Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/773

PRISON DISCIPLINE 749 of prisoners. A great flourish attended its opening. Its affairs were entrusted to a specially appointed committee of eminent and distinguished personages, the chairman being the Speaker of the House of Commons. Crowds of visitors royal dukes, foreign princes, the elite of society came to see the new prison ; most elaborate arrange ments were made for its internal government, and no money was spared either upon the staff or upon the com pletion of the buildings. The sum total expended upon the latter amounted to half a million of money, and the yearly charges of the establishment were a heavy burthen on the exchequer. The erection of Millbank was, however, a step in the right direction. The energy with which it was under taken was the more remarkable because elsewhere through out the United Kingdom the prisons, with but few excep tions, remained deplorably bad. Mr Neild, who in 1812 followed in the footsteps of John Howard, found that the old conditions, overcrowding and indiscriminate inter course, remained unchanged. " The great reformation produced by Howard," to use Neild s own words, " was merely temporary ; prisons were relapsing into their former horrid state of privation, filthiness, severity, and neglect." Yet the legislature was alive to the need for prison reform. Besides the building of Millbank it had promulgated many Acts for the amelioration of pri soners. Jail fees were once more distinctly abolished ; the appointment of chaplains was insisted upon ; the erec tion of improved prison buildings was rendered impera tive upon local authorities. But these with other and much older Acts remained in abeyance. Thus an Act which provided for the classification of prisoners had re mained a dead letter ; even the separation of the males from the females was not an universal rule. Humane pro visions intended to secure the good government of prisons, their cleanliness and ventilation, and the proper supply of food, clothing, and bedding to the prisoners were still sys tematically ignored. Roused by these crying evils, a small band of earnest men, philanthropists and members of the Society of Friends, formed themselves into an association for the improvement of prison discipline, and devoted themselves with rare energy and singleness of purpose to their self-constituted task. They perambulated the country inspecting all the prisons ; they issued lengthy interrogatories to prison officials ; they published periodi cal reports giving the result of their inquiries, with their views on the true principles of prison management, and much sound advice, accompanied by elaborate plans, on the subject of prison construction. The labours of this society brought out into strong relief the naked deformity of the bulk of the British jails. It was the old story. Jails, speaking broadly, were lamentably inadequate for the numbers crowded into them. Hence there was the most terrible overcrowding : by day in some prisons it was nearly impossible to push through the throngs in the yards ; by night the wretched prisoners ran the risk of suffocation. Prisoners were still very generally obliged to wear heavy irons. They had no regular diet at best only dry bread. Speaking of St Albans from his personal observation, Mr Buxton, a most active member of the Society, says, " All were in ill health ; almost all were in rags ; almost all were filthy in the extreme. The state of the prison, the desperation of the prisoners, broadly hinted in their conversation and plainly expressed in their con duct, the uproar of oaths, complaints, and obscenity, the indescribable stench, presented together a concentration of the utmost misery and the utmost guilt." This was no over-coloured picture ; nor did it portray a solitary instance. The reports of the Society laid bare the exist ence of similar horrors in numbers of other jails. Yet this was in 1818, when the legislature was setting a praise worthy example when half a million had been spent in providing large airy cells for a thousand prisoners. Even in London itself, within easy reach of this palatial Mill- bank penitentiary, the chief prison of the city, Newgate, was in a disgraceful condition. This had been exposed by a parliamentary inquiry as far back as 1814, but nothing had been done to remedy the evils laid bare. All the shameful conditions of neglect, ill-treatment, and over crowding were present in Newgate, and to the same extent as in any of the provincial prisons. The state of the female side had already attracted the attention of that devoted woman, Mrs Fry, whose ministrations and wonder ful success no doubt encouraged, if they did not bring about, the formation of the Prison Society. Mrs Fry went first to Newgate in 1813, but only as a casual visitor. It was not till 1817 that she entered upon the great and noble work with which her name will ever be associated. She worked a miracle there in an incredibly short space of time. The ward into which she penetrated, although strongly dissuaded by the officials, was like a den of wild beasts ; it was filled with women unsexed, fighting, swearing, dancing, gaming, yelling, and justly deserved its name of "hell above ground." AVithin a month it was transformed, and presented, says an eye witness, " a scene where stillness and propriety reigned." The wild beasts were tamed. It was not strange that such marvellous results should be bruited abroad, that public attention should be attracted to Mrs Fry s labours, and that others should seek to follow in her footsteps. Movements similar to that which Mrs Fry headed were soon set on foot both in England and on the Continent, and public attention was generally directed to the urgent necessity for prison reform. Stimulated no doubt by the success achieved by Mrs Fry, the Prison Discipline Society continued its useful labours. Hostile critics were not wanting ; many voices were raised in protest against the ultra-humanitarianism which sought to make jails too comfortable and tended to pamper criminals. But the society pursued its way undeterred by sarcasm, through evil and good report striv ing earnestly after the objects it had in view. Many of these are now accepted as axioms in prison treatment. It is, for instance, established beyond question that female officers only should have charge of female prisoners, that prisoners of both sexes should be kept constantly employed. Yet these principles were unacknowledged at that time, and were first enunciated in Acts such as the 4 Geo. IV 7 . c. 65 and the 5 Geo. IV. c. 85 (1823-24), the passing of which were mainly due to the strenuous exertions of the Prison Discipline Society. It was laid down in these that over and above safe custody it was essential to preserve health, improve morals, and enforce hard labour on all prisoners sentenced to it. These Acts also provided that male and female prisoners should be confined in separate buildings, that matrons should be appointed, and schoolmasters, and that there should be divine service daily in the jails. Now at last irons were strictly forbidden except in cases of "urgent and absolute necessity," and it was ruled that every prisoner should have a bed to himself, if possible a separate cell, the last being the first formal statement of a principle upon which all future prison discipline was to be based. The importance of these Acts cannot be overestimated as supplying a legal standard of efficiency by which all prisons could be measured. Still the progress of improve ment was extremely slov, and years after the managers of jails still evaded or ignored the Acts. Many local authorities grudged the money to rebuild or enlarge their

jails ; others varied much in their interpretation of the