La Privation Excessive De La Liberté
Authors: Cormier Bruno M. , Williams Paul J. 
Published: April 2017

Deprivation of liberty as a form of punishment is a relatively recent development. It is generally agreed that since the eighteenth century and even more rapidly following the French Revolution, the use of corporal punishment decreased and deprivation of liberty became increasingly the punishment of choice, as it is today.

When describing the barbarous and sadistic punishments inflicted by our ancestors, contemporary writers assume a position of superiority which is not too well merited. Man in the Middle Ages was assailed by plagues, by incurable illnesses and pain unrelieved by drugs; the high birth rate was matched by the equally ‘high death rate and the lifespan was very short. Pain was then an inescapable accompaniment of life. When people inflicted cruel suffering it was no more than a heightening of their own pain.

With scientific progress and the birth of liberating ideas, freed from many of his earlier handicaps and suffering, man grew to cherish individual liberty. In the days when to possess a healthy physical body was a most essential condition for survival, punishment consisted of hurting, mutilating and finally killing the body. When liberty became a necessity and life was worth living only in freedom, punishment was precisely to take away man's prized liberty. Seen in this perspective medieval man was not notably more barbarous and cruel than his modern counterpart.

The deprivation of liberty as a form of punishment is accompanied by emotional regression, the extent of which is predetermined by the personality of the offender. Paradoxically the persistent offender, the man most frequently convicted both for the protection of society and as a means of reformation, is the one who does not learn from such punishment, and who regresses sometimes to the point where he may become ‘imprisoned’ not unlike institutionalized dependent patients.

Excessive deprivation of liberty, here defined as near complete confinement to the cell, results in deep emotional disturbances. Aggression is mobilized in two directions, suicidal and homicidal. A third reaction is a withdrawal into the self leading to a psychotic-like state or a psychosis. Between these three states there is an intermediate condition, a state of rage. It is a kind of crossroads from which the inmate moves in one direction or another. He may return to the crossroads and take another path. These three reactions may thus be interchangeable.

The study of liberty has in the past generally been left to philosophers, theologians and thinkers involved in abstract ideas. Some of the syndromes and symptoms related to the actual deprivation of liberty were here and there described by physicians accompanying the army and attending captives, and those who worked in prisons. It gave a limited picture. It was not until the twentieth century with its totalitarian regimes, concentration camps and the experience of the War that psychiatrists approached the problems of the meaning of liberty and of its deprivation. Since the War we can speak of literature on the subject, where the deprivation of liberty is seen not simply as a withholding of freedom but as an experience of living in an alien world.

Psychiatrists have now discovered that in our present civilization not to be free is to live in a pathological state. In loss of freedom the danger of individual and social pathology is great.