Jules Verne Quotes
External objects produce decided effects upon the brain. A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise for the thinking faculty!
Verne, Jules. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Translated by Frederick Amadeus Malleson, Griffith and Farran, 1871, p. 95.
This Pennsylvania prison was supposedly a “modern” reform in law enforcement. Rather than work gangs or mandatory factory work, this was the first “penitentiary” in America. The guilty convicts would be in a small cell for all but 1 hour or less a day, and the only thing in the cell other than soap and a toothbrush was a Bible. The convict was supposed to spend his sentence reading th Bible and being penitent for his crimes. It destroyed most inmates mentally until the Supreme Court Ruled total solitary confinement was unconstitutional. There are a fee high security prisons today where there is no social contact allowed the inmates and their constitutionality is being litigated based on Miller’s 1890 opinion. Another point that this quotation illustrates is that sometimes reform efforts produce a situation that was worse than before.
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).
