Such detachment is granted to the outsider, but he is too far removed to make any statements of real value.
Only the man inside knows. His judgments may not be objective; his evaluations may be out of proportion.
This is inevitable. An attempt must be made to avoid any personal bias, and that is the real difficulty of a book of this kind.
At times it will be necessary to have the courage to tell of very intimate experiences.
I had intended to write this book anonymously, using my prison number only.
But when the manuscript was completed, I saw that as an anonymous publication it would lose half its value,
and that I must have the courage to state my convictions openly.
I therefore refrained from deleting any of the passages, in spite of an intense dislike of exhibitionism.
I shall leave it to others to distill the contents of this book into dry theories.
These might become a contribution to the psychology of prison life, which was investigated after the First World War,
and which acquainted us with the syndrome of “barbed wire sickness.”
We are indebted to the Second World War for enriching our knowledge of the “psychopathology of the masses”
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