OUR PRISONS 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR PATERSON 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'THE METROPOLITAN POLICE/ 'JOHN GLYNN/ ETC, 
 
 LONDON 
 
 HUGH REES, LTD. 
 
 119, PALL MALL, S.W. 
 191 1 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 One Shilling; net. 
 

OUR PRISONS 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR PATERSON 
 
 U 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'THE METROPOLITAN POLICE,' 'JOHN GLYNN,' ETC. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 HUGH REES, LTD. 
 
 119, PALL MALL, S.W. 
 1911 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE contents of this volume were published in the form of 
 articles to the Times in June, 1910, and I have to thank the 
 proprietors of that paper for their courtesy in allowing me 
 to reprint them. 
 
 These sketches of prison life and administrations have been 
 taken from personal observation on the spot, and they see the 
 light again because it is thought that the public outside the 
 sixteen-foot wall, in spite of books that have been written by 
 writers with distinguished names and undoubted experience 
 inside is still insufficiently acquainted with all that 
 happens in our prisons, not only to prisoners, but to their 
 officers, from the Commissioners toiling at Whitehall to the 
 warders at the gaols. 
 
 No theories for comprehensive prison reforms are advanced 
 in these pages. The volume is a plain narration of facts 
 given by one who can claim the privilege, to a somewhat 
 exceptional degree, of having possessed the friendship of 
 criminals both in this and other countries, and who has also 
 had the opportunity of learning a good deal about those 
 who spend their lives in disciplining and caring for these 
 criminals in prison. 
 
 ARTHUR PATERSON. 
 
 240053 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEI: PAGE 
 
 I. THE MEN WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE - - 5 
 
 II. THE ORDINARY PRISONER - 1 
 
 III. THE CONVICT - - *7 
 
 IV. THE YOUTHFUL OFFENDER - - 23 
 V. THE NEW DEPARTURE - - 29 
 
 VI. THE WOMEN - 35 
 
 VII. NON-CRIMINAL - - 4 
 
 VIII. THE PRISON STAFF - - 46 
 
 IX. REFORMATION - - ' S 2 
 
 X. THE SENTENCE - . - 58 
 
OUR PRISONS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MEN WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE 
 
 IT is a mere commonplace to say that the efficiency of 
 our prison system is a matter of national importance ; but, 
 for all that, it needs saying. Though society is beginning 
 to feel a real sense of responsibility toward those members 
 of the community who have not had a fair chance in life, 
 and though it is even able to grasp the fact that the right 
 treatment of crime in prison is fruitful of good results only 
 if followed up outside the gaol, it is extraordinarily ignorant 
 of what is actually going on in the prison world. 
 
 How many well-educated people, actively interested, pro- 
 fessionally and otherwise, in the social improvement of 
 persons known to the police not to mention the ordinary- 
 public could undergo with credit an examination, say, 
 from the Secretary to the Prison Commission, upon the 
 routine of a warder's day's work in a local prison, the 
 official duties of a governor or an inspector of prisons, of the 
 medical officer of a gaol, or even of a chaplain under up-to- 
 date conditions ? While as to diet, punishments for mis- 
 conduct, and rewards for diligence and good behaviour, and 
 the life generally of the various classes of prisoners they 
 are as unfamiliar to most people as the domestic customs 
 and tribal laws of the native races in Central Africa. 
 
 An attempt will be made in this, and in succeeding 
 chapters, to set forth the full circumstances of life and 
 administration in our prisons. 
 
 The first subject claiming attention is the central 
 authority the Prison Commission at Whitehall. 
 
 The Commission came into existence through the passing 
 of the Prisons Bill of 1877. Up to that time, though an 
 attempt had been previously made to deal with the matter 
 by an Act in 1865, it had largely failed, and the prisons of 
 this country were separately governed by local authorities. 
 In 1876 there were 113 of these places, under the adminis- 
 tration of some 2,000 Justices of the Peace. There was no 
 
 5 
 
6 OUR PRISONS 
 
 common standard of administration among the multitude of 
 authorities. Each prison had its own particular way of 
 dieting, punishing, and employing its inmates, and its own 
 idea of the amount of space and of ventilation required by a 
 man doing time. The result was chaos of a scandalous 
 description. Though many honourable exceptions existed, 
 certain prisons being managed well and humanely even 
 according to modern ideas, the majority were in a bad way. 
 Some gave prisoners too much to eat, others too little. 
 Some worked them unmercifully at nothing but tread-wheel 
 and oakum -picking. In another prison a prisoner was 
 known to remain in bed fifteen hours at a stretch. In certain 
 places benevolent cranks reigned supreme : and a delightful 
 account is given by Sir Edmund Du Cane in his book 
 ' Punishment and Prevention of Crime ' of a gaol where 
 the prisoners were not allowed to do anything but read, 
 though as a privilege instead of learning lessons all day they 
 were allowed to pick a little oakum. Hard bodily labour 
 was forbidden in this prison. The Bible was the principal 
 lesson-book, and the prisoners were made to learn off by 
 heart large portions of the Testament. A beautiful story is 
 quoted of a felon who upon his release at the expiration of 
 his sentence was said to have promptly committed another 
 crime sheep-stealing so that he might return to prison. 
 He had reached Ephesians, and wanted to finish the Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 The comment of a Select Committee of the House of 
 Commons on the state of things generally was that ' several 
 prisons are in a very unsatisfactory condition, and proper 
 punishment, separation, or reformation in them is impossible/ 
 The remedy for this resolved upon by Parliament was the 
 transference of all control over prisons to a central authority. 
 The Prisons Bill of 1877 enacted that the whole of the 
 prisons in England were to be handed over to the Home 
 Secretary and a body of Commissioners appointed by Royal 
 Warrant. 
 
 The change had to be made in the face of bitter opposition, 
 but the results as a whole have fully justified the Act. The 
 Commissioners appointed were first-rate administrators, and 
 Mr. Asquith's Departmental Committee of 1894, presided 
 over by Mr. Herbert Gladstone, which made searching 
 inquiries into the results of the Act of 1877, reported that 
 ' the centralization of authority has become a complete 
 success in the direction of uniformity, discipline, and 
 economy.' 
 
 Prison administration, however, is a very complicated, 
 
THE MEN WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE 7 
 
 many-sided business. Its success depends not only, or 
 even chiefly, upon ' uniformity, discipline, and economy * 
 though these things must be at the root of it all. The main 
 factors in life within prison walls, if the effect of that life 
 upon those committed to it is to be for good and not for 
 evil, must be an atmosphere and an influence which make 
 all prisoners feel crime and misbehaviour to be unprofitable, 
 unworthy, and a mistake, and honesty of life, uprightness, 
 and a good reputation to be the better part and the course 
 that pays not only for the time being, but all through life. 
 
 In the eighties and up to the time when the report of the 
 Departmental Committee of 1894 was published, there is 
 strong evidence that, great as were the achievements of the 
 Commission in the direction of strictly administrative reforms, 
 the men in power did not grasp the possibility that such a 
 thing as enthusiasm or inspiration was desirable in prison 
 management except in the direction of good sanitation 
 and construction and the physical well-being of prisoners, 
 combined with exact obedience to orders and discipline. 
 Justice according to the law every man and woman, was 
 to receive, no matter what crime he or she had committed. 
 But that anything beyond this justice was necessary, 
 or even advisable, hardly entered the heads of the 
 authorities of that day. This was pointed out in the report 
 of the Departmental Committee of 1894 with great frank- 
 ness ; and a series of far-reaching recommendations were 
 made in the direction of a different procedure and principle, 
 both in system and in work. 
 
 That was seventeen years ago. The men who were in office 
 in the eighties have now retired. The present members of 
 the Commission have been appointed since 1894. It will be 
 interesting to consider the reputation they bear to-day. 
 
 If the truth must be told, the impression that appears 
 to exist in the minds of most people interested in the re- 
 generation of our criminal classes is that, while individually 
 and as private persons the members of the present Prison 
 Commission may be men of kind heart and excellent 
 intention, officially they are hide-bound autocrats, looking 
 upon red tape as an honourable badge of office, and 
 believing that the perfection of administrative efficiency is 
 to be achieved by exacting from their officers clockwork 
 regularity in performance of duty, and a discipline among 
 prisoners into which no human feeling or sentiment must 
 be allowed to intrude. 
 
 The Prison Commissioners are wedded, it is said, to the 
 virtues of mere punishment as a reformatory influence, and 
 
8 OUR PRISONS 
 
 so far as they are concerned punishment punishment and 
 nothing but punishment shall be the lot of all unfortunates 
 sent to gaol. It is admitted indeed by some critics that 
 the establishment of the ' Borstal Institutions/ and the 
 efforts made to reclaim and reform juvenile-adult offenders 
 in ways other than by prison discipline, are signs of 
 grace ;> but even here the belief prevails that these reforms 
 are due to pressure of public opinion alone. 
 
 It may be said at once that this popular impression of 
 the Prison Commission is entirely, even ludicrously, devoid 
 of foundation in fact. The investigations made by the 
 writer have been searching and extensive. It was necessary, 
 in order to ascertain the full facts of the case, to request 
 permission from the authorities to see and to know all that 
 goes on. That permission was readily given. All informa- 
 tion has been supplied most willingly. It has been possible 
 to unlock all doors and to peep into every secret of the 
 prison houses. As a result one fact has been proved clearly 
 and beyond dispute. No body governing a public service has 
 less intention of being fettered by red tape than the Prison 
 Commission. The men who compose it are not only practical 
 administrators, with far too much personal dignity to care 
 a farthing for mere authority or the trappings of official 
 etiquette, but they are reformers of the keenest and most 
 intrepid kind. 
 
 The record of progress of the Department for the last 
 seventeen years shows this. In every direction the traditional 
 usage of the past has been broken remorselessly where 
 occasion required it ; and all that has been done, including 
 the great reforms in the treatment of the juvenile-adult 
 prisoners at Borstal and elsewhere, has been directly initiated 
 by the Commissioners themselves, and in no single instance 
 forced upon them by opinion and pressure from without. 
 
 But the most impressive and significant feature of the 
 Department as it is to-day lies not in what it has accom- 
 plished, but in what it would do, if it could, and, as oppor- 
 tunity offers, may do in due time. The men who direct the 
 Commission are instinct with life and energy. They have 
 done much, but they show you plainly that they look upon 
 their progress as simply a foundation on which to build 
 more and more. If their wishes and intentions were to be 
 published, which for obvious reasons they will not be, proof 
 could be given that no reformers outside the Home Office 
 have more plans in their heads for improving prison 
 administration in so far as that is possible, and all services 
 connected therewith, than the officials within the Department. 
 
THE MEN WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE 9 
 
 In saying this there is no intention of making out the 
 Commissioners to be other than men as liable to err as the 
 rest of us. They are not above class prejudice; they have, 
 in common with their staff, leanings in the direction of there 
 being nothing like leather. They also think, and not without 
 justice, that, having spent many years studying and working 
 at prison administration from every point of view, they are 
 rather better judges of what can be done and should be done 
 than enthusiastic idealists who have not had any adminis- 
 trative experience at all. Moreover, they are strictly 
 practical, and see much more plainly than other reformers 
 the supreme difficulties which the very best reformatory 
 system must meet with from the qualities and nature of the 
 ordinary criminal whether that nature is the result of 
 heredity, or a feeble brain, or downright ' cussedness.' 
 
 There is a potent personality among the members of the 
 Commission. In a hundred ways it turns up in far-away 
 prisons and among all sorts and conditions of officials. In 
 our gaols now, as a rule, there is sincerity and often kindly 
 tolerance of small peccadilloes, and the desire to help a 
 prisoner. Mistakes are made, of course, and sometimes 
 grave ones. The most careful training and probation does 
 not turn prison officials into wingless angels. So much is 
 required of them in control of temper, in tact, shrewdness, 
 forbearance, and common sense, that it is not possible that 
 they should always be blameless. The life of a prison 
 officer is as hard and wearing an existence as may well be 
 conceived. Then it is not possible for the Commission to 
 guarantee that the governor, or the doctor, or the chaplain 
 shall always be just the right man in the right place. Last 
 of all, the difficulties and complications of the organization 
 of the prison world are endless, as will presently appear. 
 It is not, therefore, laid down here that prison administra- 
 tion is perfect, or ever will be, or that our prison system or 
 its directorate is free from weakness. But it is not in the 
 least like what its critics believe it to be. It is not by 
 intention harsh, cold, or unsympathetic. In spite of 
 mistakes and a system still far from perfect, and the inevit- 
 able difficulty on the part of officers to live up to all that is 
 required of them, the heart of the service is in the right 
 place. It is a brave and a hopeful service, a service full of 
 faith, energy, and charity ; the men at the head of it love 
 their work, and are determined to spare no effort to make it, 
 so far as they are able, all that it ought to be. 
 
io OUR PRISONS 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE ORDINARY PRISONER 
 
 ORDINARY prisoners, or persons sentenced to imprisonment 
 in the third division for not more than two years, outnumber 
 all other classes put together ; and the problem they present 
 is, broadly speaking, the problem of prison treatment as a 
 whole. 
 
 It is a dreary and most difficult problem ; and though the 
 Prison Commissioners and their officers of every degree 
 have given many years of strenuous effort and thought to 
 the subject, it cannot be said that they have succeeded 
 in finding a solution satisfactory either to themselves or to 
 the public. Nevertheless, what strikes an observer most 
 forcibly is the energy and enterprise with which the problem 
 has been approached and the progress that has been made 
 of late years in dealing scientifically with it. Twenty years 
 ago prison life of all kinds was a deadly level of mechanical 
 routine, which benumbed or tortured the new offender, and 
 had no effect whatever, in the main, upon the old hand. A 
 low diet, hard discipline, and dull, unintelligent work 
 these were the characteristic features of a prisoner's life in 
 those days. He has a very different time of it now. The 
 diet is sufficient and of good quality ; at the same time it is 
 not ' tasty ' and is not therefore beloved by the majority 
 of criminals. There are three degrees. ' A. diet,' the first 
 and the worst, is given for the first week breakfast, bread 
 and a pint of gruel ; dinner, bread and porridge, or bread 
 and suet pudding, or bread and potatoes ; supper, bread and 
 gruel. After the first week B. diet is given. This includes 
 bread and porridge at breakfast and supper, but adds meat 
 or meaty soup, or bacon and beans to the midday meal. On 
 this the prisoner lives for four months. Beyond that 
 limit and for the rest of his sentence he has C. diet, which 
 still further increases the allowances of meat and potatoes at 
 dinner, and provides him with cocoa in lieu of porridge at 
 night. Prisoners are weighed periodically, and if they lose 
 flesh or strength receive special diet under medical orders. 
 
 The discipline of a prison still is, and must always be, 
 strict. It forms, in these days, almost the only really 
 ' deterrent ' feature to those who have ceased to care for 
 the disgrace of committal to gaol. But year by year its 
 sternness grows less. The old rule that prisoners must not 
 converse still holds, but they are now allowed to say a word 
 to one another now and then. No warder of the new school 
 
THE ORDINARY PRISONER n 
 
 addresses his charges in the tone which may still be heard 
 sometimes from men of the older time. He must be firm 
 always, but as he requires civility, so he must exercise it. 
 Obedience from a prisoner, and industry and attention to 
 all rules and good behaviour, are encouraged now by a 
 system of 'marks' and 'stages/ by which a prisoner who 
 tries to do well receives reward in various forms. In other 
 words, incitement to well-doing, rather than punishment for 
 ill-doing, has become the dominant note in prison manage- 
 ment. Nor has this system reached its fullest development 
 even yet. Among juvenile-adults i.e., lads between sixteen 
 and twenty-one years old rewards for good conduct have 
 been carried farther than anything previously known. If the 
 departure from rule and tradition proves really successful in 
 their case, something will be done in the same direction for 
 the men and women. 
 
 But all such changes must develop very slowly. The 
 most dangerous enemies to true prison reform are those 
 excellent persons who persist in looking upon a criminal as 
 a mere victim of circumstances a sort of lost dog or cat, 
 only requiring kindness and abundance of sympathy to 
 become a sleek and well-conditioned member of society. 
 The humanitarian instinct has become a ' cult ' in these 
 days, and while, like all instincts, it should receive attention 
 and even expression, it requires controlling most carefully in 
 its actions concerning persons who have committed crime. 
 
 What is the attitude of the ordinary prisoner ? In the first 
 place, he is perfectly well aware that he is not in gaol from 
 misfortune, but from his own fault. He has hurt some- 
 body. He has behaved like a brute, or has done a mean or 
 dishonest act, or, at the least, deliberately infringed a law 
 framed, as he knows, for the protection of society. It is 
 obvious, therefore, that for the sake of justice, for the pro- 
 tection of the person, or persons, he has wronged, and, not 
 least, for his own sake as a creature with a soul capable of 
 better things, he must receive punishment. He must, 
 while in prison, be under some disability in comparison to 
 his life outside. He must, in short, pay a penalty. 
 
 There is another point. The large majority of all 
 prisoners only serve short sentences. Out of 205,681 
 persons committed to prison in 1908-9 (exclusive of convicts), 
 93 per cent, of the men and 97 per cent, of the women were 
 sentenced to three months or less, 62 per cent, of the men 
 and 64 per cent, of the women to two weeks or less. It is 
 essential, therefore, if prison is not to be a pleasant resting- 
 place to the majority, that all the worst side of the life 
 
12 OUR PRISONS 
 
 should be presented at the beginning. This acts in two 
 ways. The necessary shock is given to the first offender, 
 who must at any cost be made to feel that there is hardness 
 in prison life. On the other hand, the danger of hardening 
 him by too much misery and discomfort is avoided by a 
 gradual relaxation of the worst features of confinement as 
 his sentence lengthens and a corresponding increase in the 
 encouragements to him to show that he can be industrious 
 and patient, and overcome his weakness. Thus the worst 
 type of ordinary prisoner, the man sentenced to hard labour, 
 has to wrestle for twenty-eight days with coal-sack making, 
 an occupation painful to the fingers, or oakum-picking, the 
 most uninteresting of occupations, or stone-breaking, or 
 wood-chopping, which is trying in many ways, particularly 
 to the small of the back. This work a prisoner must do either 
 alone in his cell or in a cubicle outside where he can see 
 no one. He hates that. During the first fortnight he has to 
 sleep on bare boards, though allowed covering, and for the 
 first week receives the worst diet allowed in prison. 
 
 A prisoner without ' hard labour ' also works during his 
 first month alone, but at ' second-class ' work tailoring, 
 glove-making, mat-making, or any other occupation which 
 keeps him well occupied without causing any particular 
 physical strain. 
 
 After the twenty-eight days are past the ordinary prisoner 
 emerges from his solitude and works all day in association 
 with others in a shop at blacksmithing, carpentering, mat- 
 making, brush-making, book-binding, boot-making, or mail- 
 bag making. In some cases, he goes outside and delves in 
 the garden, or is engaged in building operations. In any 
 case, he works at a trade, in which, if he stays in some time, 
 he can become proficient. He is with his fellows all day, to 
 whom he may speak on the work. The shops are mostly 
 large, well lighted and well aired, and in winter well warmed. 
 In each there is an instructor as well as the warder or 
 warders. The instructor assists and teaches while the 
 warders stand like watchful storks, vigilantly observant of 
 loitering, malingering, or breaking of rules. They must 
 have all their wits about them. 
 
 It is necessary here to correct with all possible emphasis 
 a delusion dear to very many people, not excepting members 
 of the magistracy and even Judges of the superior Courts. 
 As the following true story will show. A young foreigner in 
 England anxious for information asked a well-known light 
 of the English Bar what the sentence of ' two years' hard 
 labour' meant. This great authority replied with unction 
 
THE ORDINARY PRISONER 13 
 
 that it was worse than a longer term of penal servitude, be- 
 cause the prisoner was kept at stone-breaking, or the like, 
 for the whole term ! This great authority totally misled the 
 inquiring foreigner. No prisoner performs 'hard larbour' 
 i.e. stone-breaking, etc. for more than twenty-eight days. 
 After that period he joins the other prisoners in the shops, 
 and works at a trade, according to his strength, former ex- 
 perience, or capability, for the remainder of his sentence. 
 Why is the term ' two years' hard labour/ it will be asked, 
 still extant ? The Courts of Justice must supply the answer. 
 
 The day of a prisoner begins at 5.30 a.m. He then 
 washes, dresses, and cleans his cell. At 6 his warder 
 examines the cell and notes down, if the prisoner wishes it, 
 a request to see the governor or any other superior officer of 
 the prison. Prisoners can see the governor, medical officer, 
 chaplain, a member of the visiting committee an in- 
 dependent committee of Justices of the Peace and an 
 inspector of prisons from the Home Office, or send in a 
 written application or complaint direct to the Prison Com- 
 mission at the Home Office. It will be found that they 
 make pretty free use of these privileges, and have no hesita- 
 tion in complaining of any one, if aggrieved, not excepting 
 the Home Secretary himself through members of the House 
 of Commons. At 6.10 a.m. work begins and goes on till 7.10. 
 This is breakfast time. At 8 bell rings for chapel. Prisoners 
 march there, returning at 8.30. Work begins again at 8.45 
 and goes on till 12 noon. Dinner is then served. Work starts 
 for the afternoon at 1.30, and ends at 5 p.m. Supper comes 
 a * 5-3O> and after that the prisoner's time is his own, to read 
 his library book he gets one each week from a wide choice 
 of light literature when he has earned a sufficient number of 
 good conduct marks until 8.20 p.m., when lights are put 
 out, and the whole prison turns in. Such is the life of the 
 ordinary prisoner of to-day. 
 
 A word must be said as to classification. The law 
 provides that any person not sentenced to penal servitude 
 may be placed by the Court which convicts him in the first, 
 second, or third ' division.' The ordinary prisoner belongs 
 to the third division only. No discretion in this matter 
 rests in the hands of the prison authorities. In order, 
 however, that first offenders and those who have committed 
 comparatively trivial offences may be separated from old 
 hands, a prisoner of the former kind is placed in a class 
 by himself called the star class, and wears a red star on 
 his tunic. He receives the same treatment, food, and 
 discipline, but is kept absolutely apart from men of the 
 ' habitual ' class. 
 
14 OUR PRISONS 
 
 It is the object of prison authorities to stir up a prisoner 
 to concentrate his attention upon his work, and to teach 
 him by every means in their power to become energetic and 
 active in mind and body, as well as obedient and well- 
 behaved. The worst feature of any kind of institutional life 
 is the tendency of the inmates to live and think mechani- 
 cally. This feature is not absent from our prisons, but the 
 authorities fight against it. The means they take are partly 
 by punishment for idlers and insubordination, but chiefly by 
 offering rewards for industry and willingness. A man who 
 will not work loses all privileges given to the rest ; and if he 
 really misbehaves and is obstinately idle he is punished 
 by confinement in his cell, withdrawal of his mattress, and a 
 diet of bread and water for three days at a time. A 
 prisoner who works and behaves really well receives full 
 marks, eight per day, and earns remission of sentence and 
 extra gratuity at end of term. The marks are given by the 
 warder and instructor, supervised by the chief warder and 
 the governor. Many precautions are taken to prevent 
 favouritism or under-marking of an unpopular prisoner by 
 an officer. Any offence of this character would be punished 
 by instant dismissal of the officer. 
 
 There is one other class of prisoner for whom accom- 
 modation is found in certain local prisons : this is the convict 
 serving the first few months of his sentence of penal 
 servitude in solitary confinement. These men are techni- 
 cally known as ' separates.' They are divided into three 
 grades the first offenders, who do three months as 
 ' separates ' ; the intermediates, who have six months 
 these men who have been in before but are not hardened 
 offenders ; and the old hands or recidivists, who get nine 
 months, the longest term allowed.* 
 
 Separate confinement has been much criticized and 
 deserves special mention. Many people think it a relic of 
 harsh old days which should be done away with. A well- 
 known writer stirred up much feeling in the matter not 
 long ago by describing the condition in which he found 
 a man who had endured such punishment. As it happened, 
 the man had been confined for many years instead of a few 
 months, and under conditions which do not exist in England. 
 The conditions in this country at the present day are as 
 follows : A ' separate ' occupies the same kind of cell 
 as an ordinary prisoner. He has a mattress from the 
 beginning to the end of his term ; he also lives upon the 
 best or C. diet. His work is selected from that already 
 described. It must be of such a nature that it can be done 
 * This is now reduced. 
 
THE ORDINARY PRISONER 15 
 
 in a cell. It is chosen for each man according to his 
 strength and adaptability. He has books, in common with 
 other prisoners, and receives visits from the chaplain and 
 prison officers. He can see the governor or members of the 
 visiting committee. He works the same hours. The differ- 
 ence between his treatment and that of the rest is that 
 he has to work during the whole time alone in his cell, and 
 never leaves it day and night until the conclusion of his 
 three, six, or nine months' sentence, except for an hour's 
 exercise in the open air during the morning, and chapel, 
 which he attends with the rest. As to visitors, the 
 ' separate ' may receive friends once during the first week 
 of his imprisonment, but not again after that for four 
 months, and only then if he has earned the full number 
 of marks by industry and good conduct. There is nothing 
 in the life that need impair health, physically or mentally. 
 It is only dull and monotonous beyond that of the ordinary 
 prisoner ; but then the convict is not an ordinary prisoner. 
 He is one who has committed some very serious offence. 
 I saw and talked with a batch of men whose time was just 
 up, and who were off to Dartmoor the following day. 
 They were pasty faced from their confinement ; but they 
 were healthy, with excellent appetites, and were looking 
 keenly forward to the fresh air of the moors and the life 
 with others. 
 
 Care is taken, as far as may be, to prevent morbid 
 brooding by separates. Their work is interesting and pro- 
 ductive, and marks are given for it with advantages which 
 will follow later on. The means of reading is provided 
 to pass away leisure hours and freshen the mind. That the 
 convict will brood and think over many things as he has 
 not done, probably, for a long time, and as he will not, 
 perhaps, do again under the more stirring conditions of 
 Dartmoor or Portland is inevitable, and is even desired 
 by those who impose the discipline. The psychology of a 
 criminal mind has never been fully grasped yet, and probably 
 never will be. Moreover, it differs in each individual case. 
 But enough is known for those who have watched it care- 
 fully under various phases and conditions to say with 
 certainty that this separate confinement period is salutary 
 and of great importance. It is very deterrent. Criminals 
 hate loneliness. Association in work and at other times 
 such as exists afterwards at Dartmoor, limited, guarded, 
 and disciplined as it is, is the very breath of life to them. 
 The mere confinement in a cell is a real punishment to such 
 men, accustomed as they are to activity and change. An 
 habitual criminal, indeed, is the most restless person on 
 
16 OUR PRISONS 
 
 earth when he is at large. A recidivist, who openly 
 confesses that he finds life at Dartmoor palatable if not 
 pleasant, admits that he feels separate confinement a real 
 hardship and discomfort. On the other hand, the first 
 offender the lad who in a fit of brutal fury or lust has 
 ruined fair prospects, or the educated man who has for 
 the first time embezzled, or forged, to supply himself with 
 the wherewithal to bet, gamble, or worse, may find in this 
 period of probation, when alone in his cell he sees his crime 
 and its consequences staring him in the face, the first 
 step toward reformation. 
 
 Prison discipline cannot be said as a whole to err on 
 the side of overharshness. In the treatment of adult 
 criminals of every class the limits of comfort and indulgence 
 have been reached. It is even questionable to many 
 capable judges whether the authorities have not gone too far. 
 This will appear to some people a brutal thing to say, but 
 not to those who know personally the wife-beater and the 
 man who kicks a policeman when he is down, and the 
 clever, unscrupulous thief or receiver of stolen goods ; the 
 trickster with women ; the hooligan ; the racecourse welsher, 
 and ' sharp.' The same thought has struck the prisoners 
 themselves. The following effusion is taken from many 
 others written in the same strain ; it was found on the slate 
 which all prisoners have for writing or drawing upon, and 
 discovered by chance. Doggerel as it is, it is worthy of 
 note by a humanitarian public : 
 
 ' I cannot take my walks abroad, 
 
 Pm under lock and key, 
 And much the public I applaud 
 For their kind care of me. 
 
 c Not more than others I deserve, 
 
 In fact much less than more, 
 Yet I have bread whilst others starve 
 And beg from door to door. 
 
 ' The honest paupers in the street 
 
 Half-naked I behold, 
 While I am clad from head to foot, 
 And covered from the cold. 
 
 1 Whilst they are fed on workhouse fare 
 
 And grudged their scanty food, 
 Three times a day my meals I get, 
 Sufficient, wholesome, good. 
 
 ' Then to the British public" Health ! 
 
 Who all our care relieves, 
 And while they treat us as they do 
 They'll never want for thieves.' 
 
THE CONVICT 17 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CONVICT 
 
 THE convicts, or criminals sentenced to not less than three 
 years' imprisonment termed penal servitude, do not number 
 more than 3,000 to 4,000 all told, of which fewer than 200 
 are women. But they form the grimmest problem of all in 
 prison administration. They are received by three prisons 
 Parkhurst, Portland, and Dartmoor. At the first only 
 feeble-minded and criminal lunatics are kept, while Portland 
 takes, as a rule, the milder cases and those who are specially 
 fitted for hard physical labour. Dartmoor has the rest, 
 including the worst and most dangerous recidivists, and 
 murderers who have just escaped capital punishment. 
 When visited there were 1,151 inmates there. The full 
 complement is 1,200. 
 
 Dartmoor prison is one of the most interesting of places 
 from an historical point of view. It was built for the recep- 
 tion of French and American prisoners at the beginning of 
 last century, and was occupied by them, 5,000 strong, from 
 1809 to 1815. The ' Story of Dartmoor Prison ' has been 
 told most graphically by Mr. Basil Thomson, under that 
 title, in a book (Heinemann, 35. 6d.) that all students of 
 prison administration on its human side should read. It 
 purports, modestly, to be a history of a prison. It is in 
 reality as pungent a chronicle of convict men and manners 
 on a small scale as the Diary of the immortal Pepys. 
 
 The life at Dartmoor is as busy, varied, and well-ordered 
 as that of a hive of bees. The hours of rising, working, 
 and chapel and meals differ very little from those already 
 described among ' separates ' in a local prison, except that 
 their day begins and ends half an hour earlier. But there 
 the likeness ends. At 7.15 a.m., breakfast and chapel being 
 over, the convicts are marched out of their cells, party by 
 party, and, parading past the governor, or deputy-governor, 
 are counted and then set off in columns, two by two, to 
 their place of work, returning at 11.10, marching forth again 
 at i o'clock, and returning for the night at 5 ; in the darkest 
 days of winter (December) at 4.30. The greatest care is 
 taken to keep exact count of the whereabouts of all convicts. 
 In no circumstances, if a man escaped in the daytime, 
 could his absence remain unnoticed for a longer period than 
 between the hour he went out to work and the hour he 
 should have returned. At 7.15, at 11.10, at I p.m., and at 
 5 p.m. every inmate, except those in cell-confinement for 
 
i8 OUR PRISONS 
 
 punishment or in hospital for illness, passes before the 
 governor in the prison yard. The warder in charge of each 
 party gives the number of his men as he passes with them. 
 An officer notes it, and no party is allowed to separate until 
 the total of the numbers given has been checked with the 
 known strength of the prison at the time. Should any 
 discrepancy be found, the men are marched past again, and 
 the mistake discovered and rectified. 
 
 The nature of the work performed by convicts is varied 
 enough. Upon a given day in August last, there were 
 1,151 convicts at Dartmoor. After allowing for 98 men 
 engaged in cooking, cleaning, and other domestic work in 
 the building, and 49 in hospital, 6 under punishment, and 
 ii kept in cells, the remainder were working as follows : 
 347 in manufacturing labour in shops in association of 
 which 77 were tailors, 26 twine-makers, 24 smiths and 
 fitters, 39 shoemakers, 22 needleworkers, 40 mail-bag 
 makers, 24 knitters, 42 carpenters, 29 basket-makers, 8 
 bookbinders, and 16 oakum-pickers. There were 379 in 
 the building department as quarrymen, stone-cutters, slaters, 
 plumbers, plasterers, painters and glaziers, excavators, 
 carpenters, bricklayers, and general labourers. On the 
 farm, engaged in haymaking, manuring, gardening, etc., 
 there were 261. 
 
 The recreative and educational side of life is not neglected. 
 Lectures of various kinds on popular subjects are delivered 
 at regular intervals, and musical voluntaries are given on 
 the organ. There is a choir which makes up in heartiness 
 to speak from experience what it lacks in finish. The 
 library of the prison numbers some 3,000 volumes, and 
 among it are novels of all kinds, books of travel and adven- 
 ture, the Boy's Own Paper and the Strand Magazine, and 
 other popular periodicals bound up, which pass rapidly from 
 cell to cell. Something like 80 per annum is spent in 
 books. But, besides the reading time for amusement, there 
 is a great deal of study, voluntarily entered into, of a 
 technical kind. Trade journals on motoring, agriculture, 
 building and architecture, cabinet making and engineering, 
 are frequently asked for and diligently studied. Convicts, 
 though out of the world, wish to keep up with the times a 
 sign that mental debility is not one of their weaknesses. In 
 many instances they request the governor's permission for 
 relatives or friends to send them, individually, books of this 
 kind. This permission is granted on condition that the 
 book in question, upon the convict's departure, shall, unless 
 good reason can be shown, become the property of the 
 prison and remain there. 
 
THE CONVICT 19 
 
 Thus the days pass. As in the local prison, a convict 
 can get access to the governor daily, and to an inspector 
 when on his rounds, the visiting committee, and the 
 Commissioners at the Home Office. It is a rule at Dart- 
 moor that the governor is in attendance every day at 
 ii o'clock to hear any complaints, petitions, or remarks 
 prisoners may desire to address to him. One day sixteen 
 such interviews were witnessed. All were friendly in char- 
 acter and very matter-of-fact. The attitude of the governor 
 to the men was courteous, pleasant, and considerate ; that 
 of the men towards him blunt and straightspoken. They 
 plainly stood in no overpowering awe of their master. 
 Those who were pleased with his replies retired with 
 cheerful thanks and often a nod and friendly grin. Those 
 who were not pleased assumed the injured countenances 
 of schoolboys whose excuses have been disallowed. The 
 majority of the requests were for removals to another 
 working party. These applications are worth noting. 
 They are always granted where it is believed that the 
 applicant has a genuine and justifiable reason for dis- 
 liking the work he has been put to or the companions it 
 throws him among. Thus, though selection in the first 
 instance for farm work, building or quarry, or the workshop 
 is usually made from a prisoner's former industrial position 
 rather than from any particular social standing he may 
 have held, the men as time goes on fall naturally and by 
 their own initiative into the company which suits them best. 
 
 A word may be said here in regard to the regulations as 
 to silence when at work. By rule, as in local prisons, no 
 convicts are allowed to talk until they have served some 
 years, and then only on Sundays. In practice the rule is 
 not strictly enforced. Of course, in any case, the men 
 are allowed to speak about their work. But even a word 
 or two of a more general kind is not reported against a 
 man by the warder in charge unless he talks habitually 
 after a caution. 
 
 There remain, last of all, the punishments given for 
 misconduct, insubordination, or serious offence in prison. 
 These are first, bread and water diet and confinement in 
 cell during the day when the others are at work. This 
 punishment may not be given for more than three days 
 consecutively. If it is to run for a fortnight, three clear 
 days of ordinary diet must intervene between every three 
 days of bread and water only. Secondly, there is stone- 
 breaking in a separate compartment fitted up in one of the 
 yards for the purpose, with a hammer chained to the wall 
 
20 OUR PRISONS 
 
 so that the delinquent cannot strike the warder with it. 
 This is given to violent or irritable men who attack others. 
 Thirdly, loss of marks for good conduct, which means loss 
 of gratuity at conclusion of sentence, and loss of remission 
 of sentence. This remission is given in definite proportions 
 for every year a man serves in a proper manner. Lastly, 
 there is punishment for attempted escape, the wearing of 
 chains and irons (weighing altogether about four pounds) 
 and yellow stripes, all of which are hated because of their 
 conspicuousness, and the punishment for brutal assault of 
 a warder or other officer, consisting of so many strokes with 
 the 'cat' up to eighteen for a really serious case. This 
 punishment cannot be given without sanction from the 
 medical officer, the Prison Commissioners, and the Home 
 Secretary himself. 
 
 Many and curious are the characteristics of convicts. 
 Though it must be admitted that reformation is almost 
 unknown except in first offenders, or the 'juvenile-adults,' 
 who will be dealt with elsewhere; though there is ever 
 present in their ranks the instinctive tendency of a wild 
 beast to violence and a bloodthirsty impulse to smash an 
 officer with little or no provocation, yet they are human 
 beings still, capable of many a kindly thought and even 
 affection, and, moreover, with a sense of honour of their 
 own. One of their favourite occupations is to keep tame 
 field mice ; and if humanitarian persons who object to 
 governors and warders of prisons on principle can believe 
 it, this atrocity against discipline is allowed, or at least 
 deliberately winked at by the authorities. It is not an un- 
 alloyed advantage, for the men get very jealous over their 
 mice, steal them from one another, and fight for them, and 
 have to be punished. But for the sake of the comfort and 
 pleasure given by the keeping of these pets and its human- 
 izing influence, it is not forbidden. In one direction official 
 action is regularly taken concerning mice. It is a prison 
 rule that no prisoner may take away with him on comple- 
 tion of sentence any article which he did not possess 
 before going in. When the time for leaving comes, there- 
 fore, a mouse-keeper asks if he may remove his pet. The 
 governor's reply is to produce a wooden box, suitably made 
 for the carriage of mice, and to present it to the happy 
 owner, thus speeding two parting guests at the same time 
 in a manner satisfactory to every one concerned. 
 
 But many as are the little amenities of life in this hive of 
 habitual hardened criminals, whose daily occupation in 
 many instances has been crime of the foulest or most 
 
THE CONVICT 21 
 
 desperate description, and will be again when they are 
 free, the real atmosphere of Dartmoor, so far as the men 
 responsible for its well-being and discipline are concerned, 
 is that of a handful of whites on the American frontier 
 among ten times their number of Apache Indians. ' We 
 stand on a volcano,' an officer said to the writer in a matter- 
 of-fact tone. ' If our convicts here had opportunity to 
 combine and would trust one another, the place would be 
 wrecked in an hour.' 
 
 Observation more than confirmed these words. If you 
 watch carefully the faces, build, and demeanour of the men 
 marching so meekly to work two by two behind their 
 warder, or in front of the mounted Civil Guard with his 
 rifle across his knees, you will find a grim study in human 
 degeneracy and understand that the life of the wives of 
 governors and warders at Dartmoor is a very anxious one. 
 In the cunning, hard, shifty eyes there is more suppressed 
 murder and devilment than may be seen in a year anywhere 
 else in the world. Animal ferocity lurks in every line of the 
 enormous jowls of these men, in their protruding sensual 
 lips, and coarse nostrils. Their bodies and limbs are well- 
 set and muscular. The majority of them are big burly 
 fellows, and, most striking of all, there is in their faces a 
 high level of intelligence. A few there are with narrow 
 foreheads and receding chins but they are a very small 
 minority. The rest have every sign of fully developed 
 brain power together with strong wills and characters. 
 The very cheerfulness and contentment to be seen on 
 very many faces has its depressing side. They have good 
 food, healthy work, and no cares to speak of. They are 
 clever of hand, nimble of wit, great readers, and competent 
 craftsmen. Yet all that is done for them but increases the 
 power for evil of the recidivists and old hands. 
 
 To guard and hold the convicts there are some 130 to 
 150 warders, ' Civil Guards,' and other officers. The 
 warders are not armed except in emergency. They carry 
 a truncheon loose in the hand always, with which they may 
 defend themselves from sudden assault a very necessary 
 protection. The Civil Guards are armed with rifles loaded 
 with buckshot, with which they may fire upon a convict 
 who assaults a warder or who attempts escape. In firing 
 they aim low so as to cripple but not to kill. It is the 
 business of the Civil Guards to accompany each party of 
 men, and remain at a convenient distance on watch. 
 
 Attempts at escape are made from time to time, but 
 always frustrated. If the men get away they are retaken. 
 
22 OUR PRISONS 
 
 They seldom do it by deliberate plan. In most cases it is 
 the result of a sudden uncontrollable impulse to cut and 
 run. One man did this though he had only six weeks to 
 serve to finish his sentence. 
 
 The worst cases are assaults upon warders. These are 
 generally committed by convicts in the fields with the 
 heavy spades they have for digging. One man cut a warder 
 down last spring with a heavy blow on the head, and then 
 attempted to kill him as he lay on the ground. The reasons 
 he gave were of the most trivial kind the warder (he said) 
 had reported him once, had refused him a pair of dry 
 stockings at another time when his feet were wet, and 
 denied him a drink of water just before the assault occurred. 
 Even these accusations were proved to be false. The 
 warder, however, was disabled for life. The convict received 
 a heavy sentence of further penal servitude. In another 
 instance, last year, the man admitted that he had no 
 grudge against the warder, and said he was just in a bad 
 temper because some other convicts had made some nasty 
 remarks to him. It is only fair to say that both these 
 crimes were disapproved of by the convicts as a whole. 
 
 There is, indeed, a public conscience of a sort, even at 
 Dartmoor. It is described by Mr. Basil Thomson in his 
 * Story of Dartmoor Prison.' Mr. Thomson's words must 
 be quoted as they stand. They will not lose point because 
 their author has been himself a Governor of Dartmoor. 
 
 THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE OF A CONVICT PRISON, CAST WITHOUT 
 IRREVERENCE IN THE FORM OF COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 1. Thou shalt not curry favour, or play the * copper.' 
 
 2. Be swift to avenge an injury, not only with the weapons God has 
 given thee. When struck, think not of losing marks for fighting, but 
 strike back ; to turn the other cheek is to play the coward. 
 
 3. Thou shalt not take a loaf of bread from thy fellow, for this is steal- 
 ing ; to take from the dinner tray is no offence. 
 
 4. When tobacco has been entrusted to thee to distribute divide it 
 equally. 
 
 5. Thou shalt not hide forbidden things in thy neighbour's cell to get 
 him into trouble. 
 
 6. When thou hast induced a warder to favour thee thou shalt not 
 betray him to his superiors. 
 
 7. Thou shalt not overwork thyself and so cause the standard task to 
 be raised, neither shalt thou shirk thy work so as to throw it upon others. 
 
 8. Thou shalt be kind to animals, tender and unselfish to the sick, 
 stoical in endurance of pain. 
 
 Well worth quoting also are Mr. Thomson's concluding 
 words : 
 
 The code breathes a spirit of courage, and when a net has been 
 
THE YOUTHFUL OFFENDER 23 
 
 dragged through England with meshes so exceeding wide that none 
 but the worst thousand have been landed in these walls, and this 
 thousand frame such a code, who shall say that mankind can be wholly 
 depraved ? 
 
 Who shall deny, either, that the governors of convict 
 prisoners know how to govern such men with insight, kindly 
 humour, and, above all, sympathy? 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE YOUTHFUL OFFENDER 
 
 IN the early days of prisons, until 1854, there was no 
 systematic segregation of juvenile criminals from the rest 
 of the prison population. Once a thief always a thief was 
 the rough and ready creed of our forefathers, and in 1833 a 
 boy of nine was sentenced to be hanged for stealing two- 
 pence worth of paint. He was not hanged, as it happened, 
 but the mere sentence is significant of how times have 
 changed since then. 
 
 In 1854 prison reformers at last secured a change so far 
 as children under 16 years of age were concerned. That 
 year reformatories were established, and juveniles began to 
 disappear from prison. But great as the reform undoubtedly 
 proved to be, it did not go far enough to achieve the purpose 
 for which it was conceived. All young prisoners over 16 
 were classed as adults. Consequently, lads and girls just 
 entering the criminal ranks were thrown into contact with 
 old offenders, with disastrous results. 
 
 The truth was that the high legal authorities of those 
 days did not believe in any reformation of criminals, old or 
 young, except through a system of stern deterrence by 
 punishment ; and those who thought differently had to 
 content themselves with saving the children. 
 
 All this has now passed away. In 1894 Mr. Asquith's 
 Departmental Committee on Prison Administration delivered 
 a sweeping and unqualified denunciation of the system of 
 subjecting youthful prisoners to the same ' rigid system of 
 prison discipline ' as those who had grown to full manhood, 
 and recommended the creation of a special class of prisoners, 
 to be called juvenile-adults, and to include criminals of 
 every grade over 16 and under 21 the limit being stretched 
 to 23 in cases of slow development who should receive 
 special training and separate treatment. This recommenda- 
 tion, as most people know, has been carried out in a very 
 complete and thorough manner by the present Prison Com- 
 missioners. 
 
24 OUR PRISONS 
 
 It has taken three forms. First, the establishment of 
 what is now known in the * Borstal Institutions ' as a penal 
 reformatory not a prison to which by the Prevention of 
 Crimes Act, 1908, lads over 16 and under 23, who have 
 committed offences serious enough to warrant a sentence of 
 penal servitude, may be sent and detained for not less than 
 one year and not more than three years ; secondly, the 
 creation of special treatment of youths committed for 
 ordinary offences, and serving their sentences in local 
 prisons, a system known as ' modified Borstal '; and, thirdly, 
 at Dartmoor the separation, under rules very similar to 
 those of the Borstal Institution itself, of all convicts between 
 these ages from other prisoners. Many of these juvenile- 
 adults at Dartmoor have committed murder, and are under 
 sentence of imprisonment for life. 
 
 The lives of lads in ordinary confinement and those of the 
 convicts will be described here, the Borstal Institution being 
 reserved for separate consideration. 
 
 The magnitude of the results of this movement, if it 
 becomes possible for the authorities to carry it out with 
 sufficient thoroughness, can scarcely be exaggerated. Mr. 
 Asquith's committee proved that a very large proportion of 
 the habitual criminals and worst recidivists at Dartmoor 
 began their careers of crime in early youth. It may be said, 
 in fact, that those old hands who are the despair of all 
 Discharged Prisoners' Aid Societies, and who have no sooner 
 served a sentence than they plunge into fresh crime and the 
 training of those less experienced than themselves, would in 
 time almost cease to exist were it possible to reform every 
 prisoner who committed his first serious offence before he 
 became a man. 
 
 First of all, however, the public must be under no illusion 
 as to the nature of the task which prison officials and prison 
 reformers alike have undertaken. Youths enter prison at 
 the time of life when the hardships offered by ordinary gaol 
 treatment are very little felt, and the joys of a criminal career 
 outside appeal with particular force. What does a lad who 
 has been brought up in a miserable home, sleeping on the 
 floor, perhaps in a dirty room, sweltering in summer, shiver- 
 ing in winter, care for a week or two on a plank bed in the 
 cells, followed by mattress and coverings far more comfort- 
 able than he has known since childhood ? Where is the 
 hardship in prison fare ' sufficient, wholesome, good ' to a 
 stripling who has had to pick up his grub where he could, 
 and who invariably prefers to spend any extra sixpence he 
 may lay hands upon in cigarettes or music-halls rather than 
 
THE YOUTHFUL OFFENDER 25 
 
 on a beef-steak ? Of course, porridge, potatoes, and suet 
 pudding are dull eating after the tasty kipper and seasoned 
 trash his poor little palate craves for ; but youthful appetite 
 after hard work and exercise soon settles that difficulty. 
 
 Confinement is horrid, and prison dress not only un- 
 becoming, but really uncomfortable to a gentleman who 
 wears little of anything at home, and that little mostly 
 buttonless but habit is second nature in the matter of 
 clothes. Prison hours, too, are certainly cruel to the 
 ' sport/ who thinks midnight the time when men of spirit 
 should be most awake and morning the appropriate hour for 
 deep slumber ; but sleep comes easily at any time when we 
 are young and there is too much to do in waking hours for 
 drowsiness to become oppressive. 
 
 What is left ? There is the irksome discipline, and the 
 shame for the disgrace to those he loves. But our young 
 hopeful has no wife and children who will suffer by his 
 punishment. If he has a mother or a sister who cares, and 
 who will be ashamed, the chances are he has already done 
 so much to distress them that any sorrow he knows they 
 feel now will hardly keep him awake an hour, even on a 
 plank bed, or spoil the taste of a choice potato. While as 
 to the discipline, he soons learns to look upon it as a neces- 
 sary evil. The fact is that for the young offender who has 
 led a hard life, and has imbibed from his surroundings and 
 friends a callous indifference to morality, prison as it is 
 to-day is no real deterrent to a life of crime. 
 
 The authorities, therefore, in considering the reformation 
 of youthful offenders, have had the problem to solve of how 
 to make prison an incentive to better things, with the know- 
 ledge that, as far as punishment goes, it must be ineffective 
 from its lack of hardness. It was a difficult problem. The 
 solution that has been tried, and is now beyond an experi- 
 mental stage, has been to draw the attention of the lads, 
 after a first short spell of cellular discipline, plank bed, and 
 sparse, dull food, to something which has been hitherto, 
 probably, quite outside the experience of most of them. 
 They have work which they can see will make them fit, 
 industrially, to take a better position when they leave prison, 
 if they put their shoulders to the wheel, than when they 
 went in. They have next the prospect of earning by good 
 conduct a substantial gratuity and other privileges which 
 appeal strongly to the youthful mind. Lastly, they have 
 friends, when they leave prison, who take them firmly by 
 the hand. In short, the system now established in local 
 prisons for treatment of juvenile-adults is based upon the 
 
2 6 OUR PRISONS 
 
 principle of first of all awakening interest and ambition, of 
 educating those who are dull and backward mentally, and 
 strengthening the physique of all by carefully regulated exer- 
 cises and drill, and finally of providing chances for all upon 
 discharge. 
 
 There is no oakum-picking or stone-breaking, except as 
 punishment for misconduct, for a juvenile-adult in a local 
 prison. He starts at once upon employment that will make 
 him deft of hand and train his eye and brain. He goes to 
 work with other lads at a trade which, if he chooses to per- 
 severe, he may make his own. Then he can qualify by good 
 conduct and steady industry for such luxuries as a piece of 
 carpet in his cell ; an iron bedstead instead of the plank ; the 
 display of photographs of friends and knick-knacks sent from 
 home upon his cell walls ; and last, and most inspiring, the 
 privilege of spending an hour daily in a recreation-room 
 with others of his kind, and enjoying quiet games and that 
 priceless boon in prison conversation. These advantages 
 cannot be obtained until the prisoner has gained substantial 
 marks and shown himself determined to profit by the 
 instruction and the work given for his improvement. This, 
 at the least, will take him some months to earn at the 
 maximum rate of eight per day. But they are worth striving 
 for, and when once won retaining. If the lad is dull or, 
 through playing truant in younger days, has not reached the 
 fourth standard before leaving school, he receives from a 
 qualified teacher a lesson for an hour daily, which is sub- 
 tracted from his work hours. Lectures are also given at 
 intervals on interesting subjects. Each day the lads are put 
 through a course of Swedish drill and gymnastic exercises 
 by a competent instructor, as well as the hour they exercise 
 in the open air. The trades they are taught, as far as the 
 time they are in confinement allows, include carpentry, 
 building, blacksmithing, tinsmithing, baking, market-garden- 
 ing, and agricultural work generally. It is not possible, of 
 course, to teach all these trades in every prison. Cooking 
 and baking were a speciality in one prison visited, which, 
 combined with practical teaching in the elements of seaman- 
 ship, including navigation, provide a considerable number of 
 cooks' mates and sailors for British ships, whose crews, 
 needless to remark, are not aware what port the handy 
 youngsters last hailed from. In another place outdoor 
 occupations are the rule ; in another the officers pride them- 
 selves upon the skill of their ' J.-A.V in building and brick- 
 laying. Everywhere it was noticeable that the attitude of 
 the officers towards these lads was largely parental. The 
 
THE YOUTHFUL OFFENDER 27 
 
 only complaint made was that in the majority of instances 
 the sentences of their pupils were too short for satisfactory 
 results to be obtained. 
 
 It is indeed obvious that the short sentence system for 
 youthful criminals is little less, to speak plainly, than an aid 
 and incitement to crime. The lad who is just entering the 
 ranks of the predatory ought not to be able to get away from 
 his confinement under a year at least. This is gradually 
 being recognized by the public, but the facts of the case are 
 far from being fully understood even yet. It is training 
 more than punishment that a juvenile-adult must receive in 
 prison. This training can only be successful if, as well as 
 making him a better fellow, it weans him from former 
 company, influences, and habits. This cannot be done 
 anywhere in less than a year. And, unless it is done, 
 imprisonment is actively harmful to a lad. The deterrent 
 side being almost non-existent for those prone to crime, it 
 follows that short terms of imprisonment to them are mere 
 irksome interludes between jobs. After one or two experi- 
 ences the edge of deterrence has gone entirely. 
 
 Here then, since very large numbers of lads are sentenced 
 for a few weeks at a time by the Courts again and again, is 
 the weakest link in the prison chain. Until it becomes law 
 that no youthful criminal, who in the words of the Preven- 
 tion of Crimes Act, 1908, is, 'by reason of his criminal 
 habits or tendencies, or association with persons of bad 
 character,' a danger to himself and the community, shall be 
 turned loose after one conviction until he can offer proofs of 
 a better mind, so long will our slums be breeding-places for 
 crime, and the street-corners academies for the promotion 
 of hooliganism, theft, and unnatural offences of every 
 description. 
 
 The prison authorities, however, can only do the best in 
 the circumstances in which they find themselves placed, and 
 under the short sentence system these circumstances could 
 hardly be worse as regards juvenile-adults in local prisons. 
 Yet something has been done, and no sooner has a lad so 
 committed himself that he is put away for a year or more 
 than, in the majority of cases, he returns to freedom far 
 better equipped physically, mentally, and industrially for an 
 honest life than he has ever been before. 
 
 The problem of the juvenile-adult who has been sentenced 
 to penal servitude is of another kind. Here at least there 
 is ample time for reformation. The difficulty is the tough- 
 ness of the material, and the hopelessness of the previous 
 history from a reformatory point of view. 
 
28 OUR PRISONS 
 
 Here are a few typical cases : 
 
 (1) A.B. 21 years old when convicted. Sentence five 
 years. Member of a very dangerous gang. His crime 
 breaking into a house and stealing plate with others. His 
 record ten previous convictions, the first crime committed 
 when he was less than 12 years of age. This is a bad case, 
 yet even after he had had seven convictions he was only 
 sentenced to nine months' imprisonment for burglary. 
 None of the former sentences exceeded three months each. 
 If that lad had been detained and trained earlier for a 
 couple of years, he would not be a convict now. 
 
 (2) C.D. A lad of 19 sentenced to five years' penal 
 servitude for deserting from the Army with stolen goods. 
 No relatives. No home. Convicted before five times for 
 theft, and firing stacks, and other wilful damage of property. 
 
 (3) E.F. 19 years old. A murderer. Killed and robbed 
 an employer. Has a father and a fair home, but is of 
 drunken habits, and consorts with low companions. Brutal 
 by nature and habit. Sentenced to penal servitude for life 
 i.e., 20 years. 
 
 (4) G.H. A murderer also, only 18 years old. Had a 
 good home, and very respectable parents. Before he 
 committed his crime was honest, quiet, sober, and indus- 
 trious. He killed his sweetheart by cutting her throat. 
 
 (5) J.K. Sentenced to ten years' penal servitude for a 
 criminal assault of a horrible character upon a woman. 
 Has a mother alive, and a good home, but was always in 
 the worst company. An idler and a spendthrift ; character 
 bad in every way. Had been in prison five times already. 
 Age 20 years. 
 
 Such examples need no comment. 
 
 The treatment given to the lads is very similar to that 
 which will be described later in the Borstal Institution. 
 They are all at Dartmoor, working in parties quite separate 
 from the adult convicts. Their occupations are often out 
 of doors as well as in. One meets them everywhere, great 
 strapping fellows, most of them bronzed by the sun, erect 
 and muscular and of good carriage. They sing in the choir 
 at chapel with much vigour. They can perform great feats 
 in the gymnasium. They are in charge of the stable, and 
 mightily proud are they of the great shire horses they lead 
 and groom and feed horses that do Dartmoor credit. 
 These horses are bred on the estate, are of the best blood, 
 and are in perfect condition and fettle, in hands which care 
 for them lovingly though they once strangled the life out of 
 a human being. It is therefore a fine healthy life for lads, 
 
THE NEW DEPARTURE 29 
 
 and as full privileges for good conduct and diligence are 
 given and the discipline against idling and breaking of 
 rules is strict and severe they are mostly well-behaved. 
 But reformation is a slow, very uphill task. The teaching 
 of the handicrafts is comparatively easy, for there is plenty 
 of time for it. But the building up of character is a different 
 matter. In so many cases there seems no foundation on 
 which to build anything. The one chance, say those who 
 work among them, is the constant drilling into the lads of 
 the necessity for hard, sustained work and self-control and 
 at the end of the sentence to get them away, if possible, far 
 from their old haunts, comrades, and temptations. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NEW DEPARTURE 
 
 IN the establishment of * Borstal Institutions ' at Borstal 
 and Lincoln for lads convicted of serious offences the Com- 
 missioners have made a departure which is likely to beget 
 consequences reaching far beyond the problem of juvenile- 
 adults. 
 
 It is a fundamental principle of English prison administra- 
 tion, which, it is hoped, will never be departed from, and 
 which is in no way contravened in a Borstal institution, that 
 prison life must be deterrent a punishment first of all for 
 the crime or misdemeanour that has been committed. On 
 the other hand, there is equal need, in the opinion of all 
 competent authorities, for influences to be set at work 
 within the prison walls which will, at least, provide a good 
 foundation for reclamation and reform, and, where there is 
 time and opportunity, go farther and send out the criminal 
 a more honest, more industrious, and more capable man 
 than he came in. 
 
 It is not to be denied, however, that a careful study of 
 prison life and discipline as it is to-day, while it must 
 impress any observer with the vast improvements which 
 have taken place of late years, and prove beyond dispute the 
 energy and determination of the authorities to make prison 
 administration both humane and reformatory, also discloses 
 the almost insuperable difficulty of infusing into ordinary 
 prison routine any real inspiration to the average prisoner to 
 do more than labour moderately well, behave discreetly, 
 avoid insubordination and open violence, and endeavour to 
 appear reverent and attentive at religious services and in the 
 presence of the prison chaplain. 
 
30 OUR PRISONS 
 
 The authorities are well aware of this, and one cannot 
 help surmising that by the creation of Borstal institutions 
 they have deliberately broken fresh ground, and intend to 
 make the treatment of this special class the class that, 
 above all others, needs spur and stimulus to well-doing a 
 precedent for reconstitution by degrees of prison life as a 
 whole. 
 
 In a former chapter the 'modified Borstal ' treatment given 
 to all lads sent to prison over 16 years old and under 21 or 
 23 has been described. But, interesting and excellent as 
 this is as a step towards humanizing prison life for young 
 natures still capable in most cases of responding to such 
 treatment, it is in no way to be compared as a departure 
 from ordinary prison standards of life and discipline to 
 Borstal itself. 
 
 The ' Institution ' mark the name has between 200 and 
 300 'inmates' we are not 'prisoners,' if you please, at 
 Borstal. All are 'juvenile-adults' i.e., between 16 years 
 and 21, rising to 23 in some cases. All are criminals in the 
 full sense of the word that is to say, young gentlemen who 
 have done something for which they would have received at 
 least twelve months' imprisonment in an ordinary gaol before 
 Borstal came into existence. As stated in a very excellent 
 booklet, commended to all who need information on the 
 subject, the 1908 Annual Report of the Borstal Association, 
 15, Buckingham Street, Strand : 
 
 Until a few years ago such a boy would have been treated in prison in 
 the same way as an old and hardened offender. 
 
 The ' Institution,' therefore, is not a feather-bed on which 
 first offenders, with tender mothers able to appeal to a 
 paternal J.P., may lie in lieu of the ' plank ' in the local prison. 
 
 The words of the Prevention of Crimes Act, 1908, which 
 has given Borstal a full legal status, are very convincing on 
 that point. 
 
 Where a person [it runs] (not less than 16, and not more than 21 years) 
 is convicted of an offence for which he is liable to be sentenced to penal 
 servitude or imprisonment, and is of such a character by reason of his 
 criminal habits or tendencies, or association with persons of bad char- 
 acter, that it is expedient that he should be subject to detention for such 
 term and under such instruction and discipline as appears most con- 
 ducive to his reformation and the repression of crime, the Court may 
 pass a sentence of detention under penal discipline in a Borstal institution 
 for a term of not less than one year and not more than three years. 
 
 Besides the fitness from a criminal point of view of the 
 lad for Borstal he must be medically certified to be sound 
 in body and mind. 
 
THE NEW DEPARTURE 31 
 
 Thus the guests of his Majesty assembled at the ' Insti- 
 tution ' must first have proved themselves on the way to 
 enter a life-long career of crime ; and, secondly, must be 
 ablebodied in every sense of the word. 
 
 Arriving at Borstal the new-comer, 'lumpy, slack, some- 
 times defiant, and generally out of condition ' vide the 
 report already quoted and, of course, well acquainted with 
 the inside of an ordinary local prison, where he had gra- 
 duated for small offences until it has lost all terrors, finds 
 himself in a new and curious world. There are, indeed, 
 cells and prison walls. There are also rules, and disci- 
 pline, and punishments. There are even warders and instruc- 
 tors who must be obeyed. And yet how different, how 
 strange a place is this after former experiences in prison ! 
 
 In prison all things go at a certain pace, and that not a 
 very swift one. Work is there, but one need not hurry over- 
 much. Regular attention is required, but after a time that 
 becomes mechanical ; regular obedience must be given, but 
 that becomes mechanical too. You are supervised by a 
 warder at your elbow. Should he be otherwise engaged 
 a moment should his eyes be called in another direction 
 then comes a precious interval for a ' loaf/ or a thrice 
 precious opportunity to communicate against the rules 
 with a neighbour. There are certainly rewards for diligence 
 in prison, but for the young and adventurous under a strict 
 disciplinary system to break a rule unbeknown to a warder 
 and to elude his eye is far more interesting than to be good 
 in order to earn a reward. Nay, one may be bad and get 
 good-conduct marks, too, by practice and observation. Now 
 at Borstal everything is different. The lads actually work 
 behind a warder's back. When the new-comer takes up his 
 task with the due deliberation to which he has been accus- 
 tomed elsewhere he finds himself out of touch with his 
 surroundings. If he does not remedy it a warder points 
 out the fact in a manner none the less definite because it 
 is more good-humoured than warders' comments are apt 
 to be elsewhere. If a pail of water is to be carried he must 
 walk at a swinging pace and not at the old shuffle. If there 
 is wood to saw, it must be sawn through sharply. At first the 
 new-comer refuses to realize the inevitable. He notices that 
 there are fewer warders than he has ever seen before. In 
 places he can see fellow-sufferers in blue clothes another 
 difference actually labouring entirely on their own, out of 
 sight for several minutes together of any warder. It must, he 
 concludes, be a place for taking things easy. He determines 
 to watch his opportunity and do no fool-work unless driven 
 
32 OUR PRISONS 
 
 to it by a warder's eye. He does this manfully, but not for 
 long. In the first place, as he is not in blue clothes there is 
 a warder not far away, who strolls up and makes observa- 
 tions which are pungent and invidious. In the second place 
 he gets no sympathy from his mates not a bit. Wherever 
 he turns they are briskly occupied, and he perceives in their 
 eyes as they watch his movements a critical observance which 
 warns him of what he may expect. And so after a time, 
 which varies in length according to temperament and pre- 
 vious training, the new-comer begins to work himself, harder, 
 more steadily, and with more concentration than he has 
 perhaps ever worked before. Sometimes he has to be 
 punished first. The rules of the Institution are strict, and 
 provide three grades for Borstal lads penal grade, ordinary, 
 and special. The new-comer enters the ordinary grade. If 
 he plays the fool after caution he goes into penal. In this 
 condition he is not allowed to earn any gratuity, to corre- 
 spond with friends, or to receive visits. He may have to 
 sleep on a plank bed, and be put to stone-breaking or wood- 
 chopping in a lonely little cubicle all day long. He soon 
 has enough of that. At the time the writer visited Borstal 
 no boys at all were in the penal grade. The candidates for 
 it are said to be becoming very rare. 
 
 The youthful criminal comes to his downfall through 
 over-energy of some kind, never through the lack of it. 
 This fact the authorities knew. Hence in Borstal they have 
 created the atmosphere and practice of continuous vigorous 
 doing which strikes a visitor the moment he enters and 
 remains in his mind afterwards. Merely to see the lads drill 
 is a revelation of what can be got out of material which 
 would, for the most part, be promptly rejected, apart from 
 actual physique, by the Army. The instructor of the gym- 
 nasium is as strict and smart as need be, and puts his pupils 
 through as thorough a course of Swedish gymnastics as if 
 they were sailors of the Fleet. How they run and jump and 
 vault and swing to the word of command ! A new-comer 
 may try shirking the work for a time, but drill, never. An 
 hour each day at least he is in perpetual motion, honest 
 perspiration bespangling his brow, his chest expanded, his 
 muscles braced, his nerves at full tension, his attention 
 caught and held in a vice, and every ounce of him in play. 
 
 The hours of work and the routine of labour do not differ 
 materially from those of ordinary prison life. The day starts 
 with the physical drill at 6 a.m., then breakfast ; the hours of 
 work are from 7.30 a.m. to 12 noon, and 1.30 to 5.30 p.m. 
 It is a revelation to any one accustomed to ordinary prison 
 
THE NEW DEPARTURE 33 
 
 visiting to see these Borstal boys. It is not only the brisk 
 energy they put into their labours, so ruefully observed by 
 bur new-comer, that is so refreshing, nor their greater free- 
 dom of action. I saw one lad hard at it with a pick right 
 away from all supervision, tackling his job with the trained 
 skill and concentration of a highly paid navvy. That which 
 makes Borstal unique in prison life is the difference in the 
 carriage and the bearing of its inmates from prisoners living 
 under ordinary conditions in gaol. In cannot be said that 
 there are any angelic faces at Borstal. In contour and 
 in feature they are as coarse and dour as those of other 
 criminals, but their expression in nearly every case is entirely 
 different. The shifty eyes have grown steady, the sullen 
 brows and lips are clear. Heads are held erect ; they walk 
 without a slouch. They come in as criminals ; they are 
 tainted, generally speaking, with the taint of early crime 
 the worst time, when crime has most power. They leave 
 Borstal in most cases, after one, two, or three years under 
 the hand of the law, better men than when they entered it. 
 
 There is still to be considered what happens afterwards. 
 Borstal is often but the prelude to reformation, and the 
 authorities who have devised Borstal treatment and who 
 watch over its results with the interest of a mother over 
 her child irreverent persons have compared it to a hen 
 with one chick have still to face the future that awaits 
 these well-drilled, well-trained inmates when they get outside 
 the prison walls. But that is another story. It is much 
 that we can say, here is a place which, receiving hard material 
 that has given repeated evidence oif depravity and shame, 
 can send forth its inmates as well set-up youths, accustomed 
 to hard work, active and alert, capable, if opportunity is 
 given them and the fates are kind, to prove themselves worth 
 in the labour market and in the ranks of honest men what 
 they could never have been had not they been sentenced to 
 detention in the Borstal Institution. 
 
 The old-fashioned prison administrator shakes his head 
 at Borstal. A prison where after five months' good conduct 
 a lad is allowed play for an hour every evening at chess or 
 draughts, or talk under supervision ; where food is better, 
 and there is an atmosphere of cheerfulness not unmixed 
 with kindliness on the part of warders and instructors, is 
 shocking to the old school. But they need not, in truth, 
 be really nervous. 
 
 4 It is not a namby-pamby method/ says the writer of 
 the report I have already quoted, 'and the panic-monger 
 who prophesies that the ambitious youth of the working- 
 
 3 
 
34 OUR PRISONS 
 
 classes will clamour for admission, through the gateway of 
 crime, to the advantages of Borstal, would be regarded as 
 a humorist by those who have been there and have " had 
 enough and learnt sense.'" There is continuous labour ; the 
 food, though rather more substantial, is quite as uninter- 
 esting as other prison fare ; and though there are extra 
 privileges to be earned, it takes a great deal of solid energy 
 and determination to earn them. 
 
 Above all, there is at Borstal an expenditure of great 
 moral and regenerative effort on the part of the responsible 
 officers. This is the case in all prisons. In these days, 
 governors and chaplains, and their helpers, the officers of 
 Discharged Prisoners' Aid Societies, concern themselves very 
 closely with plans for finding work, or a good start, for 
 prisoners upon discharge. The public little realizes how 
 much is done, the prisoners themselves never. But at 
 Borstal the solicitude for the lads on the part of their many 
 friends approaches the attitude of a father for his boys. The 
 very thoroughness and success of the work done for them 
 while they are there increases the anxiety of the various 
 workers that their labours shall not turn out fruitless through 
 a return to bad surroundings or a hopeless search for work. 
 The Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society, called the * Borstal 
 Association ' for special after-care of Borstal boys was 
 founded in consequence. If a lad after serving six months 
 in Borstal shows sufficient signs of amendment to warrant 
 the act, it is lawful for him to be released on a conditional 
 licence. He is handed at once in this case over to the 
 association, and according to its report of his progress is 
 he able to turn his back altogether upon confinement, or, 
 if he plays the fool, liable to be seized again, returned to 
 Borstal, and serve the portion of his sentence which was 
 unexpired the day he left. 
 
 What influence would Borstal exert in prison adminis- 
 tration as a whole ? The Institution has justified its own 
 existence. But that raises the much greater question 
 whether it may not prove the beginning of much more. It 
 is not for a mere observer to judge, but were it only possible 
 in some manner to achieve in other prisons the change of 
 bearing and expression to be seen in Borstal inmates now, 
 prison life and discipline would bear a new significance, and 
 need a new name. 
 
 It is not impossible. The way may be long, and progress 
 must be gradual, but the men who have established Borstal, 
 and those who are responsible for all that it has accom- 
 plished, may be trusted to do what lies in their power to 
 
THE WOMEN 35 
 
 make our prisons all that we could wish them to be. Borstal 
 is the brightest spot on the horizon of future prison adminis- 
 tration. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE WOMEN 
 
 THE number of women prisoners, including suffragists, is 
 roughly about one-ninth of the whole prison population. 
 In 1909-10 out of a total daily average of 18,923 inmates of 
 local prisons, 2,672 were females, while of persons under- 
 going sentence of penal servitude 2,975 were men and only 
 131 women. It is worthy of note, also, that whereas 
 statistics show that an increase in the daily average of 1,196 
 men had taken place in local prisons over the previous year, 
 the increase in the average number of women in these 
 prisons was only 8, while among the convict class it was 
 only i to 41 men. In regard to the length of sentences, 
 comparative figures published by the Prison Commission 
 show that, while the percentage of women sentenced for 
 short terms of imprisonment is practically the same as that 
 of men, nearly three times as many men, in proportion, 
 were sentenced to terms between six months and a year, 
 while for terms over a year the proportion was I'i8 per 
 cent, of the males against "14 per cent, females. 
 
 The problem of the right treatment of women in prison, 
 therefore, is far less in magnitude than that of their brothers. 
 A visitor feels this instinctively as soon as he enters a prison 
 for women. Prisons, like private dwellings, have their 
 atmospheres, which are not, by-the-by, always a question of 
 the class of prisoner under discipline so much as of the 
 personality of the governor in command. 
 
 The atmosphere of a prison for women is a peaceful one. 
 Though infinite patience, firmness, and, above all, watchful- 
 ness are required of the staff controlling it, there is less hard 
 steel needed behind the patience and the care than in other 
 places. 
 
 In one women's prison, for instance, eighty-nine inmates 
 were seen working under two wardresses. It is true that 
 many of these were second-division prisoners, or first 
 offenders in the Star class, but in no male prison would it 
 be safe to provide such slender supervision. This spectacle, 
 and certain familiar sounds in that work-room, caused the 
 visitor to inquire about the rule compelling silence among 
 prisoners, mentioned in the standing orders. The governor, 
 out of hearing of his staff, replied with gravity : ' That is 
 
36 OUR PRISONS 
 
 the rule, and any improper breach of it would be reported to 
 me and mean punishment for the offender. But they are 
 women.' 
 
 A female prisoner never sleeps on a bare ' plank. 1 She 
 has a mattress from the first. No woman, now, even 
 though sentenced to hard labour, works alone in her cell 
 unless she is a convict, and then for a much shorter time 
 than a man. An ordinary prisoner, if a woman, goes with 
 the rest on the first day to work in sewing-room, kitchen, 
 or laundry. ' Hard labour ' for a woman only means 
 washing or scrubbing the oakum - picking, which still 
 lingers in male prisons to a limited extent, is now abolished 
 from all up-to-date female houses of detention. 
 
 The dress of the women is, in general, a dark brown, not at 
 all unbecoming when the wearer is comely, with a rather 
 dainty white cap as head-gear. The ugly prison drab of the 
 men is not seen on the female side of the gaol. Mere male 
 readers may deem this a small point; ladies will know 
 better. 
 
 The work in a prison for women is mainly, of course, 
 sewing in all its branches. In the work-rooms, to which 
 allusion has been made, some were cutting out, some 
 trimming bonnets, some working sewing machines, and the 
 rest, the large majority, stitching shirts, blouses, and a 
 variety of garments which a male pen should not be called 
 upon to specify. There was no useless scrap work; each 
 prisoner in her degree was busy making clothing for prison 
 officers of both sexes, for Borstal lads, and the staff of 
 public departments. Then there is knitting from its 
 earliest stages up to the making of stockings and vests. 
 Both in this and in the making of clothes great pains are 
 taken with younger prisoners who are to remain any length 
 of time in confinement, in order to teach enough for a 
 thorough understanding of the uses of a needle. Many 
 know nothing whatever about housewifely accomplishments. 
 They cannot work, they cannot sew, they cannot clean. 
 They are often ignorant and lazy beyond belief. Therefore, 
 though it is seldom that a wardress is called upon to exert 
 physical force or hold her own, as a member of the male 
 staff may be obliged to do at any time, by sheer strength, 
 muscle, and nerve, yet she has her particular trials. Per- 
 sistence in effort to teach, patience and imperturbable good 
 temper in circumstances that make her fingers itch and 
 burn almost past endurance to give a good, sound slap, are 
 perhaps the qualities she needs to cultivate the most. If a 
 male prisoner may be brutal and violent, a female is often 
 
THE WOMEN 37 
 
 shifty, cunning, and sly extraordinarily sly or else preter- 
 naturally stupid. It is not a weakness of the powers that 
 be, it would appear, to overstaff the female side of a prison. 
 
 On the other hand, women prisoners are more sensitive to 
 punishment than men. They do not like to lose marks for 
 misconduct. Loss of marks means no remission of sentence : 
 less gratuity: fewer visits from friends, and fewer letters. 
 Least of all do they appreciate the punishment of being con- 
 fined during work-hours in their cells. The very leniency of 
 the authorities in allowing some conversation about work, if 
 kept within bounds, becomes a weapon in their hands if a 
 woman transgresses. 
 
 It is a very serious hardship to a woman to be denied all 
 association with her kind for a few days, and the dread of it 
 gives edge and power to the warning of an officer. This 
 punishment in most prisons is seldom put in force. There 
 is, besides, the dietary punishment extending, as with men, 
 to three days' bread and water in solitude. 
 
 There is no other punishment. No corporal chastisement 
 is allowed in any event or for any cause : no withdrawal of 
 the mattress from the bed; no stone-breaking or oakum- 
 picking for female prisoners. 
 
 Moreover, matters even as they stand are changing in the 
 direction of less rigorous confinement. A woman's cell is 
 the same in size and has the same amount of furniture as a 
 man's : but she has a chair instead of a stool. Women in 
 the second division the suffragists are placed in this 
 division are generally allowed now to have an iron bedstead 
 and a spring bed beneath the mattress instead of the mattress 
 on the wooden ' plank. 5 The tin mug and other ware is 
 going and crockery taking its place. * It means much 
 breakage,' say the officers pensively, ' but that concerns the 
 taxpayer, not us.' 
 
 The suffragists, it is said, take the credit for all this 
 improvement. They have certainly, when in prison, done 
 their best to make prison administration as expensive as 
 possible. Beyond this the connection between their agitated 
 ecstatics and a greater degree of comfort for the less-criminal 
 prisoner is not apparent. The lads under Borstal treatment 
 who have reached the Special Class have iron bedsteads too, 
 and even strips of carpet and looking-glasses. Yet they 
 have not tried to turn a prison upside down. A word must 
 now be said about the suffragists. It has been a matter of 
 speculation whether their escapades in prison would not 
 seriously affect the discipline of Holloway as a whole, and 
 even lead to an Amazonian revolt by-and-by. Careful 
 
38 OUR PRISONS 
 
 inquiry into the subject has had interesting and somewhat 
 suggestive results. 
 
 The conduct of these ladies at their worst, or best, un- 
 doubtedly made a deep impression upon the other inmates. 
 A few the younger members roused by the heroic ex- 
 ample, tried in a mild way to imitate it. But at the first sign 
 of determined repression from the authorities they promptly 
 gave up the struggle. The rest, representing public opinion 
 in the prison world, not only refrained from excesses, but 
 behaved with even greater decorum and punctilious respect 
 for rule than before. The reason they gave for this was 
 that as respectably, regularly conducted prisoners they were 
 thoroughly disgusted and even scandalized by the gratuitous 
 contempt of authority shown by their ' educated ' sisters. 
 They thought it improper to slap or bite a wardress, nay, 
 worse, gross bad taste. The revolt against authority was 
 neither tragedy nor comedy to them but merely vulgar. As 
 one expressed it, with a curling lip that would have done 
 honour to a suffragist apostrophizing a Cabinet Minister, 
 * A low lot, I call 'em ; a fair disgrace to us all.' 
 
 Alas ! who is a prophet in her own country ? 
 
 The improvement in modern prisons for women are not 
 to stop at iron bedsteads and earthenware mugs for second 
 division offenders. The windows of the cells, as at Borstal 
 and elsewhere, are being enlarged, and the system of ventila- 
 tion improved. The change is not wholly for the better, as 
 the uses made of the privilege are not always what they 
 should be, but the changes will be beneficial to health. 
 
 In one particular the matter of food women prisoners 
 do not gain any advantage over men. 
 
 Those who desire to picture the suffragist in prison sitting 
 in her cell in her brown dress and white cap will be in- 
 terested to know that, as a prisoner of the second division, 
 she receives ' B. diet.' This for breakfast means 6 ounces of 
 bread and a pint of gruel. Dinner consists of 6 ounces of 
 bread, 8 ounces of potatoes, and either cooked meat, beans, 
 and bacon, soup (one pint), or suet pudding. For supper 
 6 ounces of bread and the pint of gruel as at breakfast time. 
 
 Doubtless for those accustomed to the food eaten by 
 people of the middle class of England this B. diet is not 
 appetizing. That it is good of its kind can be vouched for, 
 but it is certainly plain, as all prison fare should be. 
 
 The ordinary female prisoner does not have B. diet to 
 begin with. It is a salutary rule, as I remarked before, that 
 the first taste of prison which is all many a short-sentence 
 prisoner gets shall be the most unpleasant. So, for the 
 
THE WOMEN 39 
 
 first week, and perhaps a little longer if she is remaining 
 under a month, the female of the third division in Holloway 
 and elsewhere receives, besides the bread and gruel for 
 breakfast and supper, only bread and one pint of porridge 
 for dinner, or bread and 8 ounces of potatoes, or bread and 
 suet pudding all nourishing, but particularly dull. After a 
 week or two, however, she rises to B. diet, and after four 
 months to C. diet, which means a still more substantial 
 dinner, and for breakfast tea instead of porridge, and at 
 supper cocoa. 
 
 In the matter of recreation women stand on the same 
 footing as men except when they have babies under 
 eighteen months old. A woman with a baby under this age 
 brings it into prison with her, and, while she works with 
 the others all day, seeing it only at intervals either to feed 
 or tend it, she has it all to herself at night, with the one 
 proviso that it must sleep in a cot of its own. 
 
 In the day-time the infant population of the prison is 
 gathered in a creche. There it has an uncommonly good 
 time and gets properly fed, bathed, and disinfected until 
 such time as its parents are released and it returns to the 
 squalor and the risks, the excursions and alarums of the 
 slum whence it came. A pathetic sight are those babies in 
 the prison creche. At the time I visited one took possession 
 of the governor's legs, and another hailed him uproariously 
 without the least regard for his position or his rank ; while 
 a third crowed in a cot, and a fourth was being trundled 
 about by a prison nurse, the monarch of all he surveyed. 
 Yet, merry as they were, the little creatures showed plainly 
 the signs of old neglect. They are too often the offspring 
 of drinkers and worse, and they have the time of their lives 
 when it happens that their natural guardians are caught in 
 the grip of the law. What happens at other times to them ? 
 What will happen in the days to come ? 
 
 The sight of the offspring of the female prisoners, many 
 of whom bring in relay after relay of babies as they drop 
 into temporary residence year by year, brought out with 
 peculiar force the central problem of all reformation of 
 character and the recovery of self-respect. 
 
 In the prisons for women, as in those for men, there is a 
 careful orderliness and atmosphere of industry, and the 
 regular performance of tasks which are measured out and 
 appraised in marks at their proper worth. All this is to the 
 good, and, with the deterrent effect of the strict discipline, 
 confinement, and irksome lack of change, is about the best 
 that any prison administration appears able to do at present 
 
40 OUR PRISONS 
 
 in the direction of checking criminal tendencies in women 
 and encouraging habits of sobriety and industry. 
 
 But when all is done that can be done here, how much 
 remains ! These mothers of the babies in the creche serve 
 their sentence more obediently and quietly than their 
 husbands or brothers. But, as the chief guides and 
 guardians of the generation to come these babies to wit 
 there is a far greater need for good influences to surround 
 them afterwards to prevent relapse to evil ways. All 
 administrators of prisons feel this deeply, and every en- 
 couragement is given that can be extended under the 
 regulations to helpers outside who will take charge of female 
 prisoners in homes or try by other means to place them in 
 the right paths and keep them there. 
 
 The weakest link in the chain is that, if the woman her- 
 self refuses to take advantage of the help offered, nothing 
 can be done, and she must be allowed to drift and go her 
 way until she appears again at the gate with another half- 
 starved infant at the breast. 
 
 Many of these women are of weak intellect, though not to 
 be certified as imbecile or of unsound mind. Others, again, 
 are simply hard and callous. They love their babies in a 
 way, and for a time. But they love indulgence in crime or 
 appetite far more. Prison as it is now has no terrors for 
 such women. It is a home of rest where, with their children 
 off their hands, they can recruit for next time, get good food, 
 good clothing, sound sleep at night, and regular employ- 
 ment by day, and so increase or recuperate their animal 
 spirits and vigour. 
 
 The time will come when public opinion, in order to save 
 the babies of such mothers, will insist that further obligation 
 shall be imposed upon women of habitual criminal instincts 
 beyond that of simply serving a sentence of imprisonment in 
 a comfortable gaol. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 NON-CRIMINAL 
 
 THE atmosphere of the gaols inhabited by the ordinary con- 
 victed prisoner is, naturally, more remarkable for regularity 
 and order than for bustle and variety. The convict prison 
 is equally orderly, with sterner features exemplified by the 
 rifles of the civil guard. But the temporary abiding-place of 
 the debtor, the person awaiting trial, and the gentry who, 
 although convicted, are placed in the first and second 
 
NON-CRIMINAL 41 
 
 divisions, has a different atmosphere altogether. ' From 
 information received,' as the police say, it would appear that 
 standing order and rules and regulations issued by the Prison 
 Commission, which lay down in careful detail the duties of 
 prison officers of all ranks and provide for every emergency, 
 are in ' trial ' prisons often practically non-existent. Readers 
 must not infer from this that these prisons are not under 
 regulation, but that so unlike are their inmates from the 
 population of other places of detention, and so various and 
 exceptional are the problems that arise as to details of 
 administration, that the men on the spot the governors or 
 their representatives are obliged to use a wide latitude in 
 the interpretation of their instructions. And they do use it. 
 
 This does not conduce to the peace of mind of a governor. 
 Indeed, if a constant strain of attention to perplexing detail 
 all day long, a wrong handling of which would mean serious 
 consequences, constitutes happiness to the official mind, the 
 governor of a ' trial ' prison must be one of the happiest men 
 in the service. 
 
 In the first place, a more heterogeneous collection of men 
 it would be difficult to find. Take the men awaiting trial. 
 In places where persons convicted of serious crime and of 
 ordinary offences have to be housed in the same establish- 
 ment they are classified as strictly as possible according to 
 the nature of the crime committed and kept absolutely 
 separate the convicts in their cells, the habituals here, the 
 ' Star ' class there, and the juvenile-adults elsewhere, and so 
 on. But in prisons where gentlemen reside because the 
 court will not accept bail for them, but who are not convicted, 
 the situation is, perforce, entirely different. A man awaiting 
 trial cannot be pigeon-holed, for the reason that to a certain 
 extent he is a free agent. He cannot even be bathed upon 
 his entrance if he objects always excepting those cases 
 where the condition of his person or clothes renders that 
 hardship necessary for sanitary reasons he need not have 
 his hair cut, or be shaved if he affects a beard. He need not 
 clean his cell, or even make his own bed, or wash up his 
 own tea-things, or eat prison food. Of course he must pay, 
 in these circumstances, for services of others ; but the pay- 
 ment does not exceed 6d. a day and 2s. 6d. weekly for rent 
 of * special cell.' He must also, if prison diet does not suit 
 his taste, pay for food to be brought in or arrange with 
 relatives outside to board him. Then his time belongs to 
 him. He may work if he wishes to do so at anything which 
 can be found for him to do in prison, or, ' so far as prison 
 arrangements admit/ he shall receive facilities to follow any 
 
42 OUR PRISONS 
 
 trade or employment he chooses, and any money he earns 
 by this means shall be his own. If he does work for the 
 prison authorities, and is afterwards acquitted, he shall 
 receive an allowance of money for what he has done. If, 
 however, he does not want to work, he need not, but may 
 kick his heels all day long, in his cell, of course, and read 
 whatever literature his friends may provide him with, so long 
 as it is not objectionable. 
 
 It will be seen, therefore, that the arrangement of a 
 schedule of employment for trial prisoners is not an easy 
 task. As a matter of fact, most of them prefer to work at 
 whatever there is going in the prison to doing nothing. But 
 they do not work particularly hard, and it is a voluntary act. 
 The majority also affect the prison dress, a comfortable 
 blue, and not a few live, and do not grow thinner, upon 
 ' B. diet,' viz. gruel and bread for breakfast, bread and 
 meat or bacon or soup or suet pudding for dinner, and 
 bread and porridge for supper. The rest, who feed them- 
 selves, have their meals brought in ready cooked in recep- 
 tacles provided for the purpose, and numbered, so as to 
 ensure the right man getting the right dinner. 
 
 The most obvious difference between the life of a prisoner 
 awaiting trial and a convicted prisoner lies in the visits and 
 letters he may receive from the outside world. An ordinary 
 prisoner cannot see or hear from any one for two months 
 after his committal. A trial prisoner every weekday may 
 receive two people for fifteen minutes, or longer if the 
 authorities allow it. He may also see his legal adviser or 
 that person's representative at any convenient time. It may 
 be imagined what this means to the officials where there are 
 large numbers of such prisoners, as at Brixton Prison. 
 There are ranges of cubicles and compartments here which 
 at the time the writer visited the place were full to overflow- 
 ing with chatting prisoners. In the case of the lawyers the 
 visitor and his client were sitting at a table and conversing 
 without being overheard by, but in sight of, a warder. Friends 
 and relations, however, cannot talk to the prisoner in private. 
 Prisoners of exclusive tastes have special private compart- 
 ments provided for them where, under the surveillance of an 
 officer, they may receive whom they please. But most 
 inmates prefer another arrangement. There are a series of 
 open compartments all forming one large room or hall, down 
 the middle of which runs a double wire screen. On each 
 side of this screen, in the compartments, the prisoners con- 
 verse with their friends, and behind them warders pace up 
 and down. The disadvantage of the publicity of the 
 
NON-CRIMINAL 43 
 
 arrangement is more than compensated, in the opinion of 
 the lower type of prisoner, by the facility with which he 
 may exchange unheard remarks of a private nature with his 
 visitor when the warder happens not to be close by. 
 
 There are, therefore, constant ingoings and outgoings at 
 these prisons, and, next to the governor, the busiest func- 
 tionary on the place is the keeper of the prison gates. He 
 is chosen, to judge by observation, because he has a 
 tongue of velvet, a most excellent temper, the vigilance of 
 a bull mastiff, and legs of tempered steel. The greatest 
 watchfulness must be exercised. Most of the trial prisoners 
 are there because it would be highly undesirable in the 
 interests of justice that they should be at large and able to 
 * fake ' evidence or destroy it. Consequently the purport of 
 their communications with their visitors and the purpose of 
 the calls of these visitors have to be sharply observed, espe- 
 cially the identity of their ' legal advisers.' 
 
 That the authorities are watchful the writer can vouch by 
 personal experience. But their fingers, though carefully 
 inserted in every pie where discipline or duty requires it, 
 must touch lightly. Tact, firmness, and good judgment are 
 particularly needed where the man you have in custody 
 to-day may to-morrow be given his freedom without a stain 
 upon his character. 
 
 The difficulty of classification has been mentioned. It is 
 not neglected. A trial prisoner who does not work must 
 remain in his cell, except when at exercise or seeing his 
 friends. A trial prisoner when set to work is placed where 
 the authorities decide, and no older prisoners who have con- 
 victions recorded against them are allowed to work in 
 association with the young men or with those who have not 
 been under trial previously. The work provided is, of 
 necessity, simple in character. Trades and skilled employ- 
 ment cannot be taught to so shifting a population. As to 
 the general position of a trial prisoner; he may have any 
 comfort within reason, together with a comfortable bed and 
 chair. 
 
 Then there are the offenders of the first division. These 
 include persons guilty of political offences or convicted of 
 libel, etc. They are allowed to have much the privileges as 
 prisoners awaiting trial. Bath and shaving are not com- 
 pulsory. The cell may be furnished, the food brought in 
 from outside, the cleaning and washing performed by others 
 and paid for. The first division man may wear his own 
 clothing ; he may work or not, as he chooses. He cannot, 
 however, be visited oftener than once a fortnight, but may 
 
44 OUR PRISONS 
 
 then receive three friends at a time. The debtor, who is 
 usually a man committed for non-payment of rates, comes 
 next to an offender in the first division. He may wear his 
 own clothes, and need not take a bath on admission unless 
 it is necessary. But he has to eat prison food, he must clean 
 and look after his cell himself, and he must work. Should 
 he have a trade or employment of his own he may work at 
 that, and any money he makes at it will be given him, 
 subject to deductions for his maintenance. During hours of 
 exercise he may associate with other prisoners confined for 
 the same offence. In the matter of visits he is more fortunate 
 than the first-division prisoner, as he may see his friends once 
 a week. 
 
 Take it all in all the debtor has matters made fairly easy 
 for him, and is easy to take care of. He is not an unknown 
 quantity to the officials. His work, such as it is, is generally 
 at their disposal. 
 
 The second-division prisoners come at the bottom of 
 the scale of the ' non-criminal ' class. They are persons 
 who, if committed by the Court according to the regulations 
 laid down by the Secretary of State a big 'if as it happens 
 will be ' of respectable antecedents/ and men who have 
 not committed a serious offence. It was the intention of the 
 Prison Authorities when second-division prisoners were 
 created that this division should segregate a large slice of 
 the people, especially the younger men and women, who go 
 under sentence as third-division or ordinary prisoners. It 
 was hoped that all magistrates and Courts of summary 
 jurisdiction would second the effort made to cut off from 
 association with ordinary criminals those who, after leading 
 a decent life, had suddenly fallen at once into crime. There 
 are so many of these, and their punishment, even with the 
 closest supervision, when they are thrust into ordinary 
 prison life, is often so hard in comparison to their offences, 
 that the Prison Commissioners hoped a means had been 
 found by creating a new class, of performing an act of real 
 humanity as well as of common sense, and placing a fresh 
 bar against the moral contamination which creeps in in 
 spite of all precautions where ordinary prisoners are gathered 
 together. But the Commissioners have failed. Though 
 50,000 to 60,000 ordinary prisoners are committed yearly to 
 prison without hard labour that is to say, because the 
 Court did not consider their offences were really serious 
 only 2,000 to 2,300 were placed in the second division. 
 
 It is not for a layman and an outsider to form a judgment 
 upon the reason for this circumstance, much less to express 
 
NON-CRIMINAL 45 
 
 any opinion reflecting upon our public services. But some- 
 where and somehow some one is blundering very seriously 
 over this matter. If there is one thing that is more obvious 
 than another when a prison is examined, it is that the 
 classification of prisoners as it stands is inadequate. Go 
 where you will you will see men, and women too, working 
 together at the same bench, or round the same washtub, or 
 sewing, side by side, who ought to be miles apart. It is 
 inevitable that this should be so in some degree, and with all 
 its disadvantages it is a lesser evil perhaps than the dull 
 monotony of separate confinement, which ought to be in the 
 opinion of many authorities entirely abolished. But surely 
 it should be made impossible for the old hands to annoy 
 or instruct the new. The Prison Commissioners know this, 
 and every device that can be invented within the prison 
 walls is brought into play with the object of segregation. 
 But the decision upon which division the prisoners shall 
 belong to upon his committal to gaol rests with the Court 
 which sentences him, and with that Court alone. The 
 Courts, therefore, must share the responsibility for inadequate 
 classification. 
 
 It is whispered that magistrates as a class know little 
 of prison life and its effects, and that Justices of the Peace 
 often know less. It is said that forms of commitment are 
 filled up by clerks of Courts by routine and rule of thumb. 
 It is declared that a notorious habitual thief often receives 
 just the same sentence as the lad who puts his hand for the 
 first time into his master's till. I know not how far these 
 reports are accurate. But this much is certain. Our Courts 
 of Justice have a very great responsiblity in this matter, and 
 prison reformers would do well to turn their attention to 
 them and personally question every Justice of their acquaint- 
 ance as to the procedure of his Bench, and ascertain precisely 
 what his view may be of the question, and what he does. 
 
 The offender of the second division is in the first place 
 kept absolutely separate from all ordinary prisoners. He is 
 dressed differently, in brown instead of drab ; he begins his 
 sentence upon ' B. diet,' with its substantial midday meal ; 
 he is not obliged to have his hair cut to prison length ; 
 he never sleeps on a plank bed without a mattress unless 
 he has to be punished for misconduct; he is allowed to 
 see his friends once a month instead of only once in two 
 months ; and he works from the beginning at interesting 
 work in association with others of his class. In other 
 ways he must conform to the ordinary prison discipline 
 and rule, and his life is not too joyous. The real hard- 
 
46 OUR PRISONS 
 
 ship of being in prison, a governor said to me once, is the 
 feeling that you are under rule, under a warder's eye, and 
 under lock and key, always. Therefore a second-division 
 man does not escape punishment. But he does not undergo 
 what the wife-beater, the habitual thief, and irreclaimable, 
 receives the ' A. diet ' of bread, porridge suet pudding, 
 and potatoes only ; the bare boards to sleep on ; the 
 solitary confinement for twenty-eight days. Such punish- 
 ment, with which, it must be remembered, all ordinary and 
 third-division prisoners begin, and properly begin, their 
 sentence, is not justly applicable to a man who goes to 
 gaol because he is unable to pay a fine for infringement 
 of some police regulation. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE PRISON STAFF 
 
 THE prison service is not one in which the public takes 
 much interest unless there is a 'scandal/ Then a great 
 number of persons without doubt or hesitation immediately 
 believe every possible and impossible fabrication of cruelty 
 which the ingenuity and prolific imagination of a prisoner 
 who has an honest living to make upon his discharge by 
 supplying * facts ' to some sensational periodical can invent. 
 This rather annoys the service. It does not make it very 
 angry, because if you castigate a service long enough it 
 becomes inured to the process. Prison officers never whine 
 about it, rarely grumble. Generally speaking, they consider 
 it as a grim joke rather than as anything that should be 
 worried about. 
 
 But it is not a joke. A self-respecting policeman knows 
 that if he has enemies he has also warm friends and 
 admirers, for whose sake he must strive not to let the 
 reputation of his service suffer. He knows that a policeman 
 in England is felt to be the friend and the protector even by 
 the very classes he must in duty lay hands upon. The 
 soldier and the sailor have equally the honour of their 
 service in the public mind to uphold. The prison officer 
 alone gets no public recognition for good service, only severe 
 punishment and abuse if anything goes wrong or appears to 
 be wrong. If any member of the ordinary public thinks 
 about a prison officer at all it is to picture a stern-visaged, 
 formal individual with a bunch of clashing keys, a harsh 
 voice and a heart as hard as the stones of the great walls 
 behind which he passes all his working life. He is placed 
 
THE PRISON STAFF 47 
 
 behind those walls, the public thinks, simply to punish, to 
 discipline, to compel. He may in his private life be no 
 worse than other men, but in his official capacity he is 
 thought to be a cold, unsympathetic disciplinarian at best, 
 and at worst a brutal petty tyrant, comforting himself 
 for a monotonous life by taking it out of his prisoners. 
 
 This is not true ; yet it is not unreasonable that the 
 public should be prejudiced unduly in this matter. There 
 is no natural link between the man in the street who has 
 not been committed for anything and the man in uniform 
 behind the 16 ft. wall. Neither party is at fault if misunder- 
 standing arises. Each should remember this. While the 
 man outside should try to put himself in a warder's place 
 and give him credit for making the best of a very hard job, 
 the officer inside should recollect as, to do him justice, he 
 generally does that in spite of the walls he can do much by 
 his treatment of the prisoners under his charge by justice 
 and kindness, and sympathetic discharge of his duty, which 
 does not mean weakness or indulgence to make it known 
 outside that such influence and power as he possesses over 
 his charges will be well and manfully used. 
 
 There is another point the usage of the subordinate 
 officers by their superiors and the treatment of those 
 superiors by the authorities at Whitehall. A great 
 diversity of opinion exists among those who come into 
 close contact with the prison service in this matter. I 
 have heard it said that there is a hard cast-iron discipline 
 throughout, and that no officer in a prison, the governor 
 least of all, can call his soul his own, and that every detail 
 of his work down to the smallest item of daily routine is 
 planned out for him, and that any governor who dared to 
 comment upon any of the ' Standing Orders,' either by 
 protest or criticism or question, would be held to be a 
 mutineer to whom promotion would never come. On the 
 other hand, I have heard governors say that they conducted 
 their work with sublime indifference to those standing 
 orders so far as details were concerned, and successfully 
 governed and administered their prisons to the satisfaction 
 of the authorities by following the dictates of common sense, 
 and by their personal knowledge of and sympathy with the 
 minds and aims of Commissioners in all-important issues. 
 
 Perhaps the truth lies between the two statements. The 
 system of government handed down from old days is 
 strictly military in the old-fashioned sense. As a system the 
 service is under autocratic rule ; and, given a Prison Com- 
 mission devoted to red-tape and pipe-clay, undoubtedly in- 
 
48 OUR PRISONS 
 
 dividuality and initiative might be crushed out or at least 
 discouraged in superior officers. The same might be said 
 of the Police, the Army, or the Navy. But the democratic 
 spirit of the age is too strong for old service conditions. In 
 a former chapter I stated that the keenest prison reformers 
 of all were the Commissioners themselves. I repeat the 
 statement now. This does not mean that they are not 
 masters in a very full and complete sense. They must be. 
 Every act of a governor, even of a warder, the Prison Com- 
 missioners may have to account for to the Secretary of State, 
 and this Minister to Parliament. Consequently the heads 
 of the service must keep a tight hand upon those whose acts 
 might get them into great trouble. It is also true that in 
 the past there has been discipline of far too rigid a 
 character. Some of it remains. A weak governor still feels 
 oppressed by its weight, and fears to speak above his breath 
 of things which in reality Whitehall would be only too glad 
 to hear him say distinctly. But red-tape and suppression 
 of reasonable opinions and ideas are not in accordance with 
 the wishes of the authorities. Evidence has been given 
 under the writer's observation that those officers who possess 
 the full confidence of Whitehall are the men with ideas, 
 enterprise, and energy. But they must know their work 
 first. Efficient workers and administrators, not talkers, are 
 wanted in prison service. 
 
 Then there is the work they have to do. This can only 
 be appreciated fully by watching them at it. 
 
 The life of the prison warder is one of routine, but a 
 routine of duties which require all his faculties to be con- 
 stantly on the alert. He is instructed that the chief purpose 
 of his existence and the path of promotion lies in his learn- 
 ing to handle and influence men. Day by day, hour by 
 hour, he stands or walks with his men, the prisoners who 
 are at work or exercise. His eyes must be always upon 
 them, noting their movements, whether they are industrious 
 or idle, brisk or slow, obedient to instructions or insubordin- 
 ate. He has to be a judge, therefore, of what they are 
 and what they do ; and everything he sees he must re- 
 member, whether for good or evil. But while this is his first 
 duty, to watch and put down with scrupulous accuracy 
 what he sees for the information of his superior officers, he 
 has a further and a higher duty if it is in him to perform it 
 that is, to influence and strengthen prisoners. A warder 
 who is simply a recording machine of all that happens, who 
 keeps order and does what he is told himself, and is content 
 with accurate performance of the duties of routine, is not a 
 
THE PRISON STAFF 49 
 
 warder who will rise high in the service and win the plums 
 which are offered to aspiring officers in the higher ranks. 
 Those who receive preference for higher grade appointments 
 are the warders who improve the morale of the parties in 
 their charge ; those who, having troublesome prisoners thrust 
 into their hands, so deal with them that they cease to be 
 rebellious and insubordinate. Such results can never, under 
 the present regulations, be acheived by harshness and bully- 
 ing. The opposite indeed is the case. Many governors have 
 told me in answer to the question How is a warder who 
 bullies his prisoners secretly found out ? that such a man is 
 bound to bring more complaints before the governor than 
 others as to the conduct of his men, and that nothing fills a 
 governor's mind so quickly with suspicion and watchfulness 
 in regard to a warder's conduct as receiving from him many 
 complaints against prisoners. 
 
 Therefore, though most of the work of a warder with the 
 prisoners in his charge must take place when no other 
 officer is by or within hearing the interest of the warder 
 so clearly lies in proving that his men can be orderly, in- 
 dustrious, and well-behaved without the imposition of 
 punishments that a natural and effective safeguard exists 
 against tyranny and spiteful treatment of prisoners. 
 
 No warder may give punishment himself to a prisoner. 
 He must report misconduct in writing, and his report goes 
 before the governor for decision. Any prisoner, if he has 
 reason to believe that he has been unjustly reported by a 
 warder who owes him a grudge, may get access to the 
 governor and say so. And though one or two complaints of 
 such a character might not be visited against the warder, if 
 they became at all common the officer would presently be 
 watched without his knowledge and quietly tested, and 
 dealt with accordingly. 
 
 The responsibility for all acts of every member of the 
 staff of a prison rest ultimately upon the shoulders of the 
 governor. The organization of the service provides that 
 within the walls of his prison he shall be, on the one hand, 
 absolute master ; on the other hand, if anything goes wrong 
 he is responsible. 
 
 ' The governor/ say the standing orders, ' will have the 
 general control and management of the prison, will himself 
 conform to all rules and instructions, and will see that all 
 other officers obey them.' These * rules and instructions/ it 
 may be stated, cover thirty-one printed pages, from the order 
 dealing with the capture of escaped convicts to that which 
 directs the chief officer of a prison how to attach papers to 
 
 4 
 
50 OUR PRISONS 
 
 a letter when forwarding reports to the Commissioners. 
 Many orders are excellent and obviously necessary. But, 
 after all, their chief significance lies in what is left out. 
 They provide the flesh and blood and bones of a governor's 
 duty and power. He himself has to put in the soul. As the 
 governor is so will the prison be. A good governor can turn 
 the most hopeless prison into a thoroughly efficient institu- 
 tion. A bad governor converts the best-ordered establish- 
 ment into a hotbed of slovenliness, discontent, and finally of 
 mutiny. 
 
 Such a post is a responsibility the weight of which is 
 entirely unrealized outside the service. In the smaller 
 prisons, where no deputy-governor is allowed, the governor is 
 practically never off duty night or day. He may be called 
 up at any time to face any emergency. Every prisoner who 
 has a complaint may bring it to him direct ; every paper, 
 every report, every statement, whether of the conduct of the 
 men or of the storekeeper's accounts, has to be initialled by 
 him. Every letter to or from the prison must pass through 
 his hands. Every one of the thousand and one problems, 
 small and great the smaller ones being often the most 
 difficult to decide is placed before him for solution, and 
 his judgement is final. There is no appeal against it except 
 to the Prison Commissioners. A governor must never be 
 hurried or flurried; always be equable in temper ; just, yet 
 strict in discipline ; ready to hear all sides ; able to hold his 
 own and judge, always, without fear or favouritism. Then 
 he is under constant supervision from headquarters. So 
 serious and even vital is it that a governor shall never go 
 wrong that the central authority, while placing him in full 
 command of all he surveys at home, takes particular care 
 that he shall be under no delusion as to his absolute subor- 
 dination to the main authority elsewhere. In our prison 
 system, as in all other services, the standard is set by the 
 supreme authority. At the present time that authority is in 
 earnest, in passionate, deadly earnest, to promote at once a 
 humane yet thoroughly effective strict government and 
 management of prisons. First and last the central power is 
 human and flexible, elastic, personal. It may make mistakes, 
 but it is alive. Once upon a time there was deadness and 
 lifeless, stony regularity. The tradition of this exists even 
 yet, but a vigorous broom has been at work destroying cob- 
 webs since 1894. By the irony of fate this is not known to 
 the public at large. Traditions of the past are hard things 
 to kill ; and it is still firmly believed by otherwise intelligent 
 persons of quite lofty position in the legal and other worlds 
 
THE PRISON STAFF 51 
 
 that prisons are governed by rule of thumb and governors 
 are encouraged to believe that an iron discipline and cold 
 regularity should be their main object in administration. 
 
 Then there are the chaplain and the doctor and their sub- 
 bordinate officers. 
 
 The doctor in a large prison has an extremely busy life of 
 it. There are not merely the ailments that prisoners suffer, 
 or may suffer, which he has to watch and deal with, but the 
 countless and marvellous complaints which prisoners say 
 they have and where there is a nice hospital ward are 
 intensely clever in attempts to prove that they possess. All 
 these must be diagnosed as well. And it may be said at 
 once that, serious as it is for a medical officer to find that he 
 has been deluded by a would-be invalid into giving a man in 
 health treatment he did not require, it would be ten times 
 more serious if, through carelessness or irritation at imposi- 
 tion, he were to neglect a real illness and refuse a sick man 
 the care he needed. 
 
 The chaplain, next to the governor, should exercise the 
 greatest personal influence in the prison ; and perhaps he 
 alone receives from the outer world some of the credit he 
 deserves. It is his duty, besides religious and spiritual 
 ministrations, to visit every prisoner at times, and, where 
 he can get hold of a man's heart or mind, bring earnest per- 
 sistent influence to bear to soften and improve it. It is an 
 uphill, weary task in most cases. There are the younger 
 men, who may be influenced, and here and there the men of 
 better class ; but as a rule prisoners are a class of persons 
 whom only a personality of the most exceptional kind can 
 awaken to a real sense of better things in such a way that 
 the improvement will be permanent. Prison chaplains do 
 their best, and how much that means the results achieved do 
 not adequately represent. But the service needs for this 
 duty clergymen of very commanding abilities indeed. 
 
 As a whole, and in spite of black sheep, the staff of our 
 prisons are men and women of whom the nation should be 
 proud. They are neither callous nor hard in their attitude 
 to prisoners. They strive, with a courage and devotion 
 which is unknown to the public outside, toward the ideal set 
 before them to reform those in their charge. When they 
 fail, it is not so much from want of effort as from the 
 difficulties and obstacles which are in their path. Some- 
 times they succeed not only in doing good to those they 
 serve, but in awakening a real and permanent feeling of 
 gratitude and friendship. 
 
 In one gaol a man of better class was imprisoned for a 
 
52 OUR PRISONS 
 
 serious crime. He became so much depressed that there 
 was fear that he might commit suicide ; but he won through. 
 Upon his discharge he told a friend that he owed everything 
 to his warder, who, he said, had saved him from himself and 
 shown him what true manhood meant. They became fast 
 friends and correspond to this day, though that man has 
 never been inside a prison again and never will. There are 
 more warders of this class than is realized by those who 
 have not seen them at their work. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 REFORMATION 
 
 WHAT happens to prisoners after they have served their 
 time ? Upon the answer, if it were possible to know the 
 full and complete facts, would depend the existence of our 
 present system of prison administration. That system has 
 been reviewed, or rather indicated in as much detail as 
 circumstances permitted. All that it attempts, and that 
 which those who are responsible for it would have it do, 
 is contained in the well-worn phrase ' to deter and to 
 reform.' 
 
 In the old days prison was primarily, as everyone knows, 
 an act of vengeance for wrong done, being, in short, only a 
 substitute for the ear-cropping, nose-slitting, branding, and 
 the rest of it dear to our rough-and-ready forefathers. All 
 this has passed away with the one exception of the lash for 
 mutiny and murderous assault in prison a rare exception 
 in these days. In place of punishment for punishment's 
 sake there is useful, educative labour provided for all, from 
 the lad who is sentenced to a week for skylarking against 
 borough or county by-laws to the recidivist doing twenty 
 years for manslaughter or worse. There is, moreover, direct 
 encouragement and stimulus given for good behaviour and 
 industry by the institution of the mark system, or, as it is 
 termed, the ' System of Progressive Stages.' This has 
 been casually alluded to already, but in connection with a 
 study of the results of our prison system it merits special 
 mention here. 
 
 ' A prisoner,' say the regulations, ' shall be able to earn 
 on each weekday eight, seven, or six marks, according to 
 the degree of his industry. On Sunday he shall be awarded 
 marks according to the degree of his industry during the 
 previous week.' 
 
 The only time when a prisoner does not receive any 
 
REFORMATION 53 
 
 marks at all is when he is under punishment for some 
 serious breach of discipline or for idleness. 
 
 The number of marks a prisoner may receive per day 
 depends on whether he does a minimum day's work (six 
 marks), a medium amount (seven marks), or a maximum 
 quantity (eight marks). The amount is awarded by the 
 officers in charge of him, usually the warder and the in- 
 structor. The manual skill of a prisoner, it is specifically 
 ordered, shall have no relation to the marks he earns. 
 Industry and general behaviour alone can help him. 
 Warders and instructors charged with the duty of marking 
 are very carefully trained in this matter and their conduct 
 sharply watched by superior officers. Prisoners may, and 
 do, complain direct to the governor if they think they are 
 not fairly treated. The results of marks are regulated as 
 follows : A prisoner passes through four stages that is, if 
 he remains long enough in prison, or as many of them as 
 his term allows if he is under a short sentence. He begins 
 in the first stage, during which he must earn 224 marks. 
 This will take him 28 days if he is industrious, or 37 days 
 if he does only the minimum. During that time he receives 
 no gratuity or other privilege. When he is through it and 
 in the second stage he gets a gratuity of id. for every 20 
 marks earned if he does not remain to the end of his second 
 term. If he does remain he is credited with is. for the 28 
 days. Arriving at the third stage, which will take him two 
 months from the day he enters prison if his conduct is 
 exemplary, he rises a step, and as well as other privileges 
 receives credit for is. 6d., or, if he leaves prison before his 
 third month ends, at the rate of id. for every 12 marks 
 earned. In the fourth or last stage he gets 2s. after earning 
 the 224 marks, and from that time onward, so long as he 
 remains in prison and continues to be well-behaved and 
 industrious, he will have 2s. placed to his account upon 
 the completion of every 224 marks. Besides the money, 
 which after a long sentence mounts up to a respectable 
 sum, a fourth-stage prisoner is allowed to have a library 
 book (a novel or anything he fancies) twice a week, as well 
 as books of instruction ; he may receive school instruction 
 if lack of previous education requires it ; he may be put to 
 any lighter and pleasanter work than ordinary prisoners ; 
 receive or write a letter every two weeks (if he continues to 
 earn eight marks a day), and receive a visit from a friend 
 or relative lasting half an hour and another letter once a 
 month. If he is in the fourth stage when he is released he 
 receives id. for every 10 marks earned while working in that 
 stage. 
 
54 OUR PRISONS 
 
 These ' incentives to industry and good conduct ' are the 
 sign-manual of the authorities that they intend prison life to 
 reform as well as to deter. There are, of course, a score of 
 other ways in which a governor who watches his prison 
 family carefully and is aware of the infinite variety of human 
 nature and needs, both spiritual and physical, can and does 
 harden or soften the term of confinement for a man. There 
 is work a prisoner enjoys and work he hates. The tastes 
 of prisoners differ as widely in this matter as their capaci- 
 ties, so that, quite apart from regulations, encouragement to 
 those who do their best and warnings and chastenings for 
 those who will not go on quietly all the time, their extent 
 and effect depending principally, of course, upon the percep- 
 tion and care and personal interest in the matter of the 
 officers beginning with the governor himself. 
 
 There is, besides, the personal ministration of the chap- 
 lain, whose particular business it is, or should be, besides 
 conducting religious services and fulfilling other spiritual 
 duties, to make a special study of the character and dis- 
 position of each prisoner so far as this may be practicable, 
 and know how to help him to become a better man. Upon 
 the chaplain, indeed, rests the chief responsibility of bring- 
 ing into prison life that human sympathy and compassion 
 and brotherly helpfulness of strong personal influence with- 
 out which many a soul stricken with remorse or depression 
 finds lonely confinement, however humane, a living hell. 
 The chaplain has no disciplinary duties. The manner of 
 the warder must be the same, or almost the same, to all. 
 The governor must carefully refrain, except under special 
 circumstances, from anything which would appear to indi- 
 cate special notice of individual prisoners. But the chaplain 
 is not under any such disability. He visits men in their 
 cells when and how he pleases. He has neither to watch 
 for faults nor to command obedience. He may be helper, 
 friend, counsellor, and brother if he has it in him to be 
 any of these things to men who have fallen. 
 
 There should be, therefore, no just cause for any prisoner 
 to say that when he was in gaol he had no one to think of 
 his future or care whether he lived or died. 
 
 There remains the fate of prisoners upon release. In 
 gaol a man is protected from himself. The keynote of the 
 system is to remove from him any responsibility, except to 
 behave and to do what he is told. He is placed in a groove, 
 in short, and so long as he runs smoothly along it he is safe. 
 This is undoubtedly beneficial, up to a point. It teaches 
 self-discipline and self-control. Criminals as a rule are 
 
REFORMATION 55 
 
 impulsive, violent, and ill-ordered in mind or body always 
 excepting certain classes of hardened offenders, who, of 
 course, are not in question now. So it is well for prisoners 
 to learn that hardness comes to those who kick, or sulk, or 
 deceive, and advantage to those who obey, work hard, and do 
 not shirk. But the benefits of such a system are obviously 
 limited, and therefore, apart from the necessarily uncertain 
 quantity of the chaplain's personal hold or the governor's 
 genius for handling men, prison life can at the best only 
 provide a foundation for that most comprehensive and 
 complicated process we call reformation of character. 
 
 No sooner does the prison door close behind the offender, 
 no sooner is he free once more to drink, or be sober, thieve 
 or live honestly, behave peaceably or take to violence, work 
 steadfastly as he did in gaol or by fits and starts as he did 
 before he went there, than it is to be feared prison habits 
 tend to fall from him, and be left behind as the drab 
 clothing marked with the broad arrow. 
 
 What happens? There are, of course, the 'D.P.A.V 
 discharged prisoners' aid societies. They are spread, in one 
 way or another, all over the country. They employ a host 
 of good men and women, paid and unpaid, striving to pick 
 up the poor soul that has come out forlornly to face a 
 frowning, respectable world, and give him the start or the 
 opportunity he requires to prevent despair, or evil impulses, 
 or companions, tempting him back to the paths which will 
 surely bring him once again within the prison walls worse 
 than when he left them. 
 
 The work of such societies, in which must be included 
 the Church Army and Salvation Army, is so generally 
 known that no description of it is needed. Nor would this 
 be possible without some invidious distinctions. It is good 
 work in a great number of instances ; in all it is well- 
 intentioned, and in some it is admirably thorough and well- 
 organized. But if it is reviewed, as it will be here, in its 
 relation to our prison system as a whole, it can only be pro- 
 nounced as totally inadequate and unsatisfactory in its 
 results, and futile in the last degree as a force for really 
 reducing the crime of the country. 
 
 This is not, let it be said with all possible emphasis, from 
 lack of effort or goodwill on the part of the rescue agencies 
 concerned. Nor is it from neglect on the part of the prison 
 authorities. Not only do the Commissioners order and the 
 governors of prisons give every facility to representatives 
 of D.P.A.'s to visit prisoners before discharge, ascertain all 
 about them, and so procure necessary information to enable 
 
56 OUR PRISONS 
 
 them to judge what can be done in each case, but governors 
 and chaplains often personally work as administrative 
 members of the societies, and give the most anxious 
 thought and much hard labour in their spare time in 
 promoting the welfare of prisoners after discharge. In 
 some places, indeed, the D.P.A. practically consists of the 
 governor, the chaplain, and a few ladies in the neighbour- 
 hood. 
 
 But in spite of the best intentions, good work, and many 
 individual sucesses, our army of rescue workers for reform 
 of criminals is beaten by the common enemy. One cause 
 for this is not far to seek. The army is without the first 
 elements of cohesion of any kind. The units into which it 
 is inevitably divided e.g., the various agencies at work 
 have no unity of policy, still less any system of co-operation. 
 In some places they actually compete for custom, by which 
 the wily criminal seeking only for the loaves and fishes that 
 follow on ' conversion ' is not slow to profit. In other parts 
 there are but shadows and delusions, scattering half-crowns 
 for railway fares and boots. There are, on the other hand, 
 to be found among some of their workers the shrewdest 
 brains and truest hearts in charitable work, but no means 
 exist by which such men or women can become a power to 
 leaven the inevitable mass of blunderers, who at present create 
 far more confusion by inexperience than can ever be counter- 
 acted by the real reformers. Then the authorities them- 
 selves are not guiltless. Though they have pointed out the 
 evils of competition and overlapping on the one hand, and 
 have strengthened the work where possible by throwing the 
 energies of the superior prison officers into the scale, the 
 system by which official aid is given to the funds of D.P.A. 
 is still extremely questionable. The standing order on this 
 point directs that the amount which may be contributed 
 toward the expenses incurred by such a society shall not 
 exceed 2 los. for 100 persons, or 6d. a head. Great care 
 is taken that the societies are bona fide and comply with 
 proper regulations, all of which is as it should be ; but the 
 sum of 6d. for each prisoner dealt with is quite inadequate 
 where any real pecuniary aid is required. 
 
 It is easy, however, to criticize, and it must be borne in 
 mind that the problem to be solved by the authorities in this 
 matter is extremely difficult. No Secretary of State would 
 be prepared to authorize the Commissioners to subsidize 
 D.P.A.'s in a manner sufficiently substantial to allow of 
 official interference in their management. Nor if this were 
 possible would it be an unmixed blessing to the funds of 
 
REFORMATION 57 
 
 the societies. For wherever State aid increases, voluntary 
 contributions languish, and the end would be that the State 
 would be left with the whole burden of financing and staffing 
 the societies which at present draw their chief support from 
 private philanthropic sources. Further, reformation of dis- 
 charged prisoners is seldom a question of money and official 
 routine work. It requires, more than most forms of charit- 
 able organization, spontaneous initiative and individuality of 
 effort. Such plants grow best upon free soil. What a 
 discharged prisoner needs most of all is a faithful adviser 
 and friend ; next the opportunity of work under conditions 
 which will give him a living wage, and keep him out of 
 mischief; lastly and only in a certain number of cases 
 the money necessary to buy him clothes and tools, and 
 provide for his needs until the necessary work turns up. 
 This money as often as not he can provide himself out of the 
 gratuity due to him as a result of his labour in prison. 
 
 What appears to be most needed is that co-ordination of 
 the most systematic and comprehensive kind should be 
 instituted among all agencies and persons engaged in 
 reformation and rescue work. Next, that through such co- 
 ordination, a common principle of action should be created 
 and underlie all efforts of societies recognized by Govern- 
 ment namely, the principle of thoroughness and adequate 
 treatment where anything is attempted for a prisoner. 
 Those agencies which scatter doles or content themselves 
 with setting men up with stock to hawk in the streets the 
 surest way of leading men into temptation and bad company 
 should be so dealt with by the authorities that they can no 
 longer exist. Where, however, good work is done, and the 
 system of a D.P.A.'s activities is proved to be up to a recog- 
 nized standard of efficiency, aid should be granted with no 
 sparing hand always provided that there is proof of proper 
 efforts, first of all, by the managers to enlist private support 
 and sympathy. 
 
 It is hardly possible, however, for the authorities to move 
 first in this matter. A spirit of co-operation and true 
 fellowship in charity must first arise among those who are 
 responsible for the societies as they exist to-day. There are 
 signs that this may come, and from personal observations I 
 am certain that if any approach were made to the Commis- 
 sioners for a revision of the whole system of grants and 
 official connection of the authorities with D.P.A.'s by the 
 societies, they would receive a most sympathetic reception. 
 The Commissioners are well aware of the impossibility of 
 prison discipline alone preventing recurrence of crime. 
 
58 OUR PRISONS 
 
 They appreciate all that is being done, and that could be 
 done, by voluntary and independent effort after discharge, 
 and, given a spirit of initiative and combination among the 
 societies in this direction, the authorities, it is confidently 
 asserted, would not fail to do their part. If evidence of this 
 is needed, the conditions under which the Borstal Associa- 
 tion works with the authorities in its reformation of juvenile- 
 adults who have served their term at the Borstal institu- 
 tions supply it in full measure. The system employed by 
 the association for the after-care of lads has been fully 
 described more than once. Here it is only necessary to 
 point out that by the Prevention of Crimes Act, 1908, 
 it is provided that : * Where a society has undertaken 
 the duty of assisting or supervising persons discharged from 
 a Borstal institution . . . there may be paid to the society 
 out of money provided by Parliament . . . such sums on 
 such conditions as the Secretary of State, with the approval 
 of the Treasury, may recommend.' 
 
 Is it too much to say that since this is now the law as 
 regards one section of prisoners, the societies which deal 
 with the reformation of adult offenders have the matter to a 
 large extent in their own hands ? 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE SENTENCE 
 
 THE length of a prisoner's life in gaol depends first of all, as 
 everyone knows, upon the will of the Court which convicts 
 him of his crime. It is necessary, therefore, that the public, 
 in considering the circumstances of prison administration, 
 should also consider, and consider well, the administration 
 of justice by its magistrates, justices of the peace, and 
 Judges of the High Court. We expect prison authorities to 
 improve a man morally, mentally, and physically in confine- 
 ment. We require them to provide him with proper food 
 and proper clothing, a decent bed, and a cell fit for human 
 habitation. Prison officers must, under severe penalties, 
 treat him with humanity and consideration. A doctor must 
 always be at hand to attend him in illness. The chaplain is 
 provided for his spiritual needs. The governor controls the 
 whole largely in the prisoner's behalf, and at the close of his 
 sentence is frequently instrumental in procuring him the 
 help he needs to make a fresh start in life. 
 
 But we are all apt to forget that there is an authority 
 holding all convicted persons in its hand which is under no 
 
THE SENTENCE 59 
 
 control except that of statute, custom, and tradition, which 
 cannot be directly called upon by Parliament to account for 
 itself, and which has absolute powers the Court. 
 
 It is the boast of Englishmen that their Courts of Justice 
 are the cleanest and the surest in the world. Our Judges 
 are incorruptible ; our stipendiary magistrates are lawyers of 
 ripe experience and unblemished honour; and our J.P.'s are 
 men of good report, and by every canon of the Bench are 
 under a responsibility to act justly and to deal without fear 
 or favour with all who come before them. In so far as 
 right judgment upon an accused person's guilt or innocence 
 is concerned, our Courts deserve all that is said or believed 
 of them. It is true that gentlemen reach the Bench who 
 might, so far as their technical knowledge is concerned, 
 have qualified for the coveted J.P. on the same principle as 
 the chief of a lynching party the writer belonged to once in 
 the West, who was unanimously elected by us to the post of 
 Judge because it was satisfactorily proved that he knew 
 nothing whatever about law. But the clerk of the Court 
 knows law, and common sense and good judgment are not 
 the monopoly of one profession. When, however, the guilt 
 of the accused has been proved there is a further question 
 a very serious and most important question to be decided, 
 and one which the Judge alone decides : the nature of the 
 punishment which will fit the crime ; and, if that punish- 
 ment be imprisonment, whether the culprit is to be placed in 
 the first, second, or third division ; whether he is to have 
 hard labour, and for how long he is to be under detention. 
 
 It is just here that, speaking with all respect and deference 
 for this great public service of ours, I venture to believe a 
 vast improvement is needed if the administration of the 
 prisons of this country is to have a fair chance, if those 
 unfortunate persons who are more sinned against than 
 sinning are to be justly treated, and if the hardened sinner 
 is ever to receive what he deserves. 
 
 Good intentions and zeal for duty all our Judges and 
 justices possess. Their knowledge, their acumen, their 
 sense of proportion in considering not only actual guilt 
 but the degrees of guilt, are admittedly very great indeed. 
 But how many of them, from the county J.P. to the Judge, 
 really know the inside edge, so to speak, of prison life and a 
 prisoner's way of looking at it ? The agony such life may 
 be, in the third division, to the first offender ; the comfort 
 and relaxation and health restorative it often is for a short 
 spell to the old hand. Then, worse still, take penal servi- 
 tude. When a Judge of Assizes sentences a lad of 18 to 15 
 
60 OUR PRISONS 
 
 years for some violent outrage committed in a fit of drunken 
 passion, an isolated act in a life otherwise respectable and 
 decent I speak of a case within my knowledge does he 
 really know what he is doing ? Has he been in and through 
 Dartmoor and watched the faces of some of the juvenile- 
 adults there, and studied on the spot the effect of such 
 sentences upon young lives which were meant, with all their 
 capacity for brute passion, for freedom after punishment and 
 the softening influences of mothers and home ? Or, on the 
 other hand, when he puts away a recidivist, as he does often 
 enough, for three or five years only, for a crime which has 
 been repeated half a dozen times say, housebreaking with- 
 out violence does his Lordship know what happens when 
 that man is loose again how he goes back to the old haunts 
 not only to do it all again, but to teach and encourage and 
 incite the young to follow his example ? 
 
 I am well aware that it is often the law, not the Judge, 
 that is inconsistent and unjust in these respects ; but if our 
 Judges as a body were in the light of knowledge and 
 experience to feel that the law needed amendment, and 
 to say so would the law stand ? 
 
 The trouble is that, if the necessary knowledge is to be 
 acquired by our Courts, the august members thereof would 
 have to take a holiday and at their country's expense 
 visit and examine prisons, inside and out, and learn some- 
 thing of the curious morality and etiquette and customs of 
 the ' professional ' classes on the spot. And they would 
 have to do this periodically, for prison administration, under 
 the pressure of reforming influences from Whitehall and 
 other places, is always changing. Here, indeed, is the 
 point of difference between the service that deals with the 
 felon after he is sentenced and the Court which decrees 
 his punishment. The one changes with the times and goes 
 forward sometimes, if you like, backward. The other 
 remains practically stationary. The old, old forms of com- 
 mitment stating that a person is to have 'twelve months' 
 hard labour/ and only leaving a blank for the name to be 
 filled in, still stack the office of the clerk of the Courts, 
 though ' hard labour ' is never given in these days for more 
 than twenty-eight days. That may appear a small matter, 
 but it is significant of much. 
 
 Then take the prison statistics in regard to short 
 sentences. In 1908-09, 93 per cent, of male prisoners and 97 
 per cent, of females out of the total number of ordinary 
 prisoners committed to gaol only received sentences of 
 three months or less. 
 
THE SENTENCE 61 
 
 Of course there were many causes for this. It is said by 
 well-informed persons that the prevalence of unemployment, 
 the present chaotic conditions of the vagrancy laws and 
 regulations, and the constant additions made to county 
 borough by-laws, an infraction of which is punishable by 
 imprisonment with or without the option of a fine, account 
 for a great proportion of these light punishments. This 
 may be so ; but the fact which stands out in black relief is 
 that short sentences taken as a whole are the curse of our 
 prison system, the despair of its administrators, and one of 
 the most powerful, if not the most powerful, aids to crime. 
 
 Are our Courts aware of this ? I doubt it. I was prose- 
 cuting a man for stealing a short time ago. It was a petty 
 theft, but the record of the thief showed him to have been 
 continually thieving for many years past. The magistrate, 
 a London stipendiary, after ably dealing with the evidence, 
 sentenced him to three months, with the careless remark 
 that next time he was caught he would be sent to the 
 Sessions. Doubtless the sentence was corrects law; but 
 the ghastly mockery of so dealing with a creature who, as I 
 discovered afterwards, was steeped in criminality and had 
 no more business to be allowed loose than a mad dog or a 
 homicidal lunatic ! 
 
 Now, so long as our Courts which came into the closest 
 contact with the anomalies of the law look upon this condi- 
 tion of affairs as beyond their province, and as a matter 
 which chiefly concerns social reformers by profession, we 
 shall get little or no redress. The law is modified now to a 
 certain extent as regards persons declared to be habitual 
 criminals, and we have a Criminal Court of Appeal. This 
 shows that public opinion is stirring. But it is time that 
 the masters of the situation, placed in an impregnable posi- 
 tion of power over the lives of those who are proved guilty 
 of crime, should be asked, or ask themselves, how that 
 authority is used. It is useless for prison administrators to 
 toil and plan to make life in gaol a means of reformation if 
 all that they do is a sealed book to the Judge who supplies 
 them with the material upon which they have to work and 
 decides the period for which they shall keep it. It was a 
 Judge who told a foreigner a little while ago, as quoted in a 
 former chapter, that a commitment of ' two years' hard labour ' 
 was a more severe sentence than three years' penal servitude, 
 believing, in his innocence of facts, that the prisoner really 
 slaved at stone-breaking or what not for that period instead 
 of only twenty-eight days. It is the magistrate or the justice 
 who in certain towns decrees that boys shall go to prison for 
 
62 OUR PRISONS 
 
 three days for kicking a football in the street. What does 
 this mean ? It means that a rough lad who up to that time 
 has had a wholesome dread of ' the jug/ and has looked at a 
 fellow who has been ' in ' with suspicion, and avoided him 
 as a companion, is lowered in morals and self-respect often 
 for life. He hardens his heart to get through. Physically 
 he suffers little ; morally he has gone down below his sur- 
 roundings, and as in all probability these are on the edge of 
 respectability, those three days of plank and skilly just 
 make all the difference. He drops into low company, ifalls 
 into temptation, and commits real crime. And the cause of 
 it all is the ignorance or carelessness of the man in power 
 at the Court who held the scales. The justice was probably 
 as well-meaning a man as might well be, and under the im- 
 pression that three days under discipline and away from 
 home would just be the very thing to teach the young hope- 
 ful a lesson. But any superintendent of a boys' club in a 
 rough neighbourhood would do better than that. Only, as 
 it happens, he knows lads of that class and their ways, and 
 what they think of prison after they have been there; and 
 this makes all the difference. 
 
 The improvement of this state of affairs is a matter of 
 dual responsibility. 
 
 On the one hand, Courts of every degree should tear up 
 and burn all old forms of commitment indeed, get rid of 
 this obsolete term of ' hard labour ' altogether. Secondly, 
 justices of the peace should consider, especially those in the 
 county, whether they or the clerks of their Courts really 
 sentence the prisoners. Thirdly, every magistrate, justice, 
 or Judge should make it his business and pleasure to inspect 
 thoroughly both a local and a convict prison at least once a 
 year, and, if possible, serve on the committee of a discharged 
 prisoners' aid society. 
 
 On the other hand, a responsibility rests upon the prison 
 Commission and the Secretary of State. The Home Office 
 are perfectly aware of this, and circulars long and short, 
 lucid and obscure, gentle and sometimes emphatic, follow 
 one another in endless succession. But circulars, even when 
 they come from the Home Office, are not always read. Nor, 
 when they are read, are they always understood. Magis- 
 trates and Judges are busy and often overworked. Printed 
 instructions or requests bore and harass them, and are too 
 often sent quickly we all know where. Consequently the 
 words of wisdom therein fall on barren soil, and things go 
 on just as before while the public pays for the printing, and 
 the keen earnest men at Whitehall sigh, and perhaps some- 
 thing more, at the futility of it all. 
 
THE SENTENCE 63 
 
 There is a remedy, however. If men transacting business 
 by correspondence do not understand or attend to one 
 another's letters, they meet and have an explanation by 
 word of mouth. This should not, I venture to think, be im- 
 possible here. The prison authorities carry out the behests 
 of the Courts ; the Courts carry out the laws which, some- 
 times, the prison authorities have had some hand in framing 
 and inducing a Government to place on the Statute-book. 
 Assuredly if two powers ever were intended to work together 
 in perfect comradeship and fullest accord, it should be these. 
 It is an open secret, however, that they do not. 
 
 As a very humble observer, but as an observer who has 
 had the opportunity of seeing both sides of the issues at 
 stake, I venture, in the last words I have to write upon 
 prison life and administration, to urge that the Prison Com- 
 missioners should take into consideration the advisability of 
 gathering together in as informal a manner as possible small 
 conferences of Judges and magistrates and justices of the 
 peace, and consulting with them concerning the problems 
 which have to be faced and solved. In regard to prison 
 administration, I am aware that the presumption of such a 
 suggestion has probably never been equalled in the annals of 
 correspondents but I make it notwithstanding. The 
 united action of these two great services, if it were the fruit 
 of a real understanding, could revolutionize our present 
 criminal law and take powers eventually to check the first 
 offender, reform the unhardened, and lay by the heels in per- 
 manent durance under humane conditions the habitual 
 offender and the hopeless recidivist. 
 
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