View from a Cage:
My Transformation from Convict to Crusader for Liberty
by Michael
Liebowitz
Paperback, $12.95,
Barns&Noble, 229 pages
Michael Liebowitz has not returned from Hell with empty
hands. He is the author, along with his prison pal Brent McCall, of Down the Rabbit Hole: How the
Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime.
Liebowitz tells me
that McCall is largely responsible for the text of the book, an analytical
review of the proper and improper uses of punishment.
I recall a
conversation with Liebowitz shortly after he was paroled concerning personal
suffering and writing. Late in life Fredrick Nietzsche said that he had refused
to read authors who had not suffered some personal tragedy. It was suffering
that produced many of the works of Feodor Dostoyevsky, an author, Nietzsche
thought, who was the best psychologist of his time.
Liebowitz (very
excited): “I love
Dostoyevsky.”
He had in mind in
particular The House of the Dead,
Dostoyevsky’s cleverly concealed account of his own ordeal at the hands of
justice.
Having been
sentenced to death by Czar Nicholas for crimes against the state – Dostoyevsky
had procured a printing press used by a group of anarchists to peddle
anti-Czarist tracts – he and others were blindfolded and set against a wall to
be shot. At the last moment, an envoy from the Czar raced through the courtyard
with a death reprieve, and Dostoyevsky was sent to a labor camp for four years
followed by seven years of exile. The last thing he saw before being blindfolded
was the blazing cross on a church, alight with the blazing, world-affirming
sun, set against an unearthly blue sky. In these seconds, Dostoyevsky’s soul
was awakened and reborn.
Liebowitz’s book is
titled View from a Cage: My Transformation from
Convict to Crusader for Liberty.
Well now, timeservers have much time on their hands, and Liebowitz has
made good use of his time in prison, but not all transformations are like those
of Dostoyevsky.
Under proper circumstances, prison may confer on the prisoner precious
but barely noticed gifts, the most important and life-altering of which is an
irreducible yearning for liberty – hence, Liebowitz’s personal crusade for
liberty which, though it includes freedom of movement, an absence of bars and
restraints, is much more than physical liberty. Some of our most restraining bars
are interior ones. And liberty, when all is said and done, is an interior
movement and a motion of the soul, a turning back and forward – the end-point
to a series of conscious choices.
The first 20 pages of View from a Cage is an examination of
Liebowitz’s tortuous childhood. Both his mother and father were drug addicts,
and both had spent some time behind bars. It is a considerable understatement
to say he was misled as a young child, although his treatment did not affect in
the least his affection towards his mother.
Addiction and criminality both rest uneasily in a distorted morality in
which human action arises from an abject surrender, willing or not, to a
surrounding, corrupting environment. Liebowitz’s personal development in prison
was a therapeutic counter-reaction to this abject surrender.
Books led the way out of his dark tunnel.
The next 20 pages of View from a Cage, readers will be surprised
to discover, is a courageously analytical discussion of a number of moral
philosophers – economic and
philosophical theorists really – that led, in Liebowitz’s case, from
intellectual enslavement to what Sam Adams once called “the animating contest
of freedom,” proving along the way that prison is not an insuperable bar to
liberty of thought.
Two books in particular,” Liebowitz writes in View from a Cage,
“had an especially powerful influence on my thinking. These were Free to
Choose by Milton Friedman, and The Law by Frederic Bastiat. I was
unaware of it at the time, but I would eventually learn that these two authors
represented two separate types of arguments for capitalism. Milton Friedman
argued on consequentialist grounds, while Frederic Bastiat put forth a ‘natural
rights,’ or moral argument”
Unlike Friedman, Liebowitz writes, “Bastiat didn’t spend any time
arguing about the deleterious effects of government intervention in the
economy. Instead, he proffered an uncompromising moral defense of individual
liberty. In my opinion it’s a defense which, if one accepts his premises, is
irrefutable. One of those premises is that in order to survive, humans must
think, work, create, and accumulate property. Another premise of his is that
what it is ethical for an individual to do is likewise ethical for a group to
do.” Here in Bastiat, one detects the moral imperatives of Immanuel Kant, who
left his imprint on many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers of the
18th century.
As Bastiat put it, “Try to imagine a regulation of labor imposed by
force that is not a violation of liberty; a transfer of wealth
imposed by force that is not a violation of property. If you cannot reconcile
these contradictions, then you must conclude that the law cannot organize labor
and industry without organizing injustice.”
There are differences tenderly explored by Liebowitz, but very little moral
distance between Friedman, Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises, the author of the
sometimes ponderous Human Action.
If the reader asks himself what has any of this to do with the prison
experience, he will be told by Liebowitz, “…the purpose of this book is to
demonstrate how the combination of my studying and my experiences has led me to
conclude that much of what the government does is ineffectual and immoral…”
It is a rare talent to be able to swallow the whole of Human Action
and spit out for readers sweet and concise digestible conflations of abstruse
ideas. Liebowitz does this without breaking a sweat.
After a long epistemological consideration of Ayn Rand’s objectivist
philosophy, Liebowitz, well-armed, moves on in View from a Cage to his manifold
experiences in prison, some of which are amusing.
Liebowitz tells us, “My entire life I thought I was acting in my best
interest, when in fact I was furthering my own demise.
“In other words, I could feel good about doing a bad thing, and bad
about doing a good thing. Thus, given that I had criminal values, I was
rewarded with immediate pleasure by living a criminal lifestyle. I was
incentivized to commit more criminal acts, and so on. This is one of the
reasons I now believe that the entire process of criminal reformation can be
reduced to teaching criminals to use reason to dispel their criminal values,
and to replace them with objective values.”
Values, some think, are the secular equivalent of morals. But there is
an important difference between the two.
Kant argued, like Rand, that the moral law is a truth approached by
reason. But Kant’s universe is large enough, and healthy enough, to contain
morality. It does not leave morality outside the door, a homeless orphan. Dostoyevsky’s
work-camp throbs with selfish values. If asked “What should I do?” both Kant and
Dostoyevsky would answer that the moral person should act rationally in accordance
with a universal moral law. The moral person, Kant thought, should act always
as if their every action was a universal law applying to all mankind. Adam Smith,
Dostoyevsky, Bastiat, Friedman and Mises did not elbow Kant out of their moral
universe.
Rand did, elevating in the process egotism to a moral virtue.
Liebowitz is certainly right that the prisoner – do we not carry our
cages with us all the days of our lives? – may think his way to freedom and
liberty. And he is living proof that the goal, with much effort, is attainable.
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