Youth is Wasted on the Young

So said Oscar Wilde, but I’ll get to him in a minute. First Lindsay Lohan.

As of July 20th, prison is a better place. Lilo is in one, and while she won’t have much time to decorate, she’ll surely be wanting to campaign for better conditions in the clink.

For sure, it’s diverting to watch her cry as she registers the shock that you can only feel when you’ve spent ages denying that something inevitable is going to happen to you. Prison, moi? is the condensed message here. Yes, toi, comes the gleeful response, with just a pause for glum reflection that she’ll be out in no time.

Let us consider how another high-profile convict in fact brought improvements to a system that strikes her as unjust. What about Oscar Wilde, similarly denying that the law – in this case, truly unjust – was about to catch up with him? Here was someone whose life as an aesthete did little to prepare him for prison. John Betjeman’s poem about his arrest captures the clash well (if you’ll allow for the Dick Van Dyke cockney accent he gives the policeman):

“Mr. Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
He staggered—and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the plants on the staircase
And was helped to a hansom outside.

A similar shock, maybe, but will the comparison end there? In prison, Wilde showed real kindness to inmates and warders, who responded in the same spirit; and he wrote substantial letters to the press about corruption in prison, as well as the cruel treatment of young offenders. It was pity for those around him, he said afterwards, that stopped him from killing himself.

As we turn back to the thought of Lohan forced to spend time people who are nothing like her, perhaps there’s a hope that she might come to know them a little better – that the compassion she showed to street children in India might bubble up to the surface again. (Did you see this footage, btw? An Indian girl was intrigued by Lindsay’s tears, and looked round at the celebrity as though this was a puppy she could play with for a little while.)

Even if Lindsay Lohan does nothing for her fellows, can we still hope that the sheer fact of her being there will bring some thought on what prison does? When Paris Hilton went in for her stint three years ago, a lucid blogger called Steve Olson argued that Rev Al Sharpton had it the wrong way around in wishing that Paris Hilton were treated more like impoverished black prisoners; and that we should really be hoping that black prisoners could be treated more like Paris Hilton. If others are given the same chances to attend rehab, and to clean up, as part of their sentencing agreement, then her example could do some kind of good.