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the prisoners useful labour, but puts them upon the tread-wheel under the same rigorous silence.

The discipline here is of a physical nature. It is enforced by the terrors of the lash. It degrades and humiliates, stimulating vindictive feelings, by hardening the heart against so apparently arbitrary a restriction. But rigidly as the discipline was enforced, it altogether failed. On the tread-wheel, with the keeper watching; in the workshops, under the same vigilant superintendence, they communicated with each other. The superintendence could not be always equally vigilant. When it relaxed, the keeper, who was watched, gave an opportunity which was never missed. He could not prevent conversation by the eye. A look, a wink, expressed a feeling : a movement answered it, and the very restraint imposed, gave a zest to the imperfect means resorted to. Dum tacent clamant. "I have been," says a prisoner, "on the wheel; and they talk frequently in a low voice there, but they are seldom found out if they don't turn their heads. They can watch the turnkey as much as he can watch them."--1 Field, p. 42. The silent industry, in other cases, of a crowded workshop in prison, is imposing; but it is a mistake to hold that you thereby prevent the evils of unrestricted communication. It is what an eminent Scottish Judge declares to be a kind of "Sisyphian torment, to keep men for months and years in company, and yet prevent all communication by the lash."-Appendix to Lords' Report, p. 88.

But the great objection to it is, that along with the undoubted evils of bad communication, it completes effectually the ruin of every prisoner, by exposing his presence to his companions. If they cannot speak to him, they at least see and will remember him again. Thus entangled into thieves' society, he finds himself in a net, from which no virtuous resolutions can relieve him. Mr. Baron Alderson gives a striking exemplification of the inutility of compulsory silence. He states that he knew an instance in which a regular plan for a robbery, afterwards accomplished, "was laid, in one of what is called our best regulated jails, and on the tread-mill. The instrument there was a boy, and the principals were adult thieves."-Appendix to Lords' Report, p. 42. Thus the system failed, if prevention of crime, along with the punishment of the offender, constituted any part of the theory of punishment. Old associations were kept up in active and daily exercise; and new associations were formed which were never, through the whole of a guilty life, allowed to drop. The obedience too, which was extorted by the lash, not being the act of a free moral agent, was no virtue at all. It was in itself rather a weakness, preparing for evil influence much more than for sound direction.

Absurd Notions current as to Separate System.

15

In a separate cell a prisoner is in many respects free. He has himself to himself. But in the workroom he is a slavethe slave of his companions. If in their presence he give way to any outward sign of penitence, he is jeered and laughed at. The neutrality of the weak and the resistance of the brave are alike swept away. In the cell he could have relief to a mind not hardened, in his bible, his prayer-book, and his tears. But with his bad companions he loses all the good he ever had; and enriches himself at the expense of society, with a knowledge from which it will ultimately suffer. This is in truth only a modification of that old system of unrestricted intercourse which characterized our prisons in former days, when the prison was the vestibule of a life-transportation, or of the scaffold. No deterring effect can ever flow from a system in which the only punishment is that of silence imperfectly enforced. The criminal is not thrown back upon his own reflections in the stern solitude of compulsory separation. He has none of that feeling of desolation which want of companions and the grave-like stillness of a solitary cell necessarily create. To make punishment dreadful, we have only to resort to an isolation which nature loathes-to leave the objects of it

"suivis,

Que de leur malheureuse ombre."

The faces of as few human beings as is necessary to preserve from madness, should alone be seen between the time when the gloomy portals close upon the condemned, until the hour when it is declared the expiation is accomplished.

The system which has received in modern days the almost universal approbation of the most philanthropic men of all countries, is that known as the separate. The silent-system of the workhouse, the tread-wheel, and all the other optimist speculations which have each had their day and disappeared, have given place to a system to which our humanity is reconciled, at the same time that it effects the object of punishment. As to its operation much ignorance exists. Part of this is owing to those tales of horror which, a number of years ago, were sent over Europe, relative to the system of separation and of silence adopted in the cells of Virginia and New York. There, human beings were immured in dungeons dark and damp. No intercourse with mankind was allowed from the commencement of the punishment to its close. None of the physical comforts necessary for the support of life were given the unhappy condemned. The ventilation was bad, in pits, entered from the top by a ladder, the orifice of which was secured with a trap.

The consequences of such treatment might easily be anticipated. Human nature could not endure the infliction of such horrors. An uninterrupted solitude in dark pits produced its natural fruits in death and madness. The system was abandoned, both in Virginia where it had its birth, and in New York where it grew into vigour; and is now only useful as shewing that even the best principles will fail when pushed to license.

A true idea, however, once uttered is immortal. It makes its way more rapidly, or the reverse, according to the accidental circumstances which influence the oscillations of public opinion. Though humanity was shocked at the imprisonments of the New World-held up as the results of a fair experiment-there were men who saw the cause of the failure, and hastened to recall public opinion to its senses. It is strange, after our long experience, that there should be found a London magistrate so ignorant of its working as to represent it still, as bearing the fruits of the Virginia cells. Yet Sir Peter Laurie, at a meeting of the London Aldermen, no later than the 13th of September last, is reported in the Times to have said, that "its effects were indescribably horrible. Such was found to be the effect of the atrocious system, that no prisoners were now sent to the Pentonville Penitentiary who were not in vigorous health and strength; and he was glad to have the opportunity of expressing his abhorrence of a plan which was calculated to add madness to the other penalties of crime." Such a statement, even by Sir Peter Laurie, uttered in an influential assembly, renders it necessary to pause, since it has received the sanction of the prison authorities in Scotland, so far as regards juvenile offenders-the class to which of all others it would be most beneficial.

Separate confinement is effected by placing the criminal in a cell tenanted only by himself, in which he never sees a fellowprisoner, but where he is often visited by the officers of the prison. At Perth, the minimum number of visits which must be paid to every prisoner during a day is ten. Some of these are by the jailors, others by the chaplain, and others by the teachers. He is seized upon by the teacher, who inculcates a knowledge of the first branches of education. The chaplain directs himself to his moral and religious training; and, along with these, he receives from others instruction in some useful employment. This is a very different picture from the gloomy solitude that characterized the experiment in America; and the misfortune is, that it is too beautiful a picture to be useful. In our abhorrence of American cruelty, we are in danger of ruining a good system by pushing it in a different direction. There it failed because it was carried into operation through the instrumentality of measures beneath which human nature sank. Here it is gilded over with

Horror of Prisoners at absolute isolation.

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pleasures, that must often make the prisoners doubt the nature of the establishment, and their own identity.

The first effect of a thief's sudden disappearance from active labour is to astonish himself with the unusual circumstance of solitude. Taken abruptly from his companions out of a turbulent and exciting life, he is plunged at once into the deepest silence. His mind receives a shock which startles it. If he has got the slightest power of resuscitation, he has an opportunity for reflection, undeterred by false shame, by the fear of his companions' scorn, or by the constant recollection in their society of the pleasures of the life that reformation would for ever lose to him. The more grievous may have been his outrages upon society, the more painful will be the blow. If remorse does not accumulate upon his conscience, it does upon his memory. There is here a refuge to astonished and affrighted virtue. To those who are desirous of another chance, no system is more calculated to give protection against the ruffianly society, and the still more ruffianly conduct of associates. Its more terrible effects are at the first; the prisoner proceeding in a regular circle of feeling, from dismal to sorrowful, from sorrowful to sad, from sad to serious, from serious to serenity:

"Through the first week it was lonely," says a penitential felon; "but when I took to reading, I did not so much mind being by myself. I am quite sure it is a good deal better for me; I do learn something good now; but when we were all together in jail, I learned more wickedness in those three months than in all my life besides."—2 Field, p. 138.

measure.

The great mass think this discipline the severest of all. "Their own thoughts," says Mr. Tray,* "distress and pain them beyond When alone, they require excitement; and when they are so placed apart and must necessarily reflect on and review their position, they feel it intensely." They implore the authorities to send them to the wheel, where they will at least have the consolation of human fellowship. A punishment so dreadful comes recommended by the strongest of all arguments-success. The dread of it implies the necessity for its exercise, and establishes the wisdom of enforcing it. And in the total failure of one of the greatest of modern experiments-the Perth Penitentiary-will be seen the ruinous consequences of diluting the wholesome severity of a system which trusts to conscience as the main instrument of punishment and reformation.

"Pœna autem vehemens, ac multo sævior illis

Quas et cæditius gravis invenit, aut Rhadamanthus
Nocte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem."-Juv.

* Governor of House of Correction, Tothillfields, Evidence, House of Lords, VOL. X.

NO. XIX.

B

It speaks with a solemn effect, especially to the young; and if any scheme for the regeneration of fallen humanity can be successful, it must be one which takes care to prevent its good effects from being frittered away by the distractions of social activity, or the laborious bustle of useless (or useful) occupation. Shut out from the numberless things in life which distract attention and divert the thoughts, the prisoner is left to revolve in the quiet monotony of his prison-life the same ideas which in honest days (if he ever knew them) sometimes followed him, and thus permanence and effect are given to what had never been more than occasional meditations.

The assertion that the Separate System is inconsistent with health, has been often made, and as often disproved. Sir Benjamin Brodie declared, in his evidence before the House of Lords, that it was "as little unfavourable as any imprisonment, and less unfavourable than most.”—First Report, p. 390. He denies that it has the slightest tendency to promote insanity. If further evidence were needed, we would point to those elaborate statistical tables, in criminal returns, which give one so lively an idea of human patience. The chaplain of the Pentonville Prison, in his Report to the Commissioners, has a distinct section upon the question as to the effect of separate confinement on the mind. He states that out of 1000 prisoners under consideration, the greater part were to his knowledge considerably improved. Four hundred and two were totally unable to read with any understanding on their admission; and there were only forty-eight who left in that condition. One hundred and two were in the higher rules of arithmetic on entrance; but there were 713 on leaving; and the conclusion from these and similar data is, that the system has not any injurious effects upon the mind. Surveyor-Gen. Report, p. 49.

The groundless assertions on this subject have had the good of arousing attention. They have produced evidence of a kind the most direct and satisfactory. In 1844, the inspectors of the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia thus report :

"The hazard of 'stultifying the mind' has been regarded as a possible concomitant of confinement with labour; the inspectors desire to record their conviction, in regard thereto, that no case has occurred within their knowledge where such effects have ever been produced."

These considerations are applicable to separate confinement, however applied. In regard to juvenile delinquents, however, a controversy has arisen of an important character. Indeed, it has passed the stage of controversy since an alteration of the systematic plan upon which Prison-discipline is now based has been effected. The old system of association, after it had been abandoned even by speculative men, has been again thrust

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