It’s a penalty that rule-breakers within the prison must pay. But in reality sensory deprivation still exists in various levels. Technically there is no such place in California prisons. No physical contact with another human being. It’s an existence where sensory deprivation is maximized. When imagining “solitary confinement” one generally pictures a person sitting in a darkened cell with no company. Who in their right mind would want to subject themselves to 15 years of solitary confinement, like the young man in The Bet? 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. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce. The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.Īngela Davis addresses how individuals think about prisons in her 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete? …voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory. However The Bet smartly gets around this by qualifying who gets locked up and the circumstances thereof: While the plot explores the long-term effects of incarceration, The Bet also probes into how people treat each other and see themselves.Ī 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.įor someone who’s never spent a day locked up, Chekhov’s bet may seem like something worth trying.
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? 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.Ĭapital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.
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