Prison Palace; Heading County Qoall
Open Letter. Lm beth. 1847.
The John r. Oliver
Criminological Collection
NUMBER.
ML? ACQUIRED gel). 1922,
:.r' :i^'-
<^ Harvard Medical Library
in the Francis A. Countway
Library of Medicine -Boston
VERITATEM PERMEDICIjs(AM OU^^RAAIUS
Vf^'y^'l^^yiC^^
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010 with funding from
Open Knowledge Commons and Harvard Medical School
http://www.archive.org/details/viewofprisonpalaOOpear
VIEW
OF THE
PRISON PALACE,
CALLED
READING COUNTY GAOL,
FOK THE
BOARD, EDUCATION, AND MAINTENANCE
OF
CONVICTED CRIMINALS,
AT THE
PUBLIC EXPENSE.
EXTRACTED FROM MR. CHARLES PEARSON'S FIRST
LETTER TO THE ELECTORS O^ LAMBETH.
JULY, 1847.
UI|i|!Ali'ili''li'imi.p^i|j
III ,1, 1
73
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TO IMER. CHARLES PEARSON.
Sir,
I have received your address^, and much approve of
that part which relates to Pentonville Model Prison
and Reading Gaol. Why do you not circulate
a copy of that portion of the letter, with a drawing
of the Gaol, as you showed it at your Lecture ?
It is impossible for people to conceive of the ab-
surd extravagance of the system by merely reading
your account, although it is expressed in such plain
and forcible terms.
I see, in a book upon education, lately published
by the Government, they say that the expense of pre-
venting and punishing crime in this country amounts
to more than two millions of pounds a year ; and
yet the number of criminals rapidly increases.
This is not surprising, if such Prison Palaces
are built in the country, while the poor and
destitute are shut up in Union Houses, or compelled to
VI.
live in pestilential hovels not fit to shelter a dog.
People may say w^hat they please^ but it is hungry
bellies and ragged hacks that make roguish heads and
thieving hands.
Give the poor man a fair day's wages for a fair
day's work, and he will take care of his offspring, and
in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a
thousand neither he nor they will give you any
trouble^ or put the public to any expense, either as
'^ juvenile" or adult offenders.
Let real criminals be really punished, and not
petted and pampered — as the Model Prison and
Reading Gaol prisoners are treated.
I don't agree with you in Politics any more
than I agree with the other Candidates ; you are
in that respect all tarred with the same brush, as the
saying is. I shall, however, give you my plumper, not-
withstanding your politics, because I believe the mea-
sures you have proposed will diminish taxation, and
increase the welfare of the people.
I am. Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
JOHN BULL.
Lambeth, I2tk July, 1847.
m
EXTRACTED FROM
MR. CHARLES PEARSON'S FIRST LETTER
XO THE
ELECTORS OF LAMBETH.
CRZZKEE AND PUNISHMENT.
Nearly thirty years since, when a mere boy, I was privileged
by the venerable Samuel Favell to second in the Common Coun-
cil his motion for a petition to Parliament to ameliorate and
reform our Criminal Code.
I was thence led to bring my professional education to bear
upon a subject which has never afterwards been absent from
my mind. Since that period I twice served the office of under-
sheriff of London and Middlesex ; I filled the chair of a Cor-
poration Committee appointed to inquire into the effect of our
criminal laws upon the criminal classes of society, and I have
been honoured with the confidence and concurrence of many of
the wisest and best of both sexes, who have made the relations
of crime and punishment, prison discipline, and prison reform,
the objects of their anxious soHcitude and care.
With the exception of one system, to which attention has
been only recently directed, every variety of treatment has
during this period been fully tried. Under the auspices of
the philanthropic, the gaols of this country, in point of beauty,
order, cleanliness, convenience, and health, have, during the
last half century, been raised from pest-houses to palaces, and,
as far as mental occupation and moral instruction are concern-
ed, the treatment of the prisoners has been proportionably im-
proved.
8
The several systems under which these changes have been
effected bear the most diverse, and even opposite characters.
The Congregated System, the Classified System, the Silent
System, and the Separate System, have all had their advocates,
and have successively been in the ascendant, but they have
failed, and will all fail, in my opinion, to accomplish the great
objects of their benevolent advocates, because they are all
based upon what appears to me to be a fatal error. They
assume that privation of liberty and corporal coercion, com-
bined with mental and moral instruction, will operate as agents
sufficiently deterring and reformatory, to effect the repression
of crime, unaccompanied by continuous labour in some pro-
ductive occupation, analogous to the pursuits by which the pri-
soner on his restoration to society must be enabled to gain an
honest livelihood, or else return to a life of crime.
The Separate System (or the Solitary System, as it is fre-
quently but improperly called), is that which some time since
prevailed in the United States. It has been partially tried
here, and is now gaining ground in this and other countries.
It is in operation at Reading, Perth, Bath, Wakefield, Preston,
and some other places. It has been too recently introduced
into this country to enable us to state what may be the precise
amount of its effect upon recommittals, as compared with other
systems; but I have heard from credible authority, by the
evidence of a witness examined before a Committee of the
House of Lords, and from other means of information, that the
system in this important element of success has wholly failed to
counterbalance the enormous expense with which it is unavoid-
ably attended, if carried out in that spirit of humanity with
which in England at least, it must be administered.
Under this system criminals are better and more expen-
sively lodged, taught, clothed, and fed, than nineteen-twentieths
of the honest and industrious poor; nay more, because a
healthful circulation of the blood cannot be maintained in
prison without labour, which is exploded from the system, the
warming and ventilation of the apartments is made more
perfect and more costly than the airing and warming of the
mansions of the nobles of our land.
The motives of those by whom this plan of entire separation
and remission of labour was devised I have not the slightest
intention to impugn; but its justice, its policy, and expediency
I without reservation arraign.
To enable you to judge of the soundness of my views, I will
state a series of facts connected with Reading County Gaol,
which is conducted upon this system. I select this prison for
the illustration of my views, because it was built for the pur-
9
pose of separation, and it exhibits the system in its very best
form.
The building occupies a most conspicuous situation near to
the Great Western Railway, and is one of the most beautiful
erections in the country. Instead of wearing the gloomy
and repelling aspect by which our old-fashioned gaols were
distinguished, it shows an attractive cheerful countenance ; and,
if the advantages — mental, moral, and corporeal — which its in-
terior affords could be obtained without the preliminary com-
mission of crime, I verily believe that the establishment might
be constantly filled by voluntary inmates from amongst the
meritorious poor of the surrounding district.
Respectable persons are admitted to view the establishment
without a magistrate's order between the hours of 10 and 12,
and 2 and 4. Its excellent officers take pleasure in showing it
to strangers ; they exhibit specimens of the diet, clothing, and
bedding, and explain fully the working of the system. 1 have
visited the prison twice during the last two years ; on the first
visit the number of inmates was 50; the daily average I am
informed in that year did not exceed 16 ; on the last occasion
the daily average number was 120. The following are the notes
I made after the second visit : —
The official staff consists of a governor, chaplain, surgeon,
deputy-governor, matron, storekeeper, eight warders, school-
master, porter, cook, female warder, engineer, clerk, prison
servant, and trades instructor.
The superior officers are evidently men well fitted for their
duties, the chaplain is a devoted advocate of the Separate
System, and " his heart is in his work." The warders are
dressed in uniform, they are fine officer-like looking men, and
appear to be intelligent and humane. The apartments of the
prisoners are clean, light, airy, and spacious, with water laid on,
and every accommodation for washing, &c, in their own apart-
ments ; the food frugal but abundant, and of excellent quality,
the instruction the prisoners receive is sound, combining with
religious teaching, various descriptions of useful and agreeable
knowledge.
The government of the gaol is under the supervision of an
intelligent body of the county magistracy, who take great
pains to see that the system is properly carried out ; the prison
exhibits the greatest cleanliness, comfort, order, quietude, and
regularity. The building cost upwards of £50,000, the money
was borrowed on the county rates at 4 per cent. The building
fund, therefore, has imposed upon the rate-payer a permanent
charge of £2,000 per annum, or the earlier liquidation of the
capital by extra rates. Dividing the interest by 120, the average
10
number of the inmates, gives £16 10s. as the annual cost of
each man's lodging ; the average cost of his diet and clothing
is £11 5s., and his proportion of the cost of the general prison
expenses, including the staff of officers employed for his re-
straint, and his medical, educational, and religious treatment
averages £29, so that the gross annual cost to the county rates
of each man, woman, and child in Reading Gaol is upwards of
£56 ; while the average wages of our agricultural labourer ranges
from 7s. to 10s. a-week, say the latter sum, or £26 a-year, out
of which he has to provide lodging, food, fuel, clothing for him-
self and family, and perhaps education for three or four chil-
dren ; or being destitute of the means of educating his children,
they must grow up in the state of heathen ignorance upon
which the speakers upon the subject of education have so for-
cibly dwelt.
In the ancient monastic institutions of this and other coun-
tries, repentant sinners were permitted to dream away the
remainder of their existence, beyond the reach of this world's
temptations. If there were any philanthropic fund, out of
which the inmates of Reading Gaol could be maintained for the
remainder of their lives without labouring at some productive
occupation, the public might possibly have no right to com-
plain of the application of private funds, in attempting to carry
on the work of moral reform by such means and at such a cost,
but to take from the pockets of the public such enormous sums,
with a view to the repression of crime, is, in my humble judg-
ment, as unwise as it is unjust. If the funds of the rate-paying
farmer are diminished by unnecessary contributions to county
rates, he has so much less means to work his land, and he
must either diminish the number of his labourers or the
amount of their pay ; in either case their state of destitution
is increased, which, far more than the ignorance of the people,
is the fruitful source of crime.
It will be perceived by the list of the stafF-ofBcers of the gaol
a ** Trades Instructor" is enumerated. I saw the youth who
filled this situation ; he told me that, in point of fact, no "trade"
was taught in the gaol, but that he taught some of the prison-
ers " knitting," which with oakum-picking, and pumping the
water for the washing, &c., of the prison, was the only labour
performed by the inmates.
On the credit side of the printed account, I found an item
of receipts for " productive labour," amounting during the
quarter to £1 8s. 6d. ; less than 3d. per prisoner per quarter, a
sum too small to find the representative of a week's labour in
any denomination of the coin of the realm.
Mr. Field, the zealous chaplain of Reading Gaol, in his
n
11
printed report laid before the Houses of Parliament, frankly
says that ** short imprisonments are inimical to any material
moral amendment, and quite inadequate to deter from crime,
either under the Separate or any other system of prison dis-
cipline."
The Parliamentary returns show that the number of con-
victions and imprisonments for crime in England and Wales
amounts to about 100,000 in the year, out of which more than
three-fourths are for short terms, ranging from ten days to
three months ; so that, in the vast majority of cases under the
present system of criminal jurisprudence, it is admitted by its
most intelligent and able advocate, the Separate System, as a
reformatory or deterring agent, entirely fails of success.
As an instrument of lengthened punishment for grave
offences, the Separate System is pregnant, I think, with still
greater evils ; — its severity or laxity, in such cases, is dependant
upon the agencies by which it is intended to be carried out.
If, as at Reading, the administration is humane and liberal, and
the staff of officers intelligent and numerous; or if, as at Bath,
the chaplain of the prison (who is described in the Inspector's
Report as a zealous advocate for the Separate System) will
kindly relieve the ennui of the inmates, by giving them the use
of "a library of useful and entertaining knowledge," and by
delivering lectures to the prisoners upon " Natural History,
Astronomy, Optics, &c.," the system will operate as a premium
on crime ; if, on the other hand, its essential principles of sepa-
ration and seclusion are applied with severity and parsimony,
the system can only be enforced with an amount of solitude
and suffering not to be contemplated without the most painful
emotions. In whatever form the system is administered,
whether with severity or humanity, it is, in cases of long con-
finement, productive of effects upon the mental and physical
condition of the sufferers for which no other advantages it may
possess can possibly compensate.
Mr. Hampton, the Surgeon-Superintendent having the
charge of 345 "exiles," who had been confined from 12 to
18 months upon the Separate System in the Model Prison,
thus writes to the Governor : —
" I experienced some difficulty at first in berthing and arrang-
ing these men, who, apparently , from not having been associated
together for some time, were slow in comprehending orders, and
equally slow in obeying them, although evidently tractable and
willing ; in fact, they had lost their gregarious habits, and did
not again acquire them until after some weeks,
*' I'he sudden change from great seclusion to the bustle and
noise of a crowded ship, produced a number of cases of con-
12
vidsions, attended in some instances tvith nausea and vomiting,
in others simulating hysteria, and in all being of a most anoma-
lous character. The recumbent position, fresh air, mild stimu-
lants, Sfc, were found beneficial in all these cases, and after
three days the convulsions disappeared"
After a time the benefits of a sea voyage, and the influence
of a mild and more constant climate, showed themselves in the
improved condition of the convicts, and the results of their
education in the Model Prison vrere permitted to develope
themselves, for Mr. Hampton says that during the voyage —
" Divine service was performed morning and evening every
Sunday after the embarkation of the convicts ; the Church of
England service and a sermon being read each time. The
morning services were conducted by myself the evening by the
Religious Instructor. To improve the prisoners^ minds, as well
as to increase their self-respect and estimation of each other, a
certain number of the most intelligent were selected, and en-
couraged to deliver lectures to their fellow-prisoners in the
evenings, on instructive and interesting subjects ; and many of
these lectures, as well as the attentive manner in which they
were listened to, would have done credit to similar meetings of
free men having much greater pretensions.
" Among the subjects selected by the lecturers^ I may mention
the Advantages of Education ; the Use and Abuse of Music;
Comparative Anatomy ; English History ; the Origin of
Names ; Universal History ; Astronomy ; Poetry ; Ornitho-
logy ; Characteristics of the Human Race ; Circulation of the
Blood ; the Duties of Domestic Servants ; Architecture, Sfc.
" A Weekly Newspaper was also jiroposed, edited, and
carried on by the prisoners in a very highly creditable manner.
In fact, every possible means were used to excite and keep up a
healthy, vigorous, manly tone of mind amongst the convicts,
and with the most pleasing results''
It will be recollected that the persons here spoken of were
convicted criminals, who had been thus educated at the public
expense, and were then on their voyage as " exiles" to a foreign
country, where the climate being mild and constant, and labour
in great demand, they might reasonably hope to spend the re-
mainder of their days with a degree of peace and plenty which
the great majority of the honest labourers of their father land
were left in vain to sigh for.
But change the picture, that the mind may contemplate what
would be the effect of these "pleasing results" of this system
upon an English labourer destined on his exclusion from the
goal to get his living by hard work under all the changes of
our variable climate.
13
The Inspector's report of Reading gaol furnishes a daily
register of the changes of the atmosphere within and without
the walls of the establishment, from which it appears that
while in 12 days the atmosphere without ranged 31 degrees,
the variations of the temperature in the apartments in which
the inmates of the prison sleep and study did not exceed two
degrees. This equability of temperature was effected by means
of a scientific system of warming and ventilation superior to
any nobleman's drawing-room.
Let your imaginations depict the fate of an agricultural
labourer, a navigator, a bricklayer, or other out-door labourer,
discharged from such an establishment at the end of 12 or 18
months, and driven out into the wide world, by his daily labour,
to earn his daily bread.
With his appetite educated to expect, with the regularity of
clock-work, to be daily supplied with solid, wholesome, and
palatable food — with his mind taught to appreciate the charms
of quietude and study— with his whole frame enervated by ease,
and indolence, and warmth, and sedentary occupation, — what
must be the fate of such a man when turned loose into the
world without house or home, without money or friends, to
engage in competition in the labour market with men whose
robust frames are prepared to encounter privations, fatigues,
and all the variations of climate to which a labourer in this
country is necessarily exposed ?
I hope I do not undervalue the benefits that may be derived
from the mental and moral teaching which is the prevailing
discipline of the new system — I hope I do not underrate the
value of the accomplishments with which these exiles were
gifted ; but I shall, I am sure, be joined by every reflecting
person in denouncing, as equally impolitic, unjust, and illusory,
a system which holds out the prospect of reforming the crimi-
nals of this country, by discountenancing severe and continuous
useful occupation, and looking to moral and intellectual teach-
ing only, as adequate instruments for repressing the growth of
crime.
Sir Eardley Wilmot, writing of the exiles mentioned by Mr.
Hampton, while praising their docility and general conduct,
says of them, nearly a year after their liberation from the
Model Prison, — ** / should say from my own observation^ as
well as the reports of others, that they are depressed in spirits,
and appear as if their minds and energies still felt the weight
which their peculiar treatment at home appears to have pro-
duced.' If this was the condition of men under the favourable
circumstances they were placed in, what would have been their
fate if they had been exposed to the hardships they would have
had to encounter in their own country ?
14
JUVENILE OFFENDERS.
The House of Commons has been recently deluged with
statistical and other statements, to show the enormous increase
of crime in this country. Although the increase in the number
of commitments and convictions (600 per cent.) during the last
40 years does not aiford a true standard of the actual increase
of crime ; yet, after making all proper deductions on account of
circumstances affecting rather the apparent than the real
increase, the residue shows a most alarming augmentation,
and particularly amongst that class which has acquired an un-
happy notoriety under the title of *' Juvenile offenders,"
a class which almost all persons concur in considering
rather as objects of compassion than punishment, if any other
than penal measures could be devised to check their increasing
numbers.
The walls of the Commons House have rung with the asser-
tion that ignorance is the cause of this increase of crime, and
that instruction must work the cure ; if this proposition were
true, we should have found that ignorance had increased in
something like the ratio that crime had been augmented;
whereas, the facts directly contradict the supposition. During
the last 40 years, when population has increased 60, and con-
victions 600 per cent., popular education has improved in
quality, and, as appears from the reports of the National
Society and other sources of information, the means of educa-
tion provided for the masses of our youth by pubhc contribu-
tions has increased more than 800 per cent. 1 confidently
affirm, that it is not wholly, or even principally, to the igno-
rance of the people, but to the errors of legislation, that the
increase of crime must be ascribed. The working of the New
Poor Law, which has rendered the workhouse more hateful
than the gaol, the Police Acts, the vagrant laws, which an-
nually send thousands and tens of thousands of destitutes, by
means of summary convictions, to our prisons or houses of
correction, as they are delicately called ; the multipHcation of
statutes which consign both children and adults to a criminal
gaol for petty malaprohibita, or the most trifling offences, are,
with other concurrent legislative errors, the fruitful sources of
15
crime's increase. To familiarise a petty transgressor, whether
a juvenile or an adult, with the atmosphere of a gaol, whence
labour is banished, and where every comfort may be obtained
without work, is to confound the distinctions between virtue
and crime, which it should be the province of the law to define
and maintain.
I have, for the last twelve or fourteen years, been endeavour-
ing to attract attention to this subject. The alarming increase
of juvenile delinquency has at length forced itself upon public
notice, and the Prison Inspectors have recommended measures
which are, I understand, likely to be adopted. In my judg-
ment, the means recommended are fundamentally erroneous,
and, although they may be better than the present vicious
system, they are alike impolitic and unjust, both to the nation
which must pay, and the children who must suffer the discipline
they recommend.
We are in the habit of hearing what is called the French
system praised for acquitting as a criminal, and delivering over
to a reformatory asylum, a child charged with offences, who,
being under the age of 16, is held to have *' agi sans discern-
ment" I know not whence the Code Napoleon took this law ;
but I do know that it is absurd to call it the French system — it
is the English system, or the Saxon system, if you please ; for,
by the common law of England, a child under the age of dis-
cretion is held to be incapax doli, and is not amenable to the
law, unless he is shown to be endowed with what has been
termed a precocious mischievous discretion, or to have agi avec
discernment, in the same manner as required by the French
law.
I hope we shall see the principles of the English law in this
particular brought into practical operation in this country,
modified and adapted to the circumstances and state of society