THE GREAT PENAL EXPERIMENTS.

Prison Life, like life in all other circumstances, has its extremes; and these have been pushed to the farthest verge of contrast by the ‘great experiments’ that have lately been essayed. There is an aristocracy of prisoners, and a commonality of prisoners; there are palace prisons, and kennel prisons in which it would be cruelty to confine refractory dogs. We have hardened criminals put into training in Model Prisons for pattern penitence, and novices in crime thrust into dens with the most depraved felons; so as to bring them down in morals to the lowest practicable level. The study of some of these extremes is instructive. It shows what results have been produced by the ‘great experiments’ which have been tried; either how much reform they have effected; or how many misdemeanants they are likely to add to the already over-populated dangerous class. For the sake of impartiality we shall in each instance offer no description of our own; but we intend to cite what has already been in print.

A graphic but eccentric pen has supplied a vivid description of the palace order of gaols. “Some months ago,” says Mr. Carlyle, in a recent pamphlet, “some friends took me with them to see one of the London Prisons; a Prison of the exemplary or model kind. An immense circuit of buildings; cut out, girt with a high ring wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a dim and crowded one. Gateway as to a fortified place; then a spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases, passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all round. It lodges some Thousand or Twelve-hundred prisoners, besides the officers of the establishment. Surely one of the most perfect buildings, within the compass of London. We looked at the apartments, sleeping-cells, dining-rooms, working-rooms, general courts or special and private; excellent all, the ne-plus-ultra of human care and ingenuity; in my life I never saw so clean a building; probably no Duke in England lives in a mansion 251of such perfect and thorough cleanness. The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food, in their respective cooking-places, we tasted; found them of excellence superlative. The prisoners sat at work, light work, picking oakum and the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs, of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation; silent, or at least conversing only by secret signs; others were out, taking their hour of promenade in clean flagged courts; methodic composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial wholesome comfort, reigned everywhere supreme.”

This is the great model experiment. We can easily reverse the picture. It is but a short walk from Pentonville to Smithfield—scarcely two miles—yet, in the prison world, the two places are antipodes. Here, within the hallowed precincts of the City, stands Giltspur Street Compter, upon the state of which we produce another witness. Mr. Dixon, in his work on London Prisons, testifies that in this jail the prisoners “sleep in small cells, little more than half the size of the model cell at Pentonville, which is calculated (on the supposition that the cell is to be ventilated on the best plan which science can suggest, regardless of cost) to be just large enough for one inmate. The cell in Giltspur Street Compter is little more than half the size, and is either not ventilated at all, or is ventilated very imperfectly. I have measured it, and know exactly the quantity of air which it will hold, and have no doubt but that it contains less than any human being ought to breathe in, in the course of a night. Well, in this cell, in which there is hardly room for them to lie down, I have seen five persons locked up, at four o’clock in the day, to be there confined, in darkness, in idleness, to pass all those hours, to do all the offices of nature, not merely in each other’s presence, but crushed by the narrowness of their den into a state of filthy contact which brute beasts would have resisted to the last gasp of life! Think of these five wretched beings—men with souls, and gifted with human reason—condemned, day by day, to pass in this unutterably loathsome manner two-thirds of their time! Can we wonder if these men come out of prison, after three or four months of such treatment, prepared to commit the most revolting crimes? Could five of the purest men in the world live together in such a manner without losing every attribute of good which had once belonged to them? He would be a rash man who would dare to answer—‘Yes.’ Take another fact from Newgate. In any of the female wards may be seen, a week before the Sessions, a collection of persons of every shade of guilt, and some who are innocent. I remember one case particularly. A servant girl, of about sixteen, a fresh-looking healthy creature, recently up from the country, was charged by her mistress for stealing a brooch. She was in the same room—lived all day, slept all night—with the most abandoned of her sex. They were left alone; they had no work to do; no books—except a few tracts for which they had no taste—to read. The whole day was spent, as is usual in such prisons, in telling stories—the gross and guilty stories of their own lives. There is no form of wickedness, no aspect of vice, with which the poor creature’s mind would not be compelled to grow familiar in the few weeks she passed in Newgate awaiting trial. When the day came, the evidence against her was found to be the lamest in the world, and she was at once acquitted. That she entered Newgate innocent I have no doubt; but who shall answer for the state in which she left it?”

Let us not wrong the City in supposing it singular in promoting these loathsome prison scenes. A hundred passages, in nearly as many blue books, are ready for quotation, to show how some of the ‘great experiments’ in not a few of the National prisons have turned out. One, however, will do. Here is a sentence or two from the Government’s own report of the state of one of its own hulks at Woolwich—the same Government which has been so good as to dispense upwards of 90,000l. of the public money in building the Pentonville Model. We cannot quote it entire, by reason of some of the passages being too revolting for reproduction in these pages:—

“In the hospital ship, the “Unité,” the great majority of the patients were infested with vermin, and their persons in many instances, particularly their feet, begrimed with dirt. No regular supply of body linen had been issued; so much so, that many men had been five weeks without a change; and all record had been lost of the time when the blankets had been washed; and the number of sheets was so insufficient, that the expedient had to be resorted to of only a single sheet at a time to save appearances. Neither towels nor combs were provided for the prisoners’ use. * * * On the admission of new cases into the hospital, patients were directed to leave their beds and go into hammocks, and the new cases were turned into the vacated beds, without changing the sheets.”

Is anything more shocking than the Compter, Newgate, and the Unité to be conceived? Do travellers tell us of anything worse in Russia, or China, or Old Tartary? “O! yes; there is Austria and its life-punishments in Spielberg,” some one may suggest, “surely there is no London parallel for that.” But Mr. Dixon answers there is:—in the Millbank Penitentiary. ‘The dark cells,’ he says, ‘are fearful places, and sometimes melancholy mistakes are made in committing persons to them. You descend about twenty steps from the ground-floor into a very dark passage leading into a corridor, on one side of which the cells—small, dark, ill-ventilated, and doubly barred—are ranged. No glimpse of day ever comes into this fearful place. The offender is locked up for three days, and fed on bread and water only. There is only 252a board to sleep on; and the only furniture of the cell is a water-closet. On a former visit to Millbank, some months ago, I was told there was a person in one of these cells. “He is touched, poor fellow!” said the warden, “in his intellects.” But his madness was very mild. He wished to fraternise with the other prisoners; declared that all mankind are brethren; sang hymns when told to be silent; and when reprimanded for taking these unwarranted liberties, declared that he was the “governor.” They said he pretended to be mad; which, seeing that his vagaries subjected him to continual punishments, and procured him no advantages, was very likely! They put him into darkness to enlighten his understanding; and alone, to teach him how unbrotherly men are. Poor wretch! He was frightened with his solitude, and howled fearfully. I shall never forget his wail as we passed the door of his horrid dungeon. The tones were quite unearthly, and caused an involuntary shudder. On hearing footsteps, he evidently thought they were coming to release him. While we remained in the corridor, he did not cease to shout and implore most lamentably for freedom: when he heard us retreating, his voice rose into a yell; and when the fall of the heavy bolts told him that we were gone, he gave a shriek of horror, agony, and despair, which ran through the pentagon, and can never be forgotten. God grant that I may never hear such sounds again! On coming again, after three or four months’ absence, to this part of the prison, the inquiry naturally arose, “What has become of the man who pretended to be mad?” The answer was, “Oh, he went mad, and was sent to Bedlam!”’

What happens at Pentonville, and what takes place at Millbank, is done under the same eye, under the same legislative supervision. The two “great experiments” of iron and feather-bed prison reform are worked out by the same power. The despots of Russia, Austria, and China, are at least consistent. They have not carried on opposite systems—one of extreme severity, and another of superlative ‘coddling.’ In no other country but this does Justice—blind as she is—administer cocoa and condign misery to the same degree of crime with the same hand.

We have thrown these facts together, merely to awaken attention to them. We purposely abstain from suggestive comment. We know that the subject of reformatory punishment is fraught with difficulties, to conquer which all the “great experiments” have been tried. But they have only been “great” because of their great expense and their great failure; and when the failure is incontestable—proved beyond doubt by the direst results,—should they not be abandoned, and something else tried, instead of being made an absolute matter of faith, and a test to which certain county magistrates, whom we could name, bring every man who is unhappy enough to be within their power? The cause of it is plainly and constantly presented at the bar of every Police Court and in the dock of every Sessions House. It has resulted from an utter misapprehension of means to end, and a lofty disregard of the good old adage, “prevention is better than cure.” Although it has been daily observed that ignorance—moral more than intellectual—ignorance has been the forerunner of all juvenile crime, we have never tried any very great experiment upon that. On the contrary, we spend hundreds of thousands every year to effect the manifest impossibility of re-forming what has never been formed. We have tried every shade of system but the right. Ingenuity has been on the rack to invent every sort of reformatory, from the iron rule of Millbank, to the affectionate fattening at Pentonville—except one, and that happens to be the right one. Punishment has occupied all our thoughts,—training, none. We condemn young criminals for not knowing certain moralities which we have not taught them, and—by herding them with accomplished professors of dishonesty in transit jails—punish them for immoralities which have been there taught them. Instances of this can be adduced in so large a proportion as to amount to a rule; to which the appearance of instructed juvenile criminals at the tribunals is the exception. Two or three glaring cases occurred only the past month. We select one as reported in the “Globe” newspaper of Tuesday, May 7:—

‘Bow-Street Police-Court.—This day, two little children, whose heads hardly reached the top of the dock, were placed at the bar before Mr. Jardine, charged with stealing a loaf. Their very appearance told the want they were in. The housekeeper to Mr. Mims, baker, Drury Lane, deposed, that they, about eight o’clock last evening, went into the shop and asked for a quartern loaf, and while her back was turned to get it for them, they stole a half quartern loaf, value 2½d., which was lying on the counter, and made off with it. Police constable, F 14, deposed, that he was on duty in Drury Lane, and seeing them quarrelling over the loaf, he asked them where they had got it. One of them answered, they had stolen it. After ascertaining how they came by it, he took them into custody. In defence, the prisoners said they were starving. Mr. Jardine sentenced them both to be once whipped in the House of Correction.’

These children were without means, friends, or any sort of instruction. They were whipped then for their ignorance and want, for both which they are not responsible. After whipping and a few imprisonments they will doubtless be boarded and instructed by fellow prisoners into finished thieves. The authorities tell us, that five-eighths of the juvenile criminals—and a few become professional after the age of twenty—who are received into jails, have not received one spark of moral or intellectual training!

These, and a thousand other facts too obvious 253for the common sense of our readers to be troubled with, induce us to recommend one other ‘great experiment’ which has never yet been tried. It has the advantage of being a preventive as well as a cure—it is—compared with all the penal systems now in practice—immeasurably safer, more humane, and incalculably cheaper. The ‘great experiment’ we propose, is National Education.