a ransomer arrives at the sponging-house (Vanity Fair, vol. 2, cap. xviii)
A fabulously wealthy Middle Eastern
gold merchant, Reza Zarrab, has been indicted for criminal trial in New
York. But he does not fancy the idea of
awaiting his court date in such accommodations as are usually provided
by the criminal justice system. He would
prefer a luxury apartment to Riker’s Island, and would propose to pay for it
himself, relieving the taxpayer of any financial liability. He also offers to put up a huge
bail bond and even finance special police guards to guarantee his appearance in court. He will gladly wear a GPS tracking
device. He actually represents a class
of wealthy defendants. I read about this in the Times, and as usual, or at least often, the numerous readers’ comments in the
on-line edition were as engaging as the article itself. Most comments rejected Mr. Zarrab’s proposal
for a privately financed gilded cage with scorn or indignation. The recurrent adjective was unfair.
My own initial reaction was along these lines—until I thought about it
for a moment.
The guarantee to a “speedy” trial
has become a dead letter, but the presumption of innocence need not follow
it. There are two plausible
justifications for pre-trial detention.
A guilty person might run away, thus frustrating justice. There is also the possibility that such a
person might commit further mischief, such as the destruction of evidence or
suborning of potential witnesses.
Neither justification can be convincingly invoked in this instance. Punishment is not an acceptable justification
for pre-trial detention, since it obviously assumes guilt. But Times
readers want to punish Mr. Zarrab for being obnoxiously rich and having
resources others lack. Is this a matter
of “fairness”? Some people get to go to
Yale, others to Dade County Community College, and most to no place at
all. I’m willing to part with an extra
hundred bucks for six inches of supplementary legroom on a United flight. Is it unfair that somebody else can regularly
afford First Class? The morality of the one-percent
solution to pretrial detention would seem to me to be an honestly open
question.
Our penology is uncertain of its goals. Punishment?
Reformation? Protections of
Society? For the most part the prisons
of earlier centuries much more frankly had to do with money. Serious malefactors could be chastised with
horrible corporal punishments or dispatched by hanging, decapitation,
compression, suffocation, incineration, breaking upon the wheel, and a variety
of more imaginative ordeals. This sort
of thing expanded the population of potters fields, not of prisons. Punishment was public because it was
generally believed that seeing bad people put to death fostered a socially
useful shock and awe in the spectators and fostered their moral improvement. A famous instance in the British navy in 1757,
the execution of Admiral Byng by firing squad, is wickedly remembered in Voltaire’s
Candide, where the naive hero
points out that "in this country, it is good to
kill an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others."
Incarceration was a
different matter, having to do with money.
In the Middle Ages the purpose of taking prisoners was to collect the
ransom somebody was willing to pay for them.
You might call it military kidnapping.
Noble prisoners lived pretty well, and the tradition of luxury
imprisonment—more or less what Mr. Zarrab is now petitioning for—continued into
the eighteenth century. For the
most part eighteenth-century prisons were organized on the principle of Pay to
Stay. The pauper in rags, chained to an
iron ring in some vast stone cellar, is much beloved by Hollywood; but from the
economic point such a scenario wasn’t a paying proposition. Prison employees were expected to live off the tips of their affluent
charges. The Cardinal de Rohan, held in
the Bastille under the most ignominious of circumstances, was nonetheless able
to throw a sumptuous dinner party for seventy-five friends in his prison pad. The idea of Debtors’ Prison, which seems so
strange to the modern sensibility, was actually a kind of logical extension of
medieval ransom in the age of Adam Smith.
In England there was a delightful
institution called the sponging-house. The sponging-house, which took its colorful
name from the manner in which water can be squeezed out of a sponge, was a kind
of private debtors’ prison. Few wastrels
were really so broke that they couldn’t come up with some cash under extreme
duress. A private creditor at the end of
his patience, with the help of the bailiffs, could have you carted off to the
sponging-house for squeezing. Sin gives
birth to death. You had to pay for your
own keep, at fancy hotel prices, while being squeezed. The sponging-house continued to operate well
into the nineteenth century. In London
several such enterprises were operated by Jews, a fact that contributed to
the anti-Semitic money-grubbing literary stereotype in Dickens and others. There are several memorable descriptions of the
sponging-house in our literature. My own
favorite is Mr. Moss’s establishment in Cursitor Street, off Chancery Lane, in Vanity Fair. To it Rawdon Crawley is from time to time
dragged. From it he escapes to his
domestic hearth only to discover his wicked wife Becky in a highly compromising
situation with the wicked Lord Steyne. I don't know what has become of Mr. Zarrab's petition, but in general plus ça change...
