It will be seen by this description of cellular imprisonment that the classical criminal and prison experts have logically arrived at the conclusion that perpetual punishment should be abolished; and this renders recidivism possible even in murder. But it is clear that what we ought to abolish is not perpetual separation, but only the stupidly harsh form of isolation in cells--and this not only in life sentences, but in all sentences. Cellular imprisonment is inhuman, because it blots out or weakens, in the cases of the least degenerate criminals, that social sense which was already feeble in them, and also because it inevitably leads to madness or consumption (by onanism, insufficient movement, air, &c.). Hence it drives the prison authorities, in order to avoid these disastrous consequences, to the injustice of building cells for murderers which are decidedly comfortable, and consequently a mockery of the honest wretchedness of the cottages and garrets of the poor. The treatment of mental diseases recognises a special form of insanity under the name of prison madness. Cellular imprisonment, in temporary or indefinite sentences, can do nothing for the amendment of the guilty, especially because, when we do not amend the social environment, it is useless to lavish care on our prisoners if, as soon as they quit prison, they must return to the same conditions which led them into crime. No adequate social prevention can in any way be provided by the more or less arcadian devices of the prisoners' aid societies. The chief mistake of the prison experts has been to concentrate their attention <p 262>exclusively on the cell and in the cell, forgetting the external factors of crime; so that, by a familiar psychological process, the cell has become for prison experts what money is to the avaricious: it has ceased to be a means, and has become an end in itself. Again, the cellular system is ineffectual because the very isolation which was its original object is incapable of realisation. Prisoners find a thousand means of carrying on communication with each other, during their walks, or by writing on the leaves of books lent to them to read, or by knocking on their walls according to a conventional alphabet, or by writing in the sand, or by using the drains as telephonic receivers, as was done in the cellular prisons of Mazas, Milan, &c. Plain proofs of this may be found in Lombroso's ``Les Palimpsestes des Prisons.'' ``The public, and even well-informed persons, honestly believe that the cellular prison is a dumb and paralytic thing, without tongue or hands, simply because the law has ordered silence and inactivity. But as no decree, however vigorous, can counteract the nature of things, so this organism speaks, moves, occasionally wounds or slays, in spite of all the decrees. Only, as always happens when a necessity of humanity is opposed by a law, it acts by less known, underground and hidden means.''