4 really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished (…) (...) if I realise what I have suffered, society should realise what it has inflicted on me; and (…) there should be no bitterness or hate on either side."9 11. These reflections, over a century ago, are today more contemporary than ever, and they are moved by recurrent abuse that continues to take place in prisons around the world. In prison, most often, contrary to what the social milieu seems to assume, one does not learn to distinguish between good and evil, but rather to live in growing intimacy with the evil of brutalization imposed by the indifference of that very social milieu. In an impressive testimony published in 1996 on the in loco inspections conducted in European jails, a former President of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment10 pointed out that "conditions of detention are still very backward in most European States. (...) No European country is blameless. Many have overcrowded jails, with inadequate sanitation (...). In other cases solitary confinement is applied far too frequently. (...) What is a prison? It is a place where one loses not only one's liberty, but one's dignity, too. (...) In other States it is the police stations that invite criticism (...). In other States the detention centres for immigrants or for asylum seekers are unhygienic and inhuman. (...) In some (only three perhaps) torture is embedded in police methods; in others the police tend sporadically to ill-treat and brutalize their detainees; in other States the prisons reveal aspects censurable as inhuman or degrading; elsewhere single instances of arbitrary behaviour by law enforcement officers can be discerned, or there are single cases of unacceptable treatment or conditions in prisons or hospitals. Despite the many different degrees of substandard treatment, not one European State fully conforms to the parameters of the best and most enlightened traditions and the more recent studies in criminology."11 12. This is an evil that knows no borders, and one that reflects the indifference and brutalization of the world around us. Today, the characters of Kafka and Camus are dispersed and forgotten in prisons of all continents. Many of the detainees are innocent, and those who are not, having been aggressors, become new victims. Their survival no longer has a spatial dimension, and the temporal one is what they may, perhaps, fathom in the hidden depths of their inner life. Anyhow, their life, in their relations with others, is no longer theirs. And they survive in closer and closer intimacy with evil and with the overwhelming brutalization imposed on them. The Law cannot remain indifferent to all this, to the world’s indifference, especially in the pathetically self-named “post-modern” societies. 13. Actually, abuse of detention and abuse against the detainees are no recent phenomenon. In his classical work on Of Crimes and Punishments (1764), Cesare Beccaria warned about the fact that “the punishment is often greater than the crime,” and the “refined ordeals” conceived by human intellect “seem to have been invented for tyranny rather than for justice.”12 As time passed, the need for 9 . Ibid., pp. 69-71. 10 . Of the European Council at Strassburg. 11 . A. Cassese, Inhuman States - Imprisonment, Detention and Torture in Europe Today, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996, pp. 125-126. 12 . C. Beccaria, De los Delitos y de las Penas (with comments by Voltaire), 11th. repr., Madrid, Alianza Ed., 2000 (repr.), p. 129, and see p. 149.