Political prisoners

It will come as no news to any healthy person who has a trace of imagination that people who go to prison are going to have to live celibate lives. We all know about special cases and special marital visits and so on, but most of us, I'm pretty certain, would not say that a convict has a legal right to his, or her, usual sex life.

Well, there's a man in Indiana who thinks so. He’s a convicted murderer and, when he was sentenced, he asked to serve his time in a women's prison. The judge thought this an interesting request but when he heard the man's reason, he refused it. Whereupon, from his lonely cell, the man brought suit and the case has gone up to the Indiana Supreme Court. Since the case is based on the man's contention that he's being deprived of rights spelled out by the United States constitution, he can, if he has the stamina, take it up to the final authority, the United States Supreme Court. He may do this because the Indiana Supreme Court has rejected his appeal. 

Now before any of you leap out of bed to consult the juicy passages of the American constitution you may have overlooked, let me save you the trip by saying that the convict is not at all hazy about which rights are being denied. The constitution says that no citizen shall be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment and the convict maintains that being condemned to a lifetime of celibacy is both. The court ruled, on the contrary, that his right to pursue his amorous pleasures as if he were a free man were forfeited once he was found guilty of a murder. 

What the court did not say was that this particular punishment or deprivation may be cruel but is certainly usual. What the US Supreme Court will have to decide – if the case goes so far – is whether an inevitable life of celibacy is cruel in any sense intended by the founding fathersm or in any sense the present court can infer from the intent of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the others who wrote the constitution nearly 200 years ago. 

How I wish the lady who has just heard from Bernard Shaw and taken down a play dictated by him from Valhalla would get in touch with Madison and Co and hear how they stand on the sexual rights of convicted murderers. Now of course this is a bizarre case. It brings up, essentially, the same issue of definition which plagues us in all our public dealings with the Russians and which sparked the explosion last week over Mr Andrew Young's offhand assertion that 'in our prisons, too, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people whom I would describe as political prisoners'. 

The convict in Indiana is asking the courts to consider a new, or broader, definition of 'cruel and unusual'. Mr Young was not asking anybody. He was simply broadening our definition of political prisoners to take in Americans who are being, perhaps, excessively punished for crime because they were also radicals or extremists or, out on the streets, rebellious nuisances. 

Mr Young has been scolded by the president. He's admitted that the phrase 'political prisoners' was unfortunate. But it's too late. It was sadly predictable that the communist countries would make the most of Mr Young's remarks reported as a sort of agonised admission by the American ambassador to the United Nations and also make nothing at all of the sentencing of Sharansky and Ginsburg. 

I've just talked with a friend, an American, who's been in Russia on a trade deal for the past two weeks. He read a great deal about Mr Young and the trials and troubles of black men in prison, and Indians out of it, but he'd heard nothing or read nothing at all about the trials of the two dissidents. He could say with more innocence that Mr Gromyko, 'Trials? What trials?' Only other dissident Russians, underground rebels who run the risk of the same fate as Sharansky, will know anything about this brave man, what he's done, what he refused to do, where he's gone – or perhaps even know his name. It waits for honourable reincarnation in the history books if the true history of the Russian tyranny ever comes to be written and read about in Russia itself. 

I stress the enormous silence in the Soviet Union about Mr Sharansky, if only to focus by contrast on the enormous noise Mr Young has made it possible for the Russians to make about American suppression of human rights. They've never before had the free propaganda gift of a declaration by an American government official that American prisons are loaded with political prisoners. This blessed gift has been celebrated with a new round of despatches from the United States and lamenting editorials about the horrid life in America of blacks and dissidents and American Indians. 

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine in New York, a lifelong lover of gadgets, came up to my apartment to show off a new radio set, one of those wide band, all inclusive, universal short wave, 50 per cent polyethylene-in-suspension jobs made, need I say, in Japan, which by the jiggle of a knob brings in Sydney one moment, London the next and Hawaii after that. It brought in Moscow and we listened for a while to a bland and well-modulated broadcast of news from the United States. It was very well done, though what was being done required you to be living in the United States and being in fairly regular touch with the news. 

There were one or two items we knew about, figures on inflation, rather alarming but not reported with alarm or any glee and the sort of statement from the department of state that was also being quoted in Moscow. And then, an assembly of other news stories that we'd never heard of – or barely heard of – but broadcast with the implication that they were what Americans heard every day at breakfast. There was, for instance, a black murderer in the South, quietly described as 'a political victim' and there was quite a story, not offered as a novelty but as a well-worn issue, about the Wilmington Ten who I gathered were well-known martyrs along the lines of Sacco and Vanzetti. 

I'd say that one-third of the news from America would come into any news bulletin that Americans would be likely to hear. The other two-thirds were scandals illustrating the oppressive atmosphere of American society and the monstrous malfunctioning of American justice, but not told as scandals or monstrous truths, just tossed off with professional aplomb as regrettable but unsurprising facts known to all. 

Now it's not a bad thing for the citizens of any country to hear unpleasant truths about their society, which are hushed up or don't get disinterred until some persistent muckraker starts digging. I'm pretty sure that most Americans have never heard of the Wilmington Ten, or not for several years anyway. And it's probably a good thing they should. If there is any good blown by the ill wind of Mr Andrew Young's quick tongue, it's the decision of Amnesty International to take up Mr Young's charge at face value and count people who might be defined, not in the Russian sense but in a less arbitrary way, as political prisoners. Amnesty International, you know, is the international group that looks into the denial of human rights in every country around the world. It won last year's Nobel Peace Prize. 

AI has just chosen the Wilmington Ten as a case which, while it cannot be defined as a case of overt political imprisonment, yet should give pause to people who can proudly say that, in their country, there are no political prisoners by any definition at all. AI calls them 'prisoners of conscience'. The Wilmington Ten were put in prison after a turbulent week in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1970. They consist of nine blacks and one white. Eight are still in prison. They were tried and convicted of arson and conspiracy to assault, in this case, emergency workers at a school whose desegregation seemed, to the defendants, to be going too sluggishly. They were held for 14 months, they were tried and found guilty and sentenced, between them, to nearly 300 years in prison. 

What brought Amnesty International into the case was the fact – and they say it is a fact – that the key witnesses for the prosecution, a year or two ago, have taken back the testimony they gave on which the ten were convicted. If this is so, why do they remain in prison? Amnesty International reluctantly concludes it is for the political propaganda they were doing on the outside before anything burned and before there were any riots. 

Mr Brezhnev, I understand, is as well acquainted with the case as Amnesty International and brings it up whenever there's a Western jab at him about human rights. Also the Charlotte Three and Gary Tyler, a black sentenced to 99 years hard labour for supposedly shooting a white during a bussing riot in Louisiana nearly four years ago. He, too, is now a so-called 'ward' of Amnesty International which means it's devoting funds and further investigation to have his case retried. 

I hope that since the rhetorical issue of political prisoners has come up, Mr Carter's and Secretary Vance’s advisers who deal with the Russians are boning up on the Wilmington Ten and the Charlotte Three and one or two others, for unless we admit the mote in our own eye, it's going to be all the harder to point with alarm at the more massive beam in the Russian eye. 

What must be said is that in any country of over 200 million, there are going to be a lot of local miscarriages of justice but the miscarriage, or the suppression, is not built into the system. What disturbs some people about Mr Carter when he harangues the Russians about human rights is his implied belief that the Russians are really meaning to be humane and democratic, just like us, and that by pointing out where they slip and falter, they'll change. One faction of his advisers, at least, is waiting for him to recognise that political imprisonment is in the Soviet Union systematic. Criticism of how the system may be failing is allowed but the smallest criticism of the system itself – what we call healthy dissent – is absolutely verboten. 

When and if Mr Carter appreciates this fundamental difference, he may begin to frame an American Soviet policy.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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