Thomas Holmes

“ At liberty, he makes war upon society. In prison, he bows to the inevitable and makes the best of things. He is, and always has been, prepared to take the consequences, if caught, of his crime. But he has never yet persuaded himself, or tried to persuade himself, that he is a fool.
If again allowed liberty, he will cheerfully prepare for another campaign, and hope for a “long run.” He weighs things up, for he is a logician, and so many crimes are equal to so much detention. ”

“ Of all the sorrow and misery that I have seen in the sorrowful world in which I have lived and moved, I have seen no more woeful spectacle than the sight they present—objects at once pathetic, terrifying and hopeless. While all sorts of imaginings occupy their minds, some great delusion seems to dominate them and to destroy every atom of home comfort. Place them under authority, surround them with medical officers, question them and cross-question them, examine them and re-examine them, watch them unceasingly and they defy every member of the faculty to find traces of insanity. ”

“ When that happy day comes we shall be able to [81] differentiate between crime and disease; we shall no longer punish men for their afflictions, but we shall treat them as patients in places other than prisons. Look for a moment at that growing, ever-growing army of people, the feeble-minded and irresponsibles—prisoners who are perpetually haled in prison, and to whose ranks four hundred are added every year. From prison to the streets, from the streets to the police station, from the station to the police court, and from thence to prison forms the vicious circle of their hopeless lives. ”

“ Verily it passes the wit of men to conceive how any one can be a criminal and a lunatic at one and the same time, for if he be the one he cannot be the other. So Broadmoor will become the “State Asylum,” and the cruel farce of putting undeniably insane people on their trial will no longer be tolerated, for quietly and mercifully, after due certification they will pass to the mental hospital with no brand of criminality upon them. But I would ask: Are we to be for ever impotent before disease of the brain? ”

“ Indeed, dangerous criminals are all the more dangerous when possessed of health and good looks. Yet I venture to say that health and beauty, when charged with serious and repeated crime, gets off with a much lighter sentence than affliction and ugliness! I have frequently known stupid, half-witted and repulsive-looking criminals far more severely dealt with than clever, dangerous rogues of more prepossessing appearance. ”

“ Never mind the building, take no heed of the officials, let us concentrate our attention on the prisoners, the criminals, for they are all undergoing penal servitude.
You gasp! and well you may. You never saw such a strange, pitiful mass of smitten humanity! Well! that is something to be thankful for.
“Do you want any specialist in psychology to reveal the working of their queer minds?” “No,” you say, “their poor bodies reveal their minds.” “But they are convicts.” “Oh, no,” you say, “surely they are patients.” ”

“ For with liberty comes the temptation of opportunity, and with opportunity the fall.
Moral strength cannot be developed in the absence of temptation, for moral qualities must be free or die!
Prisons are at their best but unnatural places; for though the machinery, discipline and even the spirit that animates the whole of the officials be of the very best, still goodness, manhood, honesty and sobriety cannot grow inside a prison wall. ”

“ The action of magistrates would be dominated by their own individual psychology, and their own psychology would be dominated by the effect the “manual” had produced on their mind. The shallow man would be assured of his competence and knowledge, and he would, to his own satisfaction at least, know all about it. But the greater man would hesitate; he would be in a quandary, on the horns of a dilemma, for he would find that the formula of his “manual,” by which he was to form an opinion as to the guilt of the prisoner, applied with equal force to the innocence of the prisoner. ”

“ Retarded growth, ill-nourished bodies and general weakness have a thousand times more to do with crime than ill-shaped heads. Over the causes of the latter we have no control, but over the causes that lead to stunted and ill-nourished bodies we may have, and ought to have, complete control.
But the great bulk of them have not criminal minds, and though a very limited number of them show a tendency to deeds of passion or cruelty, the vast majority find their way into prison simply because they are helpless outside prison. ”

“ But being good does not happen to fill their stomachs, but doing evil does, either in prison or in the lodging-houses.
Now, I myself will venture into psychology, and I will voice their opinions. “We are poor, weak and afflicted, but we are not to blame; no one will give us work, for we have had no training; we cannot do hard work, we are not big or strong enough; we do not want to be dishonest, but we must live somehow. ”

“ I have seen the dirt and misery of many women, and the hopelessness of their lives long before they were committed to prison. I have helped to renew their homes, and have clothed the children while the feeble-minded mothers were in prison. But when those mothers came back, bringing their helplessness and irresponsibility with them, I have had the mortification of witnessing those homes and children sink back again to the old conditions. For neither warning nor imprisonment has the least effect upon such poor creatures. ”

“ It is my own belief that the assumed co-relation between the mental and physical characteristics of a man is a superstition and fallacy. I do not believe that a murderer can be revealed by his frontal curve, or a thief by his bulging forehead or the shape of his nose. In England, we have been at great pains during the last two or three years to disprove, by scientific and exact investigations, this popular conception of a criminal. We have personally examined three thousand of our worst convicts, men sentenced to penal [36] servitude and guilty of every form of crime. ”

“ Could we remove their prison clothing, dress them as ordinary citizens dress, and mingle them with a mass of ordinary citizens, I venture to say that no scientist would be able to detect the criminals by the formation of their heads or the size of their ears. I do not maintain that men who possess queer-shaped heads do not commit crime. ”

“ But it must be remembered that rich criminals are more likely to escape detection, arrest and punishment than the criminals of the poor. They are still more likely to plan numerous transactions that technically do not come within the meshes of criminal law, but which morally are as dishonest and rascally as any crime against property can possibly be. The ethics of commercial life are more than strange, for a bogus company promoter would probably be appalled should his son be charged with forgery or burglary, or his daughter with obtaining goods by false pretences. ”

“ Speaking on this subject to the American Congress at Washington on October 4, 1910, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, K.C.B., the esteemed chairman of our Prison Commissioners, made the following statement—
“There is no criminal type. Nothing in the past has so retarded progress as the conviction, deeply rooted and widespread, that the criminal is a class by himself, different from all others, with a tendency to crime, of which certain peculiarities of body are the outward and visible signs. ”

“ They become criminals not because they possess criminal minds, but because there is no place for them in our social and industrial life; because their necessities cannot be supplied in any other way.
To classify such people as criminals is about as wise and just as classifying babes as criminals! Though they form a considerable proportion of our prison population, they are not to be detected by their ill-shaped heads, for some that are declared to be feeble-minded are quite up to the ordinary standard of beauty. ”

“ I am heartily tired of meeting with such afflicted humanity that I cannot help or assist in any useful way.
But I want no specialist or professor to read me their minds, for their bodies are their minds.
These young fellows are not particularly wicked; they have no great passion that dominates their lives. They are not anxious to do ill; they have no great aspirations for good. ”

“ If we seek an opinion from tramps and vagrants, they, if honest, will tell us that from time to time prison is a necessity to them; that if they cannot obtain entrance for vagrancy, why, then they will break somebody’s window and so make sure of prison comforts, for it is “better than the workhouse.”
If we consult youthful ex-prisoners, i.e. juvenile-adults, of whom unfortunately I know many, we get an altogether too favourable picture of prison life.
Many of them do not hesitate to tell us that they can “do it on their heads.” ”

“ Judges and magistrates sometimes inform the culprits, and the public, that they sit in court for the purpose of curing this habit, vice or crime. And an admiring public always endorses, and acclaims the heavy sentence of imprisonment awarded.
But neither judge nor magistrate can cure it, for a sentence of five years’ penal servitude given by a judge is quite as futile as a sentence of three months’ imprisonment given by a magistrate. Women of this kind exist among the poor even as they do among the rich, and they are just as responsible as acquisitive jackdaws. ”

“ I know the anxiety and sorrow of families who have one such in their homes. I know that many, very many serious crimes and a world of suffering might be saved if we had registration of, and proper provision for epileptics.
The provision made for these unfortunates is miserably insufficient. Their neglect by the State is a national scandal, but it is also a public danger. People who can pay may have their epileptics cared for. But the epileptics of the poor are cared for by short periods of confinement in prison, workhouse or asylum. ”

“ I have sat beside such men as they lay in bed, I have watched the expression on their faces, and I have listened to heavy breathing, for words they had none. I have seen them rise from bed in a state of stupor and do some foolish or childish thing. ”

“ In poor countries crime is not rampant, for Ireland, the poorest of the British Isles, shows a much lower ratio of crime than England, Scotland or Wales. Even in the terrible slums of London, where the poverty is intense, where misery and suffering abound, where thousands of men and women are but a single day in advance of starvation, where absolute destitution is always in evidence, the number of real and confirmed criminals does not exceed a fair proportion when the number of the inhabitants are taken into consideration. ”

“ He reviews his life again and again, not with feelings of shame or sorrow, but for the purpose of finding some excuse for himself or fixing some blame upon others.
He is full of fear for the future, but he has no sorrow for the past; he has no desire to undo the wrong he has done, no particular desire to avoid such wrongs in the future.
He lives in a state of chronic irritation; he is morose or excitable by turns. He does not find the officials sympathetic or courteous, for they, too, are human, and even in prison like meets with like. ”

“ Probably they are as likely to produce criminals, or even more so, than [44] poverty and care. The criminal ranks, then, are by no means recruited from the poor alone, for all classes and every station contribute their proportion.
To speak of the very poor as the “criminal classes” is wrong and misleading. The term can only be applicable to the blighted, helpless weaklings constantly in prison, who have neither wit, courage, nor strength to conceive and carry out anything approaching organised crime. These, it must be admitted, come largely from the poor, for they are the product of poverty. ”

“ They do not bear on their bodies the cuts, wounds and bruises that are often found on the bodies of those who do suffer, but I have found, and certainly my experience does not stand alone, that they are often irresponsible creatures possessing strange minds, clever in certain directions and those directions not for good; capable of serious crime, but never exhibiting any sorrow, fear or remorse when convicted of any offence. They generally insist upon their absolute innocence, but go to prison just as unconcernedly as they would go elsewhere. ”

“ They tell us that for ten years they have in Pentonville prison measured, weighed and medically examined all the young prisoners, i.e., all those under twenty-one years of age who have undergone sentences in that huge establishment.
Many thousands of such prisoners have passed through Pentonville during those ten years, and a terrible procession of smitten humanity they have presented.
Listen, my lords and gentlemen of both Houses! Heed! all Social Reformers of every kind! Think of it, all you specialists who claim to explore the criminal mind! ”

“ But for a first offender, even though he be of years, who has committed some breach of honesty, restitution seems the most effective way: the only reasonable plan for the prevention of demoralisation and the expense of prison. ”

“ This failure to reform must not be attributed, then, to prison system altogether, still less must it be attributed to any lack of sympathy in the prison officials; but rather to the two facts, that prisons are unnatural places, and that a prison population is made up of strange and motley individuals, each differing widely from his fellows in temperament and taste, in physical and mental capacity.
An educated and refined man, one who loves liberty and social life, must of necessity find prison a terrible place. ”

“ The body acts upon the mind, and the mind upon the body in so many, and in such mysterious ways, that I cannot differentiate between them. But of one thing I am quite certain, and it is this: that the best way to learn something of a criminal’s mind is to ascertain everything possible with regard to his body. ”