Pentonville Prison

“ Our own Prison Commissioners have for ten years conducted an examination in Pentonville prison of all prisoners between the ages of 16 years and 21 years. They have given us the results in words and figures that compel thought. Once more I give their words: “They are as a class two inches shorter and fourteen pounds lighter than the [40] average industrial population of similar ages, and 28 per cent. of them suffer from some disease, affliction, or deprivation,” and the Commissioners add that the highest proportion of reconvictions comes from among them, being no less than 40 per cent. ”

“ A small volume, entitled, “Prisons and Prisoners,” by Joseph Kingsmill, chaplain of the “Pentonville Prison,” near London, conducted very much upon our system, is well worth reading. We would also refer to an elaborate “Essay on Cellular Separation,” written by our fellow-member, William Parker Foulke, under appointment by “the American Association for the improvement of Penal and Reformatory Institutions,” and read before that Association at the Annual Meeting, held in New York, in the autumn of 1860, as being an able exposition of our system. ”

“ To show what efficient instruction in infamy those already prepared to receive its lessons is afforded in prisons, we need only instance a fact, related in the Pentonville Prison Report by the chaplain, relative to a child of decent parentage, and not, as one may suppose, so open as many to bad impressions:—'A very young boy, seven years of age, was brought in, charged, in company with other two boys somewhat older, with stealing some iron-piping from the street. ”

“ The Salvation Army Officers have authority from the Home Office to visit the various prisons, where the inmates are informed that those who are desirous of seeing them must give in their names. Then on a certain day, the Officer, who, under Commissioner Sturgess, is responsible for the Prison work of the Army in England, appears at the Wandsworth or the Pentonville Prison, or wherever it may be. There he finds, perhaps, as many as 150 men waiting to see him, the total number of ex-prisoners who pass through the hands of the Army in England averaging at present about 1,000 per annum. ”

“ Soon afterwards he wrote the following letter to the governor of Pentonville:
“George Hackett presents his compliments to the Governor of the Model Prison, and begs to apprise him of his happy escape from the gaol. He is in excellent spirits, and assures the governor it would be useless to pursue him. He is quite safe, and intends in a few days to proceed to the continent to recruit his health.”
Hackett was a very desperate man. He had already escaped from a police cell at Marlborough Street, when confined on a charge of burglary. ”

“ He had for some years past been associated with the two official inspectors of prisons; after that he had assisted in the superintendence of Millbank, when constituting a convict depot, and he had been in reality the moving spirit of the commissioners who built the model prison at Pentonville. In those early years he gave undoubted earnest of his energetic character and great powers, a promise more than fulfilled. His proposal was to construct a great breakwater at Portland, largely assisted by the labour of convicts which was abundant and running to waste. ”

“ It will be readily understood that the convicts—really criminals, and often desperate criminals, they are—may differ widely from those who in an access of insanity have committed a crime, and that men who leave prison discipline at Pentonville, or elsewhere, to enjoy the comparative comfort of asylum life at Broadmoor, are very likely either to sham madness in order to stay there, or escape in order to avoid having to complete, on recovery, their term of servitude. ”

“ Then, in the separate confinement prisons at Pentonville, hammocks are made for the navy and bags for the post office; and at Brixton, boots, shoes, and clothes are made for the police and prison departments of Her Majesty's government. As to the adaptability of the convicts, we have the very high authority of Mr. Bernays, for sixteen years the Admiralty Civil Engineer at Portland, and of Mr. Wood, for fourteen years in the same position at Portsmouth. The former (in Q. 7,203) says:—
"As a rule, convicts are men of superior intelligence. ”

“ I have discovered that the criminal anthropologists do not choose for comparison with the prison population their normal men from the ranks where the criminal classes are recruited. Blackwell's Island has no more peculiar inmates than abound in sections of New York near the East River; the residents of the Whitechapel district of London may be compared with the inmates of Pentonville, to the distinct credit of the latter ”

“ No account of escapes from prison would be complete without some reference to George Hackett, who escaped from Pentonville in a manner nearly marvellous. Through some neglect he had been allowed to take his sheets and bedrope into chapel with him. At that time the chapel was divided into a number of small compartments, one for each prisoner. Hackett worked unobserved in his, till he had forced up the flooring, and so gained the gallery; whence, by breaking a zinc ventilator, he climbed through a window on to the parapet leading to the governor’s house. ”

“ Accordingly, when the author once asked Mr Brebner, the late governor of the Glasgow bridewell, what proportion of formed criminals he ever knew to have been reformed by prison discipline, he answered that the proportion was easily told, for he never knew one. And in the late debate in parliament on this subject, it was stated by the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, that while the prison discipline at Pentonville promised the most cheering results, it was among those trained there, and subsequently transported, that the improvement was visible ”

“ Pentonville has really been the model on which all subsequent prison construction has been based. All prisons at home and abroad are but variations, of course with the added improvements following longer experience, of the pattern originated by the architectural genius of Sir Joshua Jebb. The internal arrangements of the new model were carefully supervised by a body of distinguished men, among which were many peers, Lord John Russell, Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Benjamin Brodie, Major Jebb, R.E., and the two prison inspectors, Messrs. ”

“ The Silvio Pellicos of Pentonville are yet unwritten martyrs. Prison discipline would vulgarize the grandest epic that ever was conceived “Anything rather than this,” said I, aloud. “Proscribed, outlawed, hunted down, but never, gray-coated and hair-clipped, shall a Potts be sentenced to the 'crank,' or black-holed as refractory!—Bring me my bill,” cried I, in a voice of indignant anger. “I will go forth into the world of darkness and tempest; I will meet the storm and the hurricane; better all the conflict of the elements than man's—than man's—” I was n't exactly sure what ”

“ It is well known that the greatest pains have of late years been taken, in this country, to instruct prisoners in jail in some useful handicraft; and that, so far has this been carried, that our best-regulated jails are more in fact great houses of industry. The general penitentiary at Pentonville, in particular, where the convicts sentenced to transportation are trained, previous to their removal to the penal settlements, is a perfect model of arrangement and attention in this important respect. ”

“ As it was contrary to the rules of the Pentonville establishment that a prisoner should have any letter or anything of the kind upon him, the warders asked that the paper might be handed over to them. The note was written in pencil, and read as follows:—
“Bury me at Darnall. Good-bye. God bless you all. C. Peace.”
It appears that when a Pentonville convict has a letter sent to him, it is opened and read by one of the officials, and if there is nothing in it objectionable it is initialled and passed on to him. ”

“ Not merely to lessen the sufferings of the condemned, not alone to assist the innocent, not merely to teach sound morals to those who are suffering from a violation of the laws of God and man, not merely to prevent a too rigid enforcement of special enactments, not alone to prescribe and ensure a separate confinement to the condemned, but so to use that confinement that vice or crime, so communicable in its character, shall not propagate itself through the cells of the prison, and thus make a penitentiary a nursery for misconduct rather than a school for mental and moral discipline ”

“ This will give him plenty of time to learn a trade, so that when he goes out of prison he can make a living for himself and for those depending upon him. For crimes that require lighter sentences of imprisonment let jails or reformatories be brought into requisition. In the eyes of the world a jail sentence is not so disgraceful as one in the penitentiary.
The plumage of a jail-bird is not so black as that of a penitentiary bird. The disgrace of being sent to the penitentiary for one year is as great as being sent for five or ten years. ”

“ The justice which, for the sake of society, restrains the freedom of the offender, yields entirely to the mercy that turns to that offender’s temporal and eternal good. This infliction, that separates him from his associates in felony, frees society from apprehension of his crimes.
We speak here of the infliction of the Penitentiary. The case of a convict in the County prison has in it much less of severity, and is proportionately therewith of less benefit to him and less advantageous to society. ”

“ In France we are lamentably behindhand in the matter. Though we have some prisons which are model, we have a great many more which are shamefully behind the times. For my own part, I have come to the conclusion, from all I have seen and heard, that seclusion in cells at night, with work in common during the daytime in small easily managed workshops, or better still, in the open air as at Portland Prison in England, is the penitentiary system which offers the fewest drawbacks. ”

“ The House of Correction stands in a unique relation to the state prison, and while it may, under circumstances and in the discretion of a condemning court, be a place of imprisonment for offenders that might be committed to the state prison, yet always it is kept distinct from the state prison. It does not, therefore, make its use as a place of confinement for other offenses a penitentiary, with its attachment of infamy. Its purpose is reformation, instruction in conduct, and diversion from a criminal career. To make it, therefore, a penitentiary, would defeat the purpose of its creation. ”

“ Forty-one years."
"Gimme five minutes with them two," choked Bill, darting to the doorway. "Five minutes an' I'm yer prisoner ag'in," he pleaded over his shoulder, as he caught woman and child in his arms. "Don't worry any—I'm tuckered; I can't git away."
"Dod rot it!" howled the constable. "I've tried ter break it ter ye gently, but if ye must have it in a lump, here goes. Th' jedge sentenced ye injustly. Th' real culprit has confessed. About ten minutes after ye skedaddled, they got word at th' prison that ye was innercent an' was ter be let out ter once. ”

“ They, therefore, urged “the erection of a new Penitentiary for the Eastern District of the State, so constructed as to admit of the constant separation and healthful labor of the convicts.” This was promptly responded to, and in the following May the law was passed for building the Eastern Penitentiary at Philadelphia, which is now the model prison on the “Pennsylvania” or “separate system,” and as such, at this day maintains a prominent position among the penal institutions of the world, and stands as a noble monument of the liberality, humanity, and wise economy of its founders. ”

“ We incline to the belief that the most important and effective step which can be taken at this time by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, for the improvement of her penitentiary system, is to adapt the penalty of the law more nearly to the nature of the crime—reduce the terms of imprisonment to the lowest measure that can consist with the ends of its infliction, and then increase, in the highest degree, the facilities for the prompt detection of offenders, and the certainty of their suffering the unmitigated penalty of their crimes. ”

“ No criminal should be sent to the penitentiary for a term longer than fifteen years. The suffering he endures during this long sentence is enough to atone for any crime he may commit aside from a brutal murder, and for this he should be hung. Fifteen years of imprisonment is sufficient to break down almost any constitution. Having spent this length of time behind prison walls a man is a physical wreck, and, having atoned for his crime, let him have the last days of life in the world of freedom. The greatest desire of a life man in our penitentiaries is to die outside of prison walls. ”

“ In the Kansas penitentiary, when prisoners are in ranks going to and from their meals, their cells, or workshops, they are required to fold their arms, and keep their eyes fixed upon the back of the one's head just in front. No gazing about is permitted, and should a prisoner speak to one in the front of him and be detected, he would be summarily dealt with. In the Missouri prison I noticed that the convicts while marching would gaze about wherever they wished, and go swinging along with their arms dangling at their sides. ”

“ Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast. The difference between that mode of dealing with the convict and the lesser evil, that of allowing him to perish in inactivity, and acquire strength in bad resolves, and instruction for future crimes, is what policy and unaided humanity have wrought out of the condition of the offender. The difference between the latter condition and that of the inmates of the Philadelphia County Prison, and especially the Eastern Penitentiary, is what results from the labor of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Prisons. ”