Autor/Autorin
The Hessian Attorney General Dr Fritz Bauer once said that the punishment of guilt came „from the monkey era“ (DER SPIEGEL , No. 25, 1964). His plea was that the good in people had to be set free and conditions had to be created for them to grow.
Fritz Bauer’s criticism of the drafts for criminal law reform is just as topical as the book by prison director and psychologist Dr Thomas GalliDie Schwere der Schuld , published by „Das Neue Berlin“. It brings together nine stories about serious and very serious criminals, nine of around 62,000 stories of people who have to live behind bars in Germany. Very few of them are serious criminals, which is one of the reasons that led the legal scholar, who can look back on fifteen years of practical experience in prisons, to ask in which cases years and decades behind bars are actually a good thing.
It is rare to find a book about the treatment of the weakest in our society and the institution of prison that manages to do so without pointing a finger and without false morals. This is the case here. The author, aware of the most difficult realisation of all, writes: „It is one of the inevitabilities of our existence that man can bring all harm, but not all salvation, into the world.“ (p. 11) Each of the crime stories that Thomas Galli tells is about the realisation that once serious suffering has been inflicted, it cannot be repaired.
The gravity of the guilt remains forever, for the victim as well as for the perpetrator.
But what can we do to prevent repetitions and new violent crimes? What alternatives are there to retribution in the form of a prison sentence if this has little or no effect other than to push the offender even further to the margins of society, where he takes even less responsibility than before his imprisonment?
„Breaking or stopping the will to harm others makes sense to me,“ says one of the offenders in the book and continues: „But my will to break free, to shape my own life, to make it as worth living as possible, that will I am not allowed to live out. What should I have left of my dignity then? My dignity is entirely at your discretion. That is not dignity. That is a mercy killing.“ (S. 17)
Thomas Galli tells the story of how the total institution of prison cuts off the inmates‘ lifeblood and what means they invent and use to somehow get some breathing space in the completely organised prison routine – i.e. drugs, lies, mafia structures and even hostage-taking – without any false sympathy for the perpetrators. He reports on the offences from the perspective of the victims‘ suffering and seeks an explanation as to how and under what circumstances the seriousness of the crime could come about – in order to simultaneously pose the necessary question as to whether prison sentences make sense and whether they actually prevent recidivism and new crimes. After all, almost every criminal is released one day.
So what does resocialisation actually mean, where can it begin, where does it end, doesn’t it have to fail anyway because of the institution of prison, if only because of its bureaucracy and inevitable monotony?
The question remains as to where to start with healing, improvement and prevention, if the spiral of violence is often only opened by retaliation and the vicious circle is not broken as a result (p. 24), which Thomas Galli’s example stories illustrate in all their poignancy and pain.
The prison governor knows the answer, which is not a patent remedy, and he knows that it can and will be resented. Thomas Galli is not questioning the necessity of resocialisation. Without resocialisation it is not possible, no matter how unpromising the corresponding measures may be, unless humane principles are abandoned. (As in the case of Nazi criminals, for example, who Fritz Bauer felt needed resocialisation despite their low chances of success).
The stories that Thomas Galli tells reveal the causes of the spiral of violence. They expose the roots which, if they could be uprooted and removed, would immediately put an end to the system of injustice.
Why don’t we do it, why can’t we seem to help, why is it so difficult to remember? Thomas Galli’s stories provide an answer that few people can or want to hear, because it doesn’t start with the offenders, but with each individual, with society and ourselves. The answer starts where power and self-deception begin, in childhood and adolescence. This is difficult to bear, after all we are all (partly) responsible for it. But this book is all the more courageous for being a profound warning against false self-righteousness.