Orwell's loathing of the criminal law

I had begun to have an indescribable loathing of trhe whole machinery of so-called justice. Say what you will, our criminal law (for more humane, by the way, in India than in England) is a horrible thing. It needs very insensitive people to administer it. . . . I watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders. I never went into a jail without feeling (most visitors to jails feel the same) that my place was on the other side of the bars. I thought then—I think now, for that matter—that the worst criminal who ever walked is morally superior to a hanging judge.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 178 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)