The infrastructure of London serves to elevate and hide. It elevates the power of “the law,” the Royal Courts of Justice obtrusive and opulent as you walk along the streets of Holborn. Written into the stone of this building, home of the highest court in England, is the promise to “defend the children of the poor and punish the wrongdoer.” By intertwining the punishment of “the wrongdoer” with the defense of the most vulnerable, the stone asserts the separation of these two icons, casting people into a binary of vulnerability or moral corruption. By defining the people the law is punishing as “wrongdoers,” rather than someone who has committed a “wrongdoing,” the stone inscription asserts that one side of this binary is defined by their “punishable act.” It sensationalizes the idea of the “wrongdoer” and, perhaps most sinisterly, I find there to be an underlying assertion that we are not all capable of being “wrongdoers.” These ideas are elevated and threaded throughout the city with sounds and visuals. I hear police sirens, the clopping of hooves, and see the shadow of police. I find myself thinking about those who have been labeled as “wrongdoers,” in both the Dickensian time and in our contemporary moment. As I walk through Soho Square, all I find myself remembering is the phrase by Bryan Stevenson, the idea that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

Then there is the hidden infrastructure. We move from one side of the street with noise and life, turning the corner to where people were incarcerated in Dickens’s time. Life becomes silence, dark brick eats the sun rather than reflects it, and walls close in rather than enclose. The alley that previously held a prison seems to hide the city from the alley. I think about all the people who were hidden here, reflecting on the idea that Tellson’s, an allegory for Britain, “had taken so many lives, that if the heads laid low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor had” (Dickens 57). If the law did not hide people away within its infrastructure, would we feel comfortable looking? Who is qualified to decide who deserves light and who doesn’t? Where do you place a culture within your heart when it shoves you on the other side of the dark brick wall?

Yet, as I pass through the alley and return to the street, I remember that I find the city beautiful. I found the Royal Courts of Justice beautiful, too. However, I find people the most beautiful. I feel sad for all those that had the city stolen from them. A siren passes, and I cross the street.

I think it is important to note that I do not find “the crime” a person commits to be relevant to my observations of police states. Within an infrastructure that elevates and hides, I also see that “the wrongdoer” is simultaneously hidden and elevated. Those such as Jack the Ripper are elevated, sensationalized, and meant to show us the “deep necessity of prisons.” There are tours throughout London of old prisons and the streets where Jack the Ripper murdered women. These stories being elevated turns a profit. However, the acknowledgment that those whom the law labels “wrongdoers” are disproportionately Black people, brown people, and “the children of the poor” is hidden. It ignores the idea that “crime” does not exist in a vacuum, that colonization is deemed “lawful” and therefore moral, but a colonized people merely existing, makes them “nearly twice as likely as white people to die either during or immediately after contact with police” (Fitzpatrick). We must be in a constant process of elevating our sense of humanity—of remembering who creates the law, who wields the law, and whom the law hurts.

Walking through the streets of London, I do not find it naive to believe in empathy nor to see “the wrongdoer” as a construct rather than a person. I am operating from a different vantage point. I am thinking of the bishop in Les Mis, who gives mercy and understanding freely and without hesitation. I think of Javert, who elevates the law above all and hides his humanity below. I think of Dickens, who worked as a child laborer to survive. I think of the trial of Charles Darnay and the sensationalized need for prosecution. I do not see myself as incapable of being a “wrongdoer,” or being deemed “a wrongdoer” by the state. Although there is complexity in empathy, and often discomfort in what it asks of us, I think it is far more encompassing than the idea that “we must have police and prisons.”

As I walked through Russel Square Park, I realized that although I could point any passerby in the direction of the old Dickensian prisons, The Royal Courts of Justice, or draw a police car from memory, I did not know where current prisons were in London. In my observation of what was elevated, I saw the gaping hole of the hidden. Reading the guidebook on UK prison and probation, “DoingTime,” I learned there are three major prisons within the city of London: Wormwood Scrubs, Isis, and Wandsworth. For those incarcerated, the journey to the prisons is “slow, noisy, and uncomfortable,” and upon arrival, people are subjected to a search that is described as “humiliating and intrusive.” Upon arrival into their cells, those incarcerated find that “most [cells] are filthy when you arrive as the turnover of prisoners is rapid and nobody has time to clean their cell when they are moved out […] the cells have a loo but there is little or no privacy and ventilation is poor or non-existent” (DoingTime). I read this sitting in Russel Square Park among tourists and dogs and locals rolling cigarettes. I read this an hour after reading A Tale of Two Cities. I think, too often, the idea of “progress” falls into the category of the elevated, and reality into the hidden.

When a self-declared “impartial law” locks away person after person at an alarming rate, we have to ask ourselves what problems prisons are truly solving. For the remainder of my journey, I will be elevating the wise words of Angela Davis within my observations: “Prisons do not disappear social problems; they disappear human beings.”

Sources:

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Penguin Classics, 2012.

Fitzpatrick, Flora. “Guide: Police Brutality in the UK.” A News Education, 22 Dec. 2021, www.anewseducation.com/post/police-brutality-in- the-uk.

DoingTime. DoingTime, a Guide to Prison and Probation, 31 Jan. 2014, doingtime.co.uk/how-prisons-work/the-first-weeks-in-custody/transport-to-the-prison/.