsletter- a publication of news, and beautiful poetry and verse by inmates. I recall a poem about a mother, another about waiting for someone, I cannot remember who, but the hopefulness the writer embraced with his words lingers with me.

Another thing he told me remains with me today. He pointed at the man in white, and said, his voice low and serious, "he is a prisoner too." I was shocked. Why did he not run for his life? Where were the shackles, the chains, the guns? Why did I not realize I was speaking to "a criminal"?

When I was preparing to leave, with a beautiful painting of the Aukana Buddha statue in my arms, the man in white led me to the door and said good-bye. He smiled at me with a twinkle in his eyes, and I smiled too as I descended the stairs onto the street, free to roam where my heart desired. I imagined him, waiting there, watching me walk away. A blue prison bus with barred windows must have been waiting for him somewhere, a small cell, a bunk bed, a dented metal dinner plate, not bearing his name, but his number, the code of his punishment. A light afternoon drizzle began to fall upon the streets, but I may be wrong, my memory may be fooling me.