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In this highly valued report, he brought to light a mysterious practice of our courts, which ought to be considered by the public with no little solicitude. The negroes, for the same crimes, were almost universally sentenced for a much longer time than the whites, or, as Voltaire calls them, the ash-colored people. He shows too that the whites are pardoned at the rate of 15 per cent, with their short sentences, and that the negroes, with their long sentences, are pardoned at the rate of only 3 per cent. This prospect, then, of a long confinement, without hope of pardon, operates on the mind and indirectly on the body, causing both mental and corporeal depression that tends to consumption and scrofula. This is another reason, then, for the greater mortality of negroes; for this depressing influence must increase, as do the squares of the months to be spent in hopeless solitude and darkness.
But Dr. P.'s labors in the cause of the prisoner did not end even here; he seems to have had continually before him the memorable words—"I was in prison, and ye visited me." He read to the College in 1851, a paper "On the Mortality and Insanity in Separate-plan Prisons in England and America." It is found in Vol. I. New Series, page 173, of the Transactions. His object is to show that long sentences are dangerous to the health both of body and mind. In England, separate confinement is, for the most part, merely preparatory to transportation; therefore, the time is short, seldom exceeding a year, and the deaths, though considered by the English themselves as too many, are yet few in comparison with ours. So with respect to insanity—the amount is alarming to the English authorities, though small when compared with ours in the Eastern Penitentiary.
Now, do you ask, what all these labors and writings tended to, or what they have effected? In the first place, then, they satisfied the requirements of an enlightened conscience, which found, in the final retrospect, no work left undone, no duty neglected; he, therefore, had not, in that awful hour, to look back, as Persius says, "on life as on a murky day, and to groan away the few minutes then left him."[1]
- ↑ Tum crassos transisse dies lucemque palustrem Et sibi jam seri vitam ingemuêre relictam.—Sat. v.
