Criminal defense law and tattoos intersect at several points—many of my clients have tattoos; I have my fair share of tattoos (clients are often surprised when I meet them at the jail or office on the weekend and am wearing a t-shirt and they see tattoos all over my left arm); and police or gang experts frequently testify in court about the Accused’s tattoos as proof of his gang affiliation. In fact, on a recent trip to look at evidence at the City of Denton Police Department, I saw a poster that acted as a “key” for identifying tattoos that indicated gang affiliation.
But tattoos and criminal defense law have intersected in literature as well. One of my favorite short stories deals with exactly this connection.
Franz Kafka, noted 20th century German author (and name-sake of the expression for something truly surreal as “Kafka-esque”), is easily one of my favorite fiction writers. While Kafka is most widely known for his work “Die Verwandlung” (“The Transformation” or “The Metamorphosis”), Kafka’s best work has to be “In der strafkolonie” (“In the Penal Colony”).
“In the Penal Colony” describes a European dignitary’s (only named by Kafka as “The Explorer”) visit to a small, remote penal colony, where prisoners live, separated from the general population. While there, the Explorer encounters The Officer (Kafka’s not so big on names in this one…), who explains a terrifying machine to the Explorer—an instrument used by the government of the penal colony (the Commandment) to inflict capital punishment on the Condemned person. (I will refer to the machine as a “the Harrow,” but, for the sake of literary accuracy, only the needle configuration component of the machine is actually referred to as “the Harrow.”)
Justice at the penal colony is swift. The Condemned is always instantly found guilty, so the Harrow is a forgone conclusion. The Officer explains: “[t]he basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always proven beyond a doubt.”
The Harrows is described by Kafka as an elegant sort of tattooing machine, which via a series of needles tattoos/inscribes the law or commandment broken by the condemned person on his back. The exact text tattooed on the Condemned is called the “sentence” of the Condemned. The Condemned is given no opportunity to defend himself against what he is accused of, and the exact transgression (his “sentence”) is never made known to the Condemned. Why not? The Officer explains that telling the Condemned what he has done is pointless: “[h]e will learn it on his body.”
What types of transgressions demand execution by the Harrow? The Officer explains what this particular Condemned man has done: “[t]his morning, a captain laid a charge to this man [the Condemned], who is assigned to him as a servant and who sleeps before his door, and had been sleeping on duty. For his duty is to stand up every time the clock strikes the hour and salute in front of the captain’s door…Yesterday night…the captain opened his door on the stroke of two and found [the Condemned] curled up asleep. The captain came to me an hour ago. I wrote up his statement and after that the sentence.” The Condemned is to have “Honor Your Superiors” as his sentence.
The Harrow has fallen into disrepair, and malfunctions every now and again. Ideally, it works by burying the needles of the Harrow into the prisoner’s back deeper and deeper, tattooing the sentence of the Condemned into his flesh, until he dies some 12 hours later. The Officer explains that the tattooing process forces the Condemned to understand his crime, producing a fleeting, epiphanic moment wherein the prisoner understands the weight of his transgression upon society, and then dies. The Condemned is thus rehabilitated, and subsequently murdered.
I won’t spoil the ending of the story for you—it’s short (less than 30 pages or so) and can be found for free on-line (just search for “In the Penal Colony full text” in Google); it is definitely worth the read over the Halloween weekend.
Happy Halloween, have fun, be safe, and remember your rights if you run into the police.