The Bet, (1889) by Anton Chekhov, uses a philosophical argument about exploitation, greed, overconfidence, fear, and failure in a debate about whether a modern society should use the death penalty or life imprisonment as a punishment.
Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?
While the plot explores the long-term effects of incarceration, The Bet also probes into how people treat each other and see themselves.
A wager is proposed: How much isolation could a man take? Could a young man of modest means withstand 15 years of solitary confinement? If he could, a banker of ample means would award him $2 million.
For someone who’s never spent a day locked up, Chekhov’s bet may seem like something worth trying. However The Bet smartly gets around this by qualifying who gets locked up and the circumstances thereof:
…voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory. The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.
Angela Davis addresses how individuals think about prisons in her 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?
We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce. After all, no one wants to go to prison. Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own live.
Who in their right mind would want to subject themselves to 15 years of solitary confinement, like the young man in The Bet?
When imagining “solitary confinement” one generally pictures a person sitting in a darkened cell with no company. It is being utterly alone. It’s an existence where sensory deprivation is maximized. No light. No sound. No physical contact with another human being. It is a bleak existence.
Technically there is no such place in California prisons. But in reality sensory deprivation still exists in various levels. It’s a penalty that rule-breakers within the prison must pay.
The objective and result of prison as an institution is scrutinized by Michel Foucault in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (1977).
The general form of an apparatus intended to render individuals docile and useful, by means of precise work upon their bodies, indicated the prison institution, before the law ever defined it as the penalty ‘par excellent.’
The convict knows that when the bars are pulled shut, there’s no way out of the prison cell. It’s time to do the time. They enter a state in which they accept their punishment and become ready to repent their crimes.
The young man in The Bet comes to terms with himself, well before the 15 years of solitary confinement is over. “Fifteen years imprisonment taught him to sit still.”
During the same 15-year span, the banker loses his wealth through speculation. As the day the banker must honor his bet approaches, he becomes scared. Fear drives him to think of ways to avoid his fate, including murder.
The banker’s overconfidence and desire to play with the life of the young man shows that over time, anything can happen and a person’s perception of himself and society can change.
In the end, the argument about whether the death penalty is an appropriate form of punishment in civil society or whether long-term incarceration or solitary confinement serves a purpose is lost in The Bet, for the young man loses all interest in the material world while the banker is reduced to a pitiful and desperate individual.
So, what are prisons designed to accomplish?
In Class, Race & Hyper-incarceration in Revanchist America, (2010), Loïc Wacquant argues:
Instead of getting side-tracked into investigations of the crime-punishment (dis)connection, one must recognize that the prison is not a mere technical implement of government designed to stem offending, but a core state capacity devoted to managing dispossessed and dishonored populations.
Yet ironically, by the end of Chekhov’s story, it is the banker who becomes dispossessed and dishonored, not the man in solitary confinement.
The Bet is a short story that I encourage people to read and then give their feedback. If you’re incarcerated and want a copy of it, I’ll be happy to send one so we can hear what you think.
Juan’s Book Review