Arthur Griffiths

“ There is always the chance of a flaw in the indictment, of a missing witness, or extenuating circumstances. Even when in the condemned cell, with a shameful death within measurable distance, many cling still to life, expecting much from the intercession of friends or the humanitarianism of the age. All almost without exception sleep soundly at night, except the first after sentence, when the first shock of the verdict and the solemn notification of the impending blow keeps nearly all awake, or at least disturbs their night’s rest. ”

“ Müller knew that any confession would ruin his chances of escape. His arguments were specious and evasive when pressed to confess. “Why should man confess to man?” he replied; “man cannot forgive man, only God can do so. Man is therefore only accountable to God.” But on the gallows, when the cap was over his eyes and the rope had been adjusted round his neck, and within a second of the moment when he would be launched into eternity, he whispered in the ear of the German pastor who attended him on the scaffold, “I did it.” ”

“ To the foregoing categories of undoubted criminals must be added another pretty numerous class of offenders, who were at least so deemed by contemporary codes, and who now frequently found themselves relegated to Newgate. These were days when the press had far from achieved its present independence; when writers, chafing under restraints and reckless of consequence, were tempted into licence from sheer bravado and opposition; when others far more innocent were brought under the same ban of the law, and suffered imprisonment and fine for a hardly unwarrantable freedom of speech. ”

“ Soon afterwards Hocker heard cries of “murder,” and proceeding to where they came from, found Delarue dead, slain by the furious brother. Hocker was so overcome, feeling himself the principal cause of the tragedy, that he rushed to a slaughter-house in Hampstead and purposely stained his clothes with blood. Such an extravagant defence did not weigh with judge or jury; the first summed up dead against the prisoner, and the latter, after retiring for ten minutes, found him guilty. Hocker’s conduct in Newgate while under sentence of death was most extraordinary. ”

“ Wainwright’s demeanour was one of reckless effrontery steadily maintained to the last. His conversation turned always upon his influence over the weaker sex, and the extraordinary success he had achieved. No woman could resist him, he calmly assured Mr. Smith that night as they walked together, and he recounted his villanies one by one. His effrontery was only outdone by his cool contempt for the consolations of religion. The man who had made a pious life a cloak for his misdeeds, the once exemplary young man and indefatigable Sunday School teacher, went impenitent to the gallows. ”

“ All the evils of indiscriminate association were strongly accentuated by the crowd collected within its narrow limits. “It may easily be imagined,” say the inspectors, in speaking of the prison generally, “what must be the state of discipline in a place filled with characters so various as were assembled there, where the tried and the untried, the sick and the healthy, the sane and the insane, the young and the old, the trivial offender and the man about to suffer the extreme penalty of the law, are all huddled together without discrimination, oversight, or control.” ”

“ The wretched man did not fall with it, but jumped on to the platform, and seizing the rope with his hands, tried to avoid strangulation. The spectacle was horrible; the convict was half on the platform, half hanging, and the convulsions of his body were appalling. The crowd vociferously yelled their disapproval, and at length the executioner forced the struggling criminal from the platform, so that the rope sustained his whole weight. ”

“ There was the same crowding in the sleeping arrangements as on the male side; the same scarcity of bedding. It was a special evil of this part of the prison, that the devotional exercises, originally so profitable, had grown into a kind of edifying spectacle, which numbers of well-meaning but inquisitive people were anxious to witness. Thus, when the inspectors visited there were twenty-three strangers, and only twenty-eight prisoners. The presence of so many strangers, many of them gentlemen, distracted the prisoners’ attention, and could not be productive of much good. ”

“ Dr. Forde took life pretty easy. Had a prisoner sent for him, he told the committee, he might have gone, but as no one did send, except they were sick and thought themselves at death’s door, he confined his ministrations to the condemned, whom he visited twice a week in the day room of the press yard, or daily after the order for execution had arrived. He repudiated the notion that he had anything to do with the state of morals of the gaol. He felt no obligation to instruct youthful prisoners, or attend to the spiritual needs of the mere children so often thrown into Newgate. ”

“ Buxton, while most loudly inveighing against the foul state of most British gaols, fully exonerates the governors. “None of the grievances represented,” he says in his preface, “are occasioned by the gaolers; that class of men are often subjected to undistinguished abuse; my experience would furnish me with very different language. Without any exception, I have had reason to approve, and sometimes to applaud, their conduct; and I can truly say that of all the persons with whom I have conversed, they are the most sensible of the evils of our present system of prison discipline.” ”

“ Supplies of common necessaries, such as have now been part of the furniture of every British gaol for many years, were meagre or altogether absent. The rations of food were notoriously inadequate, and so carelessly distributed, that many were left to starve. So unjust and unequal was the system, that the allowance to convicted criminals was better than that of the innocent debtor, and the general insufficiency was such that it multiplied beyond all reason the number of visitors, many of whom came merely as the purveyors of food to their friends. ”

“ The time was one when thoughtful people who concerned themselves closely with social questions were greatly exercised as to the best system of treating the inmates of a gaol. A new and still imperfectly understood science had arisen, the principles of which were debated by disputants of widely opposite opinions with an earnestness that sometimes bordered upon acrimony. One school were strongly in favour of the continuous separation of prisoners, the other supported the theory of labour in association, but under a stringent rule of silence, with isolation only at night. ”

“ The two masses of prisoners for trial undulate and slightly murmur, while the capital convicts who were lately in that black pew appear faint with emotion.
“This exhibition lasts for some minutes, and then the congregation disperses, the condemned returning to the cells: the forger carried by turnkeys; the youth sobbing aloud convulsively, as a passionate child; the burglar muttering curses and savage expressions of defiance; whilst the poor sheep-stealer shakes hands with the turnkeys, whistles merrily, and points upwards with madness in his look.” ”

“ That sound and illustrious lawyer, Sir James Stephen, is of opinion that the receiver of stolen goods is one of the greatest of criminals; and in his recently-published history of the Criminal Law he seriously recommends capital punishment for those who have been repeatedly convicted of the offence. ”

“ They were limited to two wards and two cells, an area of about one hundred and ninety-two superficial yards in all, into which, at the time of Mrs. Fry’s visit, some three hundred women with their children were crowded, all classes together, felon and misdemeanant, tried and untried; the whole under the superintendence of an old man and his son. They slept on the floor, without so much as a mat for bedding. Many were very nearly naked, others were in rags; some desperate from want of food, some savage from drink, foul in language, still more recklessly depraved in their habits and behaviour. ”

“ That the need for prison reform was imperative may be gathered from the few out of many instances I have adduced, yet there were those who, wedded to ancient ideas, were intolerant of change; they would not admit the existence of any evils. One smug alderman, a member of the House of Commons, sneered at the ultra philanthropy of the champions of prison improvement. ”

“ Palmer’s trial caused the most intense excitement. The direful suspicions which surrounded the case filled the whole country with uneasiness and misgiving, and the deepest anxiety was felt that the crime, if crime there had been, should be brought home to its perpetrator. The Central Criminal Court was crowded to suffocation. Great personages occupied seats upon the bench; the rest of the available space was allotted by ticket, to secure which the greatest influence was necessary. People came to stare at the supposed cold-blooded prisoner ”

“ The executive was capriciously sensitive to criticism, and readily roused to extreme measures. No newspaper indeed was safe; the editors of Liberal prints, or their contributors, who touched on political subjects were at the mercy of the Attorney-General. Any morning’s issue might be made the subject of a prosecution, and every independent writer on the wrong side went in daily dread of fine, the pillory, or committal to Newgate. ”

“ In the press-yard, the press-room and ward above it were parcelled out into nine separate sleeping cells; each was provided with an iron bedstead, and a small desk at which the condemned man might read or write. But the one great and most crying evil remained unremedied. “The mischief of gaol associations,” say the inspectors, “which has been demonstrably proved to be the fruitful source of all the abuses and irregularities which have so long disgraced Newgate, is not only permitted still to exist in the prison, but is rendered more powerful than before.”... ”

“ Cries of Murder! murder! were now raised, and added greatly to the horrors of the scene. Panic became general. More women, children, and many men were borne down, to perish beneath the feet of the rest. The most affecting and distressing scene was at Green Arbour Lane, just opposite the debtors’ door of the prison. Here a couple of piemen had been selling their wares; the basket of one of them, which was raised upon a four-legged stool, was upset. The pieman stooped down to pick up his scattered stock, and some of the mob, not seeing what had happened, stumbled over him. ”

“ The keeper and his officers resided at a distance from the gaol, and left its inmates to their own devices. There was no decency whatever in the internal arrangements; still no separation of the sexes, no means of ablution or other necessary services. One borough prison consisted of nothing more than a couple of cells, about ten yards square, and absolutely nothing more. In another borough, with a population of ten thousand, the prison was of the same dimensions. One cell was a dungeon, and the other an “improper and unhealthy abode for any human being,” with a watercourse running through it. ”

“ Suicides at Newgate were numerous enough, but they seldom possessed any novel or unusual features; prison suicides seldom do, except as regards ingenuity and determination. Only great resolution indeed, persisted in to the bitter end, would make death a certainty, so limited and imperfect are the means generally available. When a bit of rope carefully secreted, braces, shoe-strings, shirt torn into strips are the only instruments, and a bar or small hook at no elevation affords{410} the only drop, strangulation would seldom supervene but for the resolution of the miserable felo de se. ”

“ Any disposed to behave well were teased and laughed at by others. Unrestricted conversation went on, accompanied by such loud yawning, laughing, or coughing as almost impeded the service. No one in authority attempted to preserve order; the gatesmen, themselves prisoners, might expostulate, but the turnkeys who were present ignored any disturbance until reminded of their duty by the chaplain. The keeper never attended service. It was suggested to him that he might have a pew in the chapel with a private entrance to it from his own house, but nothing came of the proposal. ”

“ It was manifestly wrong that such persons, “visited by the most awful of calamities,” should be detained in a common prison. Not only did their presence tend greatly to interfere with the discipline of the prison, but their condition was deplorable in the extreme. The lunatic became the sport of the idle and the depraved. His cure was out of the question; he was placed in a situation “beyond all others calculated to confirm his malady and prolong his sufferings.” The matter was still further complicated at Newgate by the presence within the walls of sham lunatics. ”

“ In a county prison adjoining the metropolis, the separation between the male and female quarters was supposed to be accomplished by the erection of an iron railing; in this same prison capital convicts were chained to the floor until execution. In another gaol not far off male and female felons still occupied the same room—underground, and reached by a ladder of ten steps. In others the separation between the sexes consisted in a hanging curtain, or an imaginary boundary line, and nothing prevented parties from passing to either side but an empty regulation which all so disposed could defy. ”