Article: Moll Flanders

The film "The Insider" begins with an interview of militant mullahs by a ‎journalist (played by Al Pacino) from "60 Minutes". The central theme of the film, of ‎course, is the tobacco industry. But for quite some time the viewer fails to see any ‎connection between the mullahs and the CEOs of the tobacco companies. ‎

Russell Crowe plays the reluctant whistleblower on the industry: for years, the ‎tobacco firms had known that cigarette was a "nicotine delivery device" and had even ‎augmented the efficiency of the device by means of chemicals. The CEOs had denied all ‎such knowledge to Congress. This was perjury. Only the personal bravery of a journalist ‎saves the whistleblower's life as well as his integrity and allows the great American ‎public to learn the sordid details of the tobacco industry. The connection with the mullahs ‎begins to be clear: only in America ("the land of the free") can such revelations occur. ‎

Incarceration rates
(prisoners per ‎‎100,000 population), 2002‎

United States ‎700‎
Russia ‎660‎
Belarus ‎550‎
South Africa ‎400‎
Thailand ‎340‎
England and ‎Wales ‎132‎
China ‎108 (2000)‎
Canada ‎102‎
Italy ‎97 (2000)‎
France ‎85‎
Japan ‎48 (2001)‎

[Table compiled from The Economist, ‎August 10th 2002, p. 27‎]

How did America come to be "the land of the free"? Because, basically, it is the ‎land of the unfree. As one author queried with passion: "What explains the paradox of a ‎country that prides itself as being the citadel of liberty, yet imprisons more people per ‎capita that any other nation...? Why does a country founded on equality imprison mostly ‎people of colour, showing a rate of incarceration of blacks that is more than eight times ‎that of whites?" ‎

‎"Don't be shocked when I say that I was in prison," Malcolm X liked to tell his ‎urban audiences. "You're still in prison. That's what America means: prison." He was not ‎wrong. From the very foundation of Virginia, the use of unfree labour has characterised ‎the economy of the colony as well as that of the mother country. The unfree labour was ‎originally white. ‎

On Columbus's first voyage he found the Taino Indians, as he called them, rolling ‎up dried leaves which they lit and inhaled. By the early seventeenth century England had ‎become addicted to tobacco. "Many a young nobleman's estate is altogether spent and ‎scattered to nothing in smoke and a man's estate runs out through his nose....". The weed ‎became as valuable as silver. ‎

The huge profits from tobacco required a huge supply of labour. Free labour ‎perished in those inhospitable conditions: by 1618, after eleven years of effort, only about ‎six hundred out of eighteen hundred colonists survived! The answer was unfree labour: ‎indentured servants, convicts, kidnapped children. By a fortuitous coincidence, even as ‎England's population soared and its 'criminal' and unemployed elements increased ‎furiously, a happy outlet was found in the colonies. These became, in effect, an overseas ‎extension of the domestic prison system. ‎

Daniel Defoe, in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, ‎describes the convict experience vividly. Moll is born in Newgate, where her mother is ‎under sentence of death for - theft! Her sentence is commuted to transportation to ‎Virginia, a humane measure adopted for commercial purposes. The abandoned child is ‎educated by a gentlewoman. Moll suffers romantic disillusionment when she is ruined at ‎the hands of a cynical male seducer; she becomes a whore and a thief, but finally she ‎gains the status of a gentlewoman through the spoils of a successful colonial plantation. ‎Moll's ageing mother-in-law (who turns out to be her mother!) confides that "many a ‎Newgate-bird becomes a great man, and we have...several justices of the peace, officers ‎of the trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have been burnt in the ‎hand." The old lady then removes her gloves to expose a scar. "You need not think such a ‎thing strange, daughter, for as I told you, some of the best men in this country are burnt in ‎the hand, and they are not ashamed to own it. There's Major_____,' says she, 'he was an ‎eminent pickpocket; there's Justice Ba_____r, was a shoplifter, and both of them were ‎burnt in the hand, and I could name you several such as they are." ‎

And we have the personal accounts of convicts like James Revel, who wrote ‎eloquent, if not polished, poetry. ‎

Examining like Horses, if we're sound,‎
What trade are you, my Lad, says one to me,‎
A Tin-man, Sir, that will not do, says he.‎
Some felt our hands and view'd our legs and feet,‎
And made us walk, to see we were compleat;‎
Some view'd our teeth, to see if they were good,‎
Or fit to chew our hard and homely Food.‎
If any like our look, our limbs, our trade,‎
The Captain then a good advantage made.‎

America, then, began as a giant penal colony, run for the profit of a few. (In fact, ‎Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the continent has been named, turned out to have a ‎criminal career; hence, Ralph Waldo Emerson's comment: 'Strange...that broad America ‎must wear the name of a thief.') John Keats was not, therefore, wide of the mark, when ‎he described America as the "dungeonor of my friends". ‎

So far, so white. Events acquire a darker complexion with the arrival, in 1619, of ‎a Dutch man-of-war that sold "twenty and odd Negroes" to Virginians. By the 1660s, the ‎states were enacting laws regarding slavery. Unlike indentured servants -who served for ‎six years - and convicts - seven to fourteen years - slaves served for life. "Every ‎Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over Negro slaves". So ‎wrote John Locke, champion of man's 'inalienable rights', into the Fundamental ‎Constitution of that state. Clearly, 'rights' were for Englishmen, and even then of a ‎certain class of Englishmen. Locke was, of course, a shareholder in the Royal African ‎Company, which made him a fortune through slavery, and he was no doubt careful to ‎distinguish between his financial and political interests. ‎

Thus, a large body of men and women, who had committed no offence save that ‎of being unarmed and defenseless, came to a fate worse than their white counterparts, ‎who were frequently felons and rogues. And, by that curious reversal of roles peculiar to ‎western civilisation, the innocent became the permanently criminal and their criminal ‎keepers continued to be permanently innocent. ‎