What are you seeing in a movie? I don’t think you are seeing a movie, you become part of it, you
become identified with some character in it. When he falls in love, you fall in love; when he kisses
his girlfriend, you are kissing his girlfriend. This is sheer nonsense, but you cannot expect anything
more from the humanity that you have got around.
So those spectators in Great Britain, what were they doing? They were so involved in watching
that there were pickpockets all around, cutting their pockets. It was brought to the notice of the
parliament: ”What kind of lesson are you teaching, because exactly there, where the crowd has
gathered to learn the lesson, there are people who are cutting others’ pockets.” And it is easy
because those people are so involved they have completely forgotten themselves and their pockets.
And that man is being beaten almost to death, and those pickpockets ....
Your whole reasoning is wrong. You cannot teach by punishment.
That’s what your jurists, legal experts, politicians, have been saying down the ages: ”If we don’t
punish people, then how are we going to teach them? Then everybody will start committing crime,
so we have to go on punishing so people remain afraid.”
They think that fear is the only way to teach – and fear is not the way to teach them at all. What
punishment teaches is, it makes people acquainted with fear, so the original shock is no longer
there. They know what can happen: ”At the most you can beat me. And if one person can take it, I
can also take it. And out of a hundred thieves you can catch only one or two persons.”
Now, if you are not ready even to take that much risk – ninety-eight percent success, two percent
failure – then what kind of man are you?
Nobody learns from any punishment. The very person who is being punished, he also does not learn
what you want him to learn. Yes, he learns something else: he learns how to become a thick-skin.
Once a person goes into prison, prison becomes his home, because there he finds people of a like
mind. There he finds his real society. Outside he was a foreigner; there he is in his own world.
They all understand the same language, and there are experts. You may be just an amateur, an
apprentice; it may be your first term.
I have heard: one man enters a prison; in the dark cell he sees an old man, resting. The old man
asks him, ”For how long are you going to be here?”
He says, ”For ten years.”
The old man says, ”Then you can stay close to the door. Just ten years! You seem to be new. I am
going to be here for fifty years. You just remain close to the door. Soon the years will be gone and
you will be out.”
But when you are with experts for ten years, of course you learn all their techniques, strategies,
methods, their experience. You will find your jail almost a certain kind of university where crime
is taught at government expense. You will find professors of crime, deans of the crime faculty,
vice-chancellors, chancellors – all kinds of people who have done every kind of crime that you can
imagine; certainly the newcomer starts learning. And one thing is in the air of every prison .... I have
been to many prisons.
It happened that in Madhya Pradesh when I was a professor there, one old man, Mangaldas
Pakvasa, was governor of Madhya Pradesh. He was very much interested in me, so much so
that although I went on telling him, ”Kaka” – he was known to everybody as kaka, uncle – ”I don’t
believe in God,” he said, ”Whether you believe it or not, just when you reach, tell God something
for this Mangaldas Pakvasa, because I am an old sinner. Being in politics, you know, I have done
everything that I should not have done. Now I am getting old.”
”But,” I said, ”you will be dying first, Kaka. Can’t you see a simple thing: you will be reaching first.
So if you want, you can help me, but I cannot help you; I am not going that early!”
”But,” he said, ”I suspect that I will never be going to heaven. Governors and prime ministers and
presidents – I don’t think any of them are going there. This whole company is going to hell!”
He was a very simple and good man. Because he was governor, I had immense dimensions open
for me. I asked him, ”You give me a general permission: if I want to visit any jail I should be allowed.”
He said, ”That is no problem.” And the biggest jail was in Jabalpur itself; it was the central jail of
the whole state – three thousand diehard criminals. So I used to go almost every Sunday; while he
remained governor I continued to go there. And what I saw – this was the climate, and in other jails
also. I went in smaller jails also but the climate was essentially the same.
The climate was that it is not crime that brings you to jail, it is being caught, so if you know right
ways to do wrong things .... It is not a question of doing right things; the question is doing wrong
things in a right way. And every prisoner learns the right way of doing wrong things in jail. In fact I
have talked with prisoners and they said, ”We are eager to get out.”
I said, ”For what?”
They said, ”You are a friend, and we don’t hide anything from you: we want to get out as soon as
possible because we have learned so much, we want to practice. Just the practicals were missing,
it was all theoretical knowledge. For practicals you need the society.”
Once a person becomes a jailbird, then nowhere will he find himself at ease; sooner or later he will
be coming back to jail. And slowly slowly jail becomes his alternative society.
It is more comfortable, he feels more at home; nobody looks down on him, nobody thinks that he is
superior and you are inferior. Everybody is a criminal. Nobody is a priest and nobody is a sage and
nobody is a holy man: all are poor human beings with all the weaknesses and frailties.
Outside he finds that he is rejected, abandoned.
In my town there was a permanent jail-goer. He was a very beautiful man; his name was Barkat
Mian. He was a Mohammedan. Mian is a Mohammedan respectful word exactly like ”sir” or the
Indian, Hindu, ji. If you simply say, ”Gandhi” it will not look respectful; you have to say ”Gandhiji.” For
Mohammedans mian is simply equivalent to ji or ”sir”.
It was strange that Barkat Mian was a permanent jail-goer, almost nine months in jail, three months
outside; and in those three months also, every week he had to go to report to the police station to
show that everything was okay and he was here.
But I had a great friendship with that man. My family was very angry; they said, ”Why do you keep
company with Barkat?” My family used to say to me, ”A man is known by his company.”
I said, ”I understand you: that means Barkat will be known by me, and to give a man a little
respectability is not anything bad.”
They said, ”When will you see things in the right way?”
I said, ”I am seeing it exactly the right way. Rather than Barkat degrading me, I am upgrading Barkat.
You think his evil is more powerful than my goodness? You don’t trust my integrity; you trust Barkat’s
integrity.” I said, ”Whatever your opinion, I trust myself. Barkat cannot do any harm to me. If any
harm is going to be done it will be done to Barkat by me.”
He was really a beautiful man, nice, and he used to tell me, ”You should not be around me. If you
want to meet me and talk to me, we can manage to meet somewhere outside the town, by the
riverbank.”
He himself lived near the Mohammedan cemetery where nobody goes unless one dies: one goes
only once. He was not allowed to live in the town. In the town nobody was ready to give him a house
to rent. Whatsoever rent he was ready to pay, nobody was ready to take it, nobody was going to
take him in.
There on the Mohammedan cemetery was a house – nothing but a shelter for the rainy season,
summer. People die in all kinds of climates, not bothering about anybody – that it is raining and they
could wait a little, there is no hurry. But people are people: if they can harass you, they will harass
you. They will die when it is raining dogs and cats, or is it cats and dogs? But it makes no difference;
when it is raining who is first and who is second does not matter.
So that shelter was just for certain times; people could sit there. But in a small place people don’t
die every day, only once in a while; so Barkat used to live in that shelter. He said, ”You always are
welcome in my house” – that shelter he used to call his house. And of course there was no fear
because nobody could steal anything from Barkat. Nobody could even dare to go in the night near
Barkat Mian because he was a dangerous man.
Just by the side of my father’s store was a big shop, a kind of general store, having all kinds of things.
He stole from that. One night he told me, ”Tonight I am coming to Mody’s shop” – that was the name
of the shop. And he came and he did a good job: he took out all the ornaments and everything, and
managed to escape but finally was caught. Not that day – after two months, in another robbery he
was caught, and there it was found that one watch he was wearing was from Mody’s store.
So it was worked out and he was forced to confess from where the watch had come to him. And
he confessed that it was from Mody’s store because that was the only store in the town that had
watches to sell. From where else could it come? Everybody’s watch came from Mody’s store!
But other things were also found in his home, in that shelter where he used to keep his suitcase and
things; and a few things he had sold – so he was sentenced to six months. After six months – this
I call a real gentleman – after six months, when he was released from the jail .... The jail was in a
district which was nearabout sixty miles away. He came in a taxi, stopped the taxi before Mody’s
store and went in.
Mody stood up, afraid that now there was going to be trouble; this man has been released. Barkat
said, ”Pay the taxi – I don’t have any money. And you know for six months you have kept me
unemployed, so, some money for my pocket.”
I was just present there because Mody’s store was just next to my father’s shop. Mody had to pay
the taxi and give Barkat a few rupees. He told Barkat, ”Don’t come every day,” and Barkat said, ”Till
I manage something I will have to come, because six months you kept me unemployed. You are
responsible.”
He continued to come every day, and I said to Mody, ”Modyji, you go on giving money to Barkat.”
He said, ”What to do? He can cut my throat – he is a dangerous man! You don’t see: when he
comes inside the shop, he shows me a knife. Nobody sees it from the outside because of so many
things in the shop. With one hand he asks for the money, with the other hand he shows me a knife,
so everybody thinks I am giving the money happily. You think I am giving it happily?”
I said, ”No, I know about the knife because Barkat Mian is my friend and he tells me everything.”
I asked Barkat, ”How did you become a thief?”
He said, ”The first time I was jailed I was absolutely innocent, but I was poor, I could not hire an
advocate; and the people who wanted me to be forced into jail had some vested interest.
”My father and mother died when I was very young, fourteen or fifteen, and my other relatives wanted
to capture the whole family’s possessions – house, land – and they wanted to remove me out of their
way. They simply managed it. They put something into my bag in my house. And there was no way
to get out of it: the thing was found in my bag, and I was sent to jail.
”When I came back, my land was gone, my house was sold, my relatives had managed to disperse
everything and distribute everything. I was just on the streets.
”So, first, I was innocent when I went in, but when I came out I was not innocent, because I had come
with a certain graduation. I told everybody in jail what had happened to me – I was only seventeen.
They said ‘Don’t be worried, these nine months will be soon finished, but in nine months we will also
give you the finishing touches. And you will be able to take revenge on everybody.’
”And I started to take revenge on all the relatives – this was simply tit for tat. They had forced me to
become a thief, and I proved that, okay, now I am a thief. I destroyed this whole gang of my relatives;
I stole everything that they had. But by and by I became more and more involved.
”You can have ten cases in which you are saved but in the eleventh you are caught. As you grow
older and more efficient, you are caught less. But now there is no problem; in fact imprisonment
proves a relaxing place, a holiday from work and worry and all kinds of things.
”A few months in jail are good for health – a disciplined life: an exact time to get up, to go to work,
an exact time to go to sleep. Just enough food to keep you alive; more than that makes you sick.”
He said, ”I am never sick in jail, unless I pretend and want to be in hospital to escape; otherwise I
am never sick. Outside I fall sick, but never inside. And outside is a foreign world and everybody is
superior and I am inferior. Only in jail I feel a freedom.”
Strange! When he said that, I said, ”You say in jail you feel freedom?”
He said, ”Yes, only in jail I feel freedom.”
What kind of society is this, in which people in jail feel freedom, and outside they feel imprisoned?
And this is almost the story of every criminal. A small thing in the beginning – maybe he was hungry,
maybe he was cold, needed a blanket and just stole a blanket – small necessities which should be
fulfilled: otherwise the society should not produce these people. Nobody asks it to produce them.
On the one hand you go on producing people more and more and more, and there are not enough
things for them, neither food nor clothes nor shelter. Then what do you want? You are putting people
in a situation where they are bound to become criminals.
The world population has to be cut to one third – if you want crime to disappear.
But nobody wants crime to disappear because the disappearance of crime means the
disappearance of your judges, of your advocates, of your law experts, of your parliaments, of your
policemen, of your jailers. It will create a big unemployment problem; nobody wants anything to
change for the better.
Everybody says things should change for the better, but everybody goes on making things worse,
because the worse things are, the more people are employed. The worse things are, the more
chances you have to feel good. Criminals are needed for you to feel that you are such a moral,
respectable person.
Sinners are needed for saints to feel that they are saints. Without sinners, who will be the saint?
If the whole society consisted of good people, do you think you will remember Jesus Christ for two
thousand years? For what? It is the criminal society that remembers Jesus Christ for two thousand
years.
It is a simple thing to understand. Why do you remember Gautam Buddha? If there were millions
of buddhas, awakened people in the world ... what speciality did Gautam Buddha have? He would
have been lost in the crowd. But twenty-five centuries have passed and he stands like a pillar, a
mountain peak far above you and your heads.
In fact Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, are not giants – you are pygmies.
And every giant has an investment in your remaining a pygmy; otherwise he won’t be a giant.
This is a great conspiracy.
I am against this whole conspiracy. I am neither a giant nor a pygmy; I have no vested interest at all.
I am just myself.
I don’t compare myself with anybody, so nobody is lower than me and nobody is higher than me.
Because of this simple fact I can see directly; there is no vested interest creating diversions to my
vision. And this is my immediate response to the question: the death penalty is simply a proof that
man still needs to be civilized, needs to be cultured, needs to know human values.
In this world nobody is a criminal, never has been. Yes, there are people ... they need compassion,
not imprisonment, not punishment. All prisons should be transformed into psychological nursing
homes.
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