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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 76

IV

IV.

I may now enquire how far our present system of dealing with the criminal is effective towards this end of reformation. Let us bear in mind what the criminal is, and that his treatment must, to be of any use, follow two definite lines. The environment which nourishes his diseased condition must be changed, he must be given wholesome occupation in wholesome surroundings that shall turn his thoughts from his former anti-social engrossment in his own perverted desires to a delight in his present and future social utility. Then page 26 his will and power of self-control must be strengthened by arousing his sense of responsibility and awakening his pride in his restored manhood: he must be given an object for his life in this world: he must be given a knowledge of eternal verities that he may have a motive for and power to attain self-mastery and self-discipline. How does our present system secure this treatment? As long ago as in the early forties one of the demands of the Chartist agitators was that punishment should be abolished and that criminals should be treated in a "rational" manner. Are our criminals yet treated in a rational manner?

The employment of criminals is evidently an important matter. No fault can be found in this respect with the managers of our existing prisons—the best is probably done that can be done under the conditions under which their work has to be carried on. But the conditions are capable of vast improvement. What, for instance, can be more absurd than the demand so often heard for the prohibition of any occupation for prisoners in which they may appear to compete with labourers outside? It is exactly those occupations, by which they will be able to get an honourable living when free, that they should be taught. It is a constant complaint in prison workshops that the workers are allowed to manufacture only particular lines of goods, frequently those in least demand outside. This is remedied somewhat where there is land connected with the prison which can be cultivated, but even here it very seldom or never happens that the land is sufficient in area to afford a really useful training for the number of labourers the prison authorities must put upon it. The employment of prisoners on State works—such as breakwaters or fortifications—seems at first to meet some of the difficulties. But surely this is illusory. If the works have to be carried out, the competition with the limited classes of stone masons and quarrymen and with unskilled labour is as severe as if the prisoners made clothes or tin or basket ware, nay more severe, for in these last employments it is only with low grade workers that they at present compete, here it is partly page 27 with skilled labour: on the other hand, if the works are not necessary, then there is not only waste of labour but the great benefit of the work is lost-the workers are not made to feel that they are becoming socially useful. There is moreover to this the great objection—which applies also to so much prison labour—that men are forced into occupations for which they are not specially fitted or for which they are quite unfitted and in which, therefore, they can never take an enthusiastic interest; they can never thus be taught to work like men, to put their best powers into what they are doing, they will not thus learn anything that will raise them now or be of service to them hereafter. What I have here said is true, I think, of all Australasian prisons; it is true of the two of which I have an intimate knowledge; it is true also of other English prisons. But if there is so much that is unsatisfactory in prisons where the best use is made of the opportunities offered, what words are strong enough to describe the irrationality of the system still surviving in some of them, where the treadmill, the crank and oakum-picking are still in evidence, where the prisoners, sullenly, listlessly, perform their minimum task, their thoughts meanwhile fixed upon their own perverted consciousness, goading themselves to brute fury against all and everything that represents authority, and only enduring in the anticipation of boundless criminal indulgences to come. It would be a miracle indeed if a prisoner did not leave such a prison a far more confirmed criminal than he was when he entered it. Such a system has done him an irreparable wrong, and he has almost a justification for his future outrages upon a society which through the action of its officials has so injured him. But there is worse even than this. There are still prisons in the Southern States of America (according to Dr. Wines) where gangs of prisoners are hired out for long periods to work on plantations, and kept to their work by threats-and blows—where conditions no longer obtaining in Siberia are still literally true. This is but a perpetuation of slavery, and such prisons are no better than the Moorish or Turkish hells where men are starved or page 28 tortured or simply left to die like trapped wild beasts. Even in the British Cape Colony some similar abuses appear to exist since the hiring out of convict gangs to work in the Kimberley diamond mines has lately been the subject of much comment.

Leaving the question of the proper employment of prisoners to be discussed with other reforms later on, I pass on to the means in use for strengthening the weak moral powers of the criminal. The systems adopted may be divided into the solitary and the collective—the former being again divided into the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems, in the former of which the prisoners are kept constantly apart, while in the latter they associate during the day but are separated during the night. The evils connected with the association of criminals are evidently so great—they cannot, indeed, be easily exaggerated—that more than a hundred and fifty years ago attention was drawn to the subject, and it grew to be believed that the solution of all difficulties would be found in the isolation of each prisoner in a separate cell, never allowing him to see or communicate with his fellow prisoners. The first attempt to carry out this idea partially I by separate sleeping apartments) seems to have been at the celebrated St. Michael's prison, at Rome, in 1704. At Horsham, in England, in 1779, and Gloucester, in 1785, it seems to have been partially adopted, and there were early examples of it at Glasgow and Aberdeen. It was recommended by the famous Howard about this time, who described some prisons where it was adopted. It was advocated by Jeremy Bentham, in 1791, in his "Panopticon," which largely influenced the building of Millbank prison, in London, in 1816; and by Neild, in 1812, and Mrs Fry. But the first fair trial of it took place in America, where the Auburn State Prison of New York was opened in 1816, and the two Pennsylvania penitentiaries at Philadelphia and Pittsburg between 1817 and 1827. Thence it was passed on to the "model" prison at Pentonville, in London, planned by Sir Joshua Jebb, in 1843, and it has since page 29 been adopted in most European countries. But, as we are beginning to see, this was only rushing from one great evil into another nearly as bad. Prisoners thus confined in solitary cells are men who have no intellectual resources within themselves to fall back upon. Solitude is thus full of horror to them, and insanity is frightfully prevalent among them, as we might expect. This was especially the case when, as in the first Pennsylvanian penitentiaries, no employment was given to them. And there are other evils inherent in the system. The object is to strengthen the prisoner's will and power of self-control: he is put in a position where he has no responsibility, where everything is done for him, and where, for the greater part of his time, he has no companionship but the memory of his own past life It is hardly to be expected but that he should come forth from his cell with all his criminal instincts intensified, with his weak moral nature still further weakened perhaps destroyed. Even if, by the excellence of the instructions given him by the prison officers, he should have been led to desire a nobler life, still he has no training to brace him against outside temptations, and his virtue will be like a hot-house plant set to bear the winter cold in the open field. For these and other reasons the solitary system is no longer advocated as it once was: indeed, almost the only serious defenders of it are the few remaining who were officially concerned in its introduction I do not know whether it is or has been adopted any where in Australasia. The modification of it—the Auburn system—which is in use in most of our prisons, is good in theory but open to many abuses in practice, and is, moreover, entirely spoilt as to any good it might produce by the neglect of classification. The prisoners are usually arranged in classes which have no reference to their characters or offences, but only to their position in prison—how long they have been in it, what their conduct has been, and whether they are first or second "timers." All prisoners at first are placed indiscriminately in the lowest class, and remain in it for varying periods. At night each prisoner has his cell, in which he spends alone often eleven page 30 hours in each twenty-four. But in some prisons the prisoners are placed at night in dormitories, in which six or more of them sleep in hammocks side by side with one another. They are supposed to have no communication with each other, but men cannot sleep for eleven hours. Sometimes they are allowed to read for part of the time. In any case the system is as bad as it can be. The prisoners' working hours are eight; they may be in their cells for eleven; five hours are left for meals and recreation, which, in the prisons I know, the prisoners usually spend together in the yards assigned to each class. It is in this unregulated association, and especially of those in the lowest class, that one great cause of the failure of our present system must be sought. I take an obvious comparison, which is common property now, since it has been used by so many writers. What would be thought of the efficiency of a hospital in which all the patients brought in were placed at first in the same ward without regard to their ailments—consumptives, epileptics, typhoid cases, contagious cases, wounds,—all together, and all submitted to precisely the same treatment, and for a length of time regulated by external circumstances, and having no connection with the ailments? Well, that is our present prison system. The strange thing about it is that the defect is universally admitted, while practically no serious steps are taken to amend it. Magistrates, it is true, avoid as much as possible sending young persons or first offenders to gaol, but this affects only a few cases, and is but a very ineffectual check upon a system which is in itself hopelessly bad. That it is not altered can only be because people have not yet realised its enormous iniquity. A French jurist lately maintained that an hour in prison, where he associated unreservedly with the other inmates, might, and probably would, ruin any man. An acquaintance is struck up, he said, an appointment is made for a future meeting, and a career of crime commenced. The worst crimes are planned in prison; few comparatively innocent persons can escape the contagion of such a place. Judges and magistrates know this quite well page 31 and constantly refer to it. Mr Whitwell, an English magistrate, always refused to send children to a Reformatory because the law then was that they must spend if only a few hours in a prison first. That prisons breed crime is the constant remark of writers on these questions. The object is to bring those who have fallen into crime under the influence of a better environment than that which encouraged their evil instincts. They are brought into one infinitely worse: they are placed in closest association with chronic cases of habitual criminality. And who can wonder at the result that so often ensues? The marvel is that any escape. I have used the comparison of the hospital. A hundred years ago, and less, our hospitals were in much the same condition. There was no proper classification, walls, floors, bedding were impregnated with the germs of disease, they were the very hotbeds of the diseases they were built to cure. Let people once realise that that is what our prisons are, that the money spent on them is, as magistrates well know, largely spent for the propagation of the criminality they are designed to cure, and there will soon be so loud an outcry that our Governments will be compelled, in spite of their natural disinclination to move, to inaugurate the much-needed reforms

A matter which must be only briefly referred to is the question of the attention paid to the bodily comforts of the prisoners. And here I complain chiefly of the inconsistency of the present system. If it is designed to make "the way of the transgressors hard," our prisons signally fail. The food and lodging is often better than the prisoner gets outside; there is no drink, it is true, but he gets used to that; there are but very few to whom the drink is a serious loss; what, at least, the male prisoner really misses is his tobacco, but he is sometimes allowed a modicum of that, and sometimes he gets it-somehow. The treatment is certainly not hard enough to act as a deterrent, and, even if it were desirable, it would be impossible in the present state of public opinion to make it so. I have already pointed out how criminals often seek a period of imprisonment for health and rest; at least this is notoriously so in Europe. page 32 An English judge speaks of the danger of sending boys to gaol; they find out, he says, how little it is to be dreaded and they never fear it again. In the English prison reports of 1888 is mentioned the oft quoted case of an Irish woman who was imprisoned 34 times that year, making 180 imprisonments in all. On the other hand if our prison system is too kindly for purposes of punishment it is equally inefficient for purposes of reform. It is a pleasant retirement for a time for the habitual criminal, for the criminal of education and refinement it is hell; the close association with so many degraded companion?, the publicity of all the minutest details of life, the dull monotony of existence, is worse than death. It is no hardship at all to the worst criminal, it is the cruellest and most brutal torture to him whose crime has been but the effect of passing passion, to whom the utmost consideration is really due. It is inconsistent and unequal. Add to all this that the lash and the dark cell still remain; the former, it is true, is little used in our Australasian prisons; but I have seen one elsewhere, where its use was constant. I never (thank God) saw the actual infliction of it, but I have seen the criminal immediately afterwards and I know well the degrading and brutalising effect of it. Even the little use we make of it here is too much. And the dark cell is nearly as injurious. I need not say that in the prison of the future, where the object will be to teach men self respect, both will be unknown.

Crime is disease in the region of morals—that all admit. A certain class of men make it the work of their lives to study moral health and disease as physicians study the conditions of physical health and disease. A rational system of prison discipline would naturally make the work of the clergyman the chief factor in the prisoner's treatment. There are Australasian prisons—many indeed—which have no chaplains and where clergymen are only admitted on sufferance and principally for the purpose of conducting services. To parallel this let us try to imagine a hospital to which medical men were only admitted on sufferance and in which they were expected to confine themselves chiefly to page 33 lecturing on hygiene. It is difficult to perceive what possible defence can be set up for such neglect of the prisoner's interests as this. Nor does it exist elsewhere in the world. In all European prisons in which any attempt is made to carry out definite principles of management, the chaplain is an important officer ranking next to the governor in the esteem in which his office is held. And, what will be regarded as more to the point, in the best managed prisons in America the supreme importance of the chaplain's work is fully recognised. In the Southern States, as has already been mentioned, are to be found some of the worst prisons in the world. In the North are many of the best. Some will be referred to later on—it will be sufficient to say here that in all these the chaplain's work is regarded as a, if not the, most essential part of the system. In Massachusetts especially, notably in the State prison, the moral reformation of the prisoner by the agency of the chaplain has been made a definite aim, and more fully and effectually carried out, perhaps, than anywhere else in the world.

Of course as long as the chaplain is regarded only as the devotional mouthpiece of a congregation, or as one whose sole end is the delivery of more or less entertaining discourses of a moral nature, such work is impossible. In the Massachusetts State prison, as in others, daily prayers are indeed offered, and that in a decent chapel set apart for this sole purpose, but the real work of the chaplain is (as that of the medical attendant is) his work with the individual-the work of restoring lost self-respect and strength of character by council, guidance, instruction, and, above all, brotherly sympathy.

The last objection I bring against our present system lies in the necessary inefficiency of many of the prison officers. This is naturally a delicate point to deal with. I have many kind and excellent friends among them and I know how anxious they are to do their duty and help to the best of their ability the unfortunate beings placed under their control. But the system is against them. The warders are untrained, they are in no way induced to make their work a calling for life, the higher offices page 34 are seldom open to them, there is nothing to lead them to regard their duties as specially responsible ones, or to suggest the importance of careful and scientific study as to the best means of discharging them. Nor is the case much better as regards the heads of prisons or of the prison departments—they are for the most part excellent men anxious to do their work, but steeped in the traditions of the service and often hardly aware that there is any literature of the subject or that there is anything to say against their present methods.

Such are, briefly, some of the objections to be urged against the existing conditions of criminal treatment. A concrete instance will show better than many words the waste of the system and its hopelessness for any purposes of reform.

A. B. was a young man of an excitable temperament, but honest, sober, religious, a Methodist or Baptist local preacher. Whatever vicious impulses he had by nature had been kept under due control, until one unfortunate day, when passion, baulked of its gratification, overcame his reason, and a horrible homicide was the result. The horror of the crime shocked the public imagination, and though murder could not be charged against him, there being no intention to destroy life, yet he was condemned to imprisonment for life: that is, under the customary conditions, fourteen years, if his conduct was good. His conduct was more than good; he soon asserted his superiority, and was even allowed (unwisely) to conduct religious services on Sundays for his fellow-prisoners. For several years he was head cook, which, in an establishment of some 250 persons, is a really responsible position. This office gave him the use of a room to himself, and of pencil and paper, and he spent much of his time in reading and in writing poetry, some of his work showing imagination and considerable delicacy of thought. In no sense was he a dangerous criminal, but there was always a certain independence of manner and bluntness of speech in his dealings with the prison officers, and even in the petitions which he sent in as required to the authorities when the end of his term of fourteen page 35 years was approaching, which apparently raised a prejudice against him. He had been imprisoned some few weeks before the actual passing of his sentence, and it was understood in the prison that this would be counted as part of his sentence and that at the end of the total of fourteen years he would certainly be released. He had been allowed to grow hair and beard, and was confidently expecting his release in a few days, when the long-delayed answer to his petition arrived—a curt and peremptory refusal—he must stay, at least, until fourteen years from the date of sentence, perhaps longer. The rest of the story follows naturally—temporary madness, refusal to work, relegation to the horrors of the yards, resistance, dark cells and tragedy only and barely averted by the extreme forbearance of the governor of the gaol and the influence which even a visiting chaplain was able to exercise upon the unhappy prisoner.

One other case, typical of many, from the same prison. C. D. was in prison, for the sixth or seventh time, for larceny. He had been a gentleman's servant, a total abstainer and devout Roman Catholic. But his strength was only equal to resistance up to a certain point. The story was the same in every case—one taste of drink, too much for one unaccustomed to it, drunkenness, crime, prison, good conduct, release, da capo.

Now what good, either to the man himself or to the community, was accomplished by his incarceration in either of these cases? There was the expense of maintenance in one case for over fourteen years, in the other for nearly as many, the services of the two men to the community for the same period lost, and the results nothing; the men left prison as weak, and at least as unable to help themselves as when they entered it. And these are but ordinary cases. Many have left prison far weaker men, far worse and more dangerous in every respect than they were when they entered it.

page V

The remainder of my task is much simpler, for it is not difficult to point out the reforms that are necessary. What is really difficult is so to overcome the vis inertia of prejudice and prepossession as to persuade their adoption. But the future is with the reformers, and we have no cause to be dissatisfied—remembering how slowly the greatest reforms have come about—with the progress that has been made in America and Europe and even in Japan.

One reform it is pleasant to record had its origin in Australasia—a reform now adopted throughout the world. This is the mark system and conditional release, the "ticket of leave." In 1840 when Captain Alexander Maconochie went to Norfolk Island, he found a condition of things which has been too often described to make any further reference to it necessary. In a very few years a revolution was wrought and order and comparative cheerfulness substituted for the misery and despair which had hitherto reigned. And all this was accomplished by bringing in hope—by the mark system all prisoners were able by good conduct to purchase some amelioration of their present lot and some expectation of liberty in the future. In one form or another this system is now universal almost throughout the world. It is a very large step in the right direction. But though all the credit of the organisation of the system belongs to Captain Maconochie, the idea of giving the prisoner the key of his own prison, as it has been called, enabling him by good conduct to shorten the term of his imprisonment, is much earlier. It was advocated by Archbishop Whateley, of Dublin, in articles in the "London Review" and in letters to Earl Grey in 1832. It was introduced into prisons at Kaiserslautern and Munich in Bavaria between 1830 and 1842 by Obermaier, and at Valencia, in Spain, by Colonel Montesinos. The first British example, however, was suggested directly by Maconochie's work in Norfolk Island: this was the "Crofton system," introduced by Sir Walter Crofton into certain Irish prisons, consisting principally of an establishment inter- page 37 mediate between prison and liberty, in which prisoners had complete personal freedom "on probation", and proved by their conduct their fitness (or otherwise) for full liberty. The system was too advanced for the time and fell into disuse after Sir Walter Crofton's death. The mark system, however, which was included in it, remained and spread.

Of another specially Australasian reform not quite so good an account can be given. This is the First Offenders' Probation Act, by which a first offender's sentence may be, and usually is, remitted at the discretion of the presiding magistrate except in very serious cases. It is indeed rather a palliative of the evils of the existing system than a reform and is in truth inconsistent in itself. It is an admission that no good can be done to the offender or the community by the offender's incarceration. It is only reasonable on the ancient and exploded theory that revenge is the reason for his imprisonment. And there is the further weakness in it that, however slight the offence for which the "first offender" is tried, he may be a person of dangerous criminal instincts and it may in that case be a serious danger to the community that he should be at large. What can be said of the provisions of the Act is that they may often be of exceeding value under present conditions, but they will be useless when the reforms now demanded are obtained.

More valuable is the existing Massachusetts "probation system" established in 1870. Under this certain State agents are appointed, to the care of one of whom any boy or girl under 17 is committed. The committal is made in writing to the agent, who becomes the young person's guardian, provides a home for him and is responsible for his conduct. The system was extended to certain cases of adults in 1880, and has been still further extended within the last two or three years.

Not much need be said of the introduction of useful labour into the prisons; the value of this is universally admitted. The first recorded experiment in this, as in many other directions, deserves again to be mentioned. This is the St. Michael's prison established by Pope Clement XI. in 1704. It was called the "House page 38 of Correction", and contained workshops and schoolroom and a separate cell facing inward from the outer wall for every inmate. Over the entrance and on the walls were inscriptions: "For the education and reformation of criminal youths, to the effect that those who, when idle, had been injurious to the State might, when better instructed and trained, become useful to it," and, "It is of little use to restrain criminals by punishment unless you reform them by education." These are wise words, but the strange thing is that no similar advance in other countries was made for over a hundred years. Even the first penitentiaries in Pennsylvania made no provision for the employment of the prisoners. Now such employment is universal in all civilised countries.

But the most important reform of all—and that which is, indeed, but the logical outcome of all the others-is that known as "the indeterminate sentence." The first experiments in this direction were, and are being, made at the New York State Prison at Elmira. It was in 1869 that the Act of the New York State Legislature was obtained authorising the establishment of this prison. The discussions between the rival Auburn and Pennsylvania systems, the reports of the Crofton system, and the introduction of the mark system, had led to strong dissatisfaction with existing conditions, and a powerful body of reformers had been formed, among whom should be named, especially, Brockway (afterwards Governor of Elmira), Wines, and Dr Dwight. To the exertions of these latter and others the establishment of Elmira is due. The treatment of the prisoner was to be revolutionised in every way, his reform being the one object before the prison management. But it was felt that the necessary reform was the inde-determinate sentence—that the prisoner should remain, not for a given period, but for the period, short or long, necessary for his cure. The Legislature conceded this with one reservation—the period was not to exceed a fixed maximum. Of course this is illogical and mischievous, for there are chronic cases and incurable cases of criminality, as there are chronic and incurable cases of mental and physical disease. But even with page 39 this restriction the system has produced remarkable results, and the restriction itself either very recently has been or is likely to be removed. The Elmira system has been adopted in all, or most, of its details in prisons in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas and South Dakotah, and there is a prison for women conducted in this way at Sherburn, Massachusetts.

I place, then, the "indeterminate sentence" as the first and most important of prison reforms, as the chief step towards a rational system of treatment of prisoners. At present an attempt is made, very unsuccessfully, to fit the sentence to the crime, the old idea of punishment and expiation being still dominant here. Rationally the sentence should be fitted to the nature of the moral sickness it is intended to cure. Hospitals do not fix a hard and fast period of detention for each disease irrespective of the special conditions of the case. Or, from another point of view, as Mr Horsley, late chaplain of Clerkenwell Prison, used to put it, what can be more senseless than sending a man, just because the period of his sentence is finished, out again into society, though you know that his criminal instincts are as strong as ever, though you know that he will lead the same life that he led before and sooner or later return to you, though he may even boast, as many do, of the crimes he intends to commit in the future? Or, I may add, where is the sense in retaining in prison, only because the term of his sentence has not yet expired, another man, who, you are persuaded, will now be able to control his vicious propensities and lead an honest and profitable life, thus risking the loss of all the man has gained, and incurring expense worse than useless to the State? For some it is evidently morally and economically profitable that the State should find them a secluded dwelling and a sufficiently supportable maintenance for the remainder of their lives; for others it is equally profitable that the State should restore them to liberty and responsibility at the earliest possible moment. The true alternative is, as Recorder Hill put it, in 1856, reformation or incapacitation. page 40 Not very long ago, as we have seen, excessive severity was the rule; that failed: now equally excessive leniency is the rule; and this is equally a failure, for statisticians assure us that crime is—and for some time past has been—on the increase in almost every part of the world. It is only reasonable, then, that the indeterminate sentence which has worked so well in the limited area in which it has been tried should now, if only at first as an experiment, be adopted. Indeed, in Australasia it is already partially in use—for the Colonial or Home Secretary exercises freely a power of remitting large parts of sentences where, in his opinion, all is gained that was expected to be gained by them. I ask only that there should be given to trained experts the power which is now exercised by an (in this respect) untrained Minister, who has many other things to occupy his attention, and that the power should be extended to the prolonging as well as to the shortening of the periods of detention.

Next in importance to the indeterminate sentence comes the matter of a rational classification of prisoners. Much has already been done in this direction, but much remains to be done. Formerly young children were herded in prisons with all kinds of adult offenders. Later they were confined in separate prisons, but even so a brand was put upon them which went far to destroy their future usefulness. Charles Mayhew, writing in 1862 of the boys' prison at Tothill Fields, London, says of many of the crimes, as petty pilfering and the like, for which they were imprisoned, that in his boyhood at Westminster School such "crimes" were daily perpetrated, "and yet," he goes on to say, "if the scholars had been sent to the House of Correction, instead of Oxford or Cambridge, to complete their education, the country would now have seen many of our playmates working among the convicts in the dockyards rather than lending dignity to the Senate or honour to the Bench." Now, happily, we have Reformatories and Industrial Schools for the children. But the adults still herd together irrespective of character or degree of criminality. They must be classified, as hospital page 41 patients are classified, according to their moral character, as diagnosed by competent experts, and each class must be separately and appropriately treated. Here we have much to learn, but the time must come when it will be no more difficult (and no easier) to classify moral than it is now to classify mental and physical disease. And here, too, I may urge that as the associated system has failed hideously, as all admit, as the separate cell system is generally allowed to have failed, it only remains in consistency to try practically what has long been theoretically seen to be the right system—that of classification according to character and moral needs.

As to the treatment of the prisoner, no one can doubt but that the two sides of it—the bodily and the spiritual—are equally important. All criminals are more or less physically unhealthy, and there is more connection than is often supposed between bodily and spiritual ailments. At present the prison doctor's business is chiefly to detect malingerers and to minister to sickness actually incurred. In the reformed prison his chief work will be to restore a healthy tone and vigorous vitality to the debased and degenerate bodies brought under his care. Thus, among other instances, some time since, at Elmira, a group of eleven criminals underwent for some months a course of baths, massage, and gymnastics before they were considered sound enough physically to begin their moral and intellectual training. At this prison it is reported that 40 per cent of the prisoners received are more or less physically infirm. The moral and intellectual training will be the chaplain's business. Hitherto his work has been chiefly to conduct services and to visit those in hospital or under punishment in the cells. In the future he will also have to suggest the proper employment of each prisoner and, in conjunction with the doctor, to arrange details of classification. The employment provided will be such as to turn the thoughts from self-introspection, to suggest higher aims, to inculcate self-respect, to strengthen self-control. To this end it must be varied, intelligent, useful. It is page 42 important that the prisoner should, as soon as possible, be made really to earn his own living so that his sense of independence may be restored and cultivated. But a difficulty arises here in the prejudice existing against the sale of prison-made goods, and even at Elmira such sale is only permitted under considerable restrictions. I have already shown that this prejudice is irrational; it is far better for the working man that the prisoner should compete with him for a time, if that will forward his cure, than that he should be supported in prison, perhaps for life, largely at the working man's cost. To be consistent, objection should be made to any attempt to reform the prisoner lest he should compete with other workers when his freedom has been restored to him. Indeed the prejudice is probably only the outcome of the ancient hopelessness as to the possibility of any kind of reform.

Besides the cultivation of independence by making, the prisoner earn his own living, his employment should have two other features—it should tend to draw out his highest powers, it should arouse his sense of responsibility. The first aim has, it is said, been very successfully attained at Elmira, in Massachussets and elsewhere, by courses of study in English literature, and by the practice of debating. In a Japanese prison a visitor found (as recorded by Havelock Ellis) sixty men executing the most delicate artistic work, an enamel of metal upon brass, while those who were unequal to this were set to just such tasks, in great variety, as they showed themselves best fitted for. The second aim it is sought to fulfil at Elmira by the adoption of a military organisation for purposes of discipline, in which prisoners act as "non-commissioned" officers. It was with the same end in view that, in 1892, a ballot was taken for the mock election of a President and Vice-President of the United States. The result was a little curious. The votes cast were 909, of which 401 were Democratic, 394 Republican, 15 People's Party, 1 Prohibitionist, and only 8 defective. In some French prisons, prisoners are allowed to earn a "credit" with which to purchase small luxuries page 43 from the prison kitchen. In Australasia, while very little has been done to attain the first aim by giving the prisoners such varied employments as may call forth their best powers, the second aim has been fairly successfully compassed by making them clerks, librarians, warehousemen, cooks, bakers, gardeners, and the like. It only wants a little further breaking down of antiquated and effete ideas to allow them to be made prefects of classes, and, where possible, teachers and lecturers, to encourage wider reading and study, to establish discussions and debates—to restore, in short, their lost and all-but-forgotten manhood.

In the reformed prison punishment, as such, will of course cease to exist, but, as in hospitals and asylums, force must be kept in reserve to meet force, if necessary. Even this will, probably, not long be required. In the Japanese prison before referred to, the visitor was shown the punishment cell, a beautifully clean, artistically-painted bamboo apartment, in the middle of a yard. "How many prisoners had been confined there in the last month," he asked. "None at all," was the reply. Discipline has not suffered in the army and navy from the abolition of the lash. The best school teacher is he who least needs to inflict punishment. The time will come when public, opinion on the side of order will be sufficient in every well-appointed prison to keep in check the insubordinate minority. Some day the very name of punishment will be forgotten.

The only important matter remaining is the question of the officials of the reformed prison. These will be the Governor, the Chaplain, the Doctor and the Warders. The Governor will of course be the supreme authority in the prison and have general control over its discipline and domestic concerns as well as charge of all its external affairs. But the direct management of the prison will be in the hands of the Chaplain and the Doctor. To the Chaplain chiefly will fall the care of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual interests of the prisoners, his it will be to raise degraded souls out of the mire of self-seeking, to give right tone to the perverted instincts, and, page 44 fixing their gaze upon the Perfect Man, to teach his pupils to realize their own manhood and reach after its more complete development in this life and in those to come. He must be a man in whom the love of God burns deeply, in whom therefore sympathy with the weak, the suffering, the sinful, springs unbidden, whose heart rather than any motive of self-interest has bound him to the work. I need not remind my readers how much good work some such men (Horsley for instance at Clerkenwell, and Morrison at Wandsworth) have already done, whether from a spiritual or a scientific point of view. To the Doctor will belong chiefly the perfecting of the bodies of the prisoners—medicine, hygiene, sanitation, and the like—but it will be impossible to define strictly the separate duties of each of these officers, they must both be devoted, earnest men, who will work together for the eternal good of the unfortunate fellow-creatures placed under their control. Only in name will the Chaplain come first, since the diseases treated are chiefly moral or spiritual, as, for a similar reason, the Doctor should come first in the hospital. In case of serious difference of opinion, and then only, should the Governor intervene. All three officers, it goes without saying, should be selected for their special technical knowledge and proved fitness for their work—never, as has often been the case in the past, because they were past other work, and anyone, it was thought, was fit for prison management.

The Warders will have to carry out the plans of the Chaplain and Doctor, as well as maintain the discipline and routine of the prison. Their selection and training is a matter of as much importance as any that have gone before. They must be men who will make the work the work of their lives, as hospital nurses do, as long as their physical fitness for it remains. I should like to see them organized as a religious order or, at least, a quasi-religious order, as St. John's Nursing Sisterhood. In any case their work is that of nurses on a higher platform, and they must be organized and trained as hospital nurses are organized and trained. There should be a college for them, and they should be admitted to the page 45 prison first as probationers, afterwards as full warders, with necessary grades leading up to head-warder or Governor, and a pension should await them when their period of usefulness is past. The subjects of study proposed to them will be such as the nature of the criminal, the psychology and pathology of crime, and the history and rationale of prison systems, and they should be encouraged besides to make themselves proficient in any branches of literature, science and art that may be likely to be useful in assisting the prisoners in the development of their faculties. They should not need to be taught that the love of God is the motive, and sympathy the basis of all successful work of men for men.

Will not such reforms be very costly? it may be asked. I believe the new prisons will from the first be much less costly than the old ones. Eventually they will be self-supporting. Warders now are paid from £100 to £130 a year, with lodging, rations and two suits of uniform clothes a year; they number about one to every five prisoners. The higher class of warders now demanded will cost but little more than this, even including their training and their pensions, and they will be much fewer in number, partly because they will be so much more efficient, partly because the prisoners will do so much more for themselves. The care of the prisoners and the appointments of the prison will, doubtless, be much more costly than at present, but, on the other hand, the earnings of the prisoners will be larger. But in any case the new system must be more economical, than the old, because it will really do the work which the old system often only mars.

I have thus stated what seem to me the chief necessary reforms required in our present system of prison, management. Others will follow from them, and without difficulty, when the principles here laid down are conceded. And, indeed, we shall not have long to wait for the general concession of principles already admitted theoretically, and already approving themselves in practice, wherever and to whatsoever extent a fair trial has been made of them. The idea of retaliation has all but gone; the idea of punishment is following rapidly; page 46 the idea of reformation and of the duty of the State to the criminal is everywhere establishing itself. Even the name "prison" is passing away, and it must pass away, for it cannot be separated from the horrible associations connected with it in the past. Confinement, now so distasteful because of the unequal and illogical conditions under which it has been inflicted, will no longer be regarded as unjust or hard when it is made clear that its only object is the benefit of those who suffer from it, when the "prison" is regarded only as a moral hospital, when the disgrace attaching to a sojourn in it has passed away, because men have learned that disgrace attaches not to the weakness in which a man is born but to the yielding to that weakness, not to the burden of an inherited tendency to evil but to the neglect to strive by every means to rid himself of that burden. We may even anticipate the time when the morally afflicted, the weak in will, will themselves seek admission to such an hospital that they may be cured of the weaknesses and infirmities which they feel have so marred, and will so mar, their highest aims in life.

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