Prison of Vincennes

“ This prison having become nearly useless, during the reign of the unfortunate Louis XVI., it was thrown open to the public in 1784. During the early stages of the revolution, Vincennes was used as a place of confinement for disorderly women. ”

“ A house within a short distance of the place where it stood displays on a sign-board a view of the old fortress-prison; and few strangers pass it during the day without pausing to gaze on the picture of a building to which history refers so many fearful incidents, exaggerated nevertheless most enormously by the unscrupulous revolutionists who introduced a "reign of terror" of greater extent, and more sanguinary atrocity, than the records of all the state prisons of France could supply. The Chateau of Vincennes is an existing building ”

“ As for the quality of the food, warders and kitchen-assistants sometimes tried to sell in Vincennes meat taken from the prison kitchen, but it had an ill name amongst the peasants: "That comes from the dungeon; it's rotten." On the other hand, wealthy prisoners who enjoyed the governor's favour, or who could bring influence to bear on him from without, were allowed to beguile the tedium of captivity by unlimited feasting and drinking. The inmate of one cell, lying in chains, dirt, and darkness, might be kept awake at night by the tipsy strains of his neighbour in the cell adjoining. ”

“ I received a letter a few days ago from a friend near Princeton, Ind., stating that Concklin and the four slaves are in prison in Vincennes, and that their trial would come on in a few days. He states that they rowed seven days and nights in the skiff, and got safe to Harmony, Ind., on the Wabash river, thence to Princeton, and were conveyed to Vincennes by friends, where they were taken. The papers state, that they were all given up to the Marshal of Evansville, Indiana. ”

“ You assert a great deal," said Mazarin. "Monsieur de Beaufort told the guards who took him to Vincennes that he had often thought what he should do in case he were put into prison, and that he had found out forty ways of escaping." ”

“ The castle of Vincennes, within a few miles of Paris, has always been as terrible a place of detention as was the Bastille. Even in these days of comparative liberty and justice, Vincennes is made an engine of oppression; for throughout all political changes, the French government never scruples to seize and incarcerate illegally any one against whom it has a grudge. ”

“ Now compare the crime of Pique-Vinaigre, a robber, to the offense of Boulard, the bailliff. Compare the point of departure from virtue of the two, and the reasons, necessities, which have pushed them on to crime. Compare, finally, the punishment that awaits them. Coming out of prison, inspiring everywhere fear and indifference, the liberated convict could not follow, in the residence appointed him, the trade he knew; he hoped to be able to work at an occupation dangerous to his life, but suitable for his strength ”

“ Yet sometimes I dream that it is all not true, that he still lives, that one day the door of my cell will open, and the lover of my youth appear to me again. I shall see him standing on the threshold, a halo of sunshine lighting his fair hair, like some young martyr-saint come to deliver me from my bondage. The hand I wounded will be filled with roses, and his clear voice will call me by my name.
Then rising from this gloomy prison bench I [84] shall move to meet him. Shame and crime and captivity will fall away from me like a dark and worn-out cloak. ”

“ Such seems to have been the external routine of life at Vincennes. Beneath the surface was the perpetual tyrannous oppression of the governor and his subordinates on the one side, and on the other a weight of suffering, extended to almost every detail of existence, endured by the great majority of the prisoners; silently even unto death in some instances, but in others not without desperate resistance, long sustained against overwhelming odds.
The recital of Mirabeau's captivity throws into curious relief the inner life of the dungeon. ”

“ No inmate can survive years of it without having had burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest metaphysical bubbles. Truth lives, we are taught; murder will out. Well, this is a demonstration that murder does not always come out. The Captain of the Yard, the late Warden Atherton, the Prison Board of Directors to a man—all believe, right now, in the existence of that dynamite that never existed save in the slippery-geared and all too-accelerated brain of the degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood. ”

“ This man, named Fortune Gobert, nick-named Pique-Vinaigre (Sharp Vinegar, to prevent mistakes) , formerly a juggler, and a prisoner for the crime of passing counterfeit money, was accused of breaking the terms of his ticket-of-leave, and of burglary.
Confined but for a few days at La Force, already Pique-Vinaigre filled, to the general satisfaction of his prison companions, the post of story-teller. ”

“ But that in room number 60 of the Viennese Military Jail I should fall right into the arms of Dušek, was one of the happiest chances which have occurred to me in the course of my misfortunes.
A man prepares and equips himself with good resolutions, with a heroic spirit, with a most firm will; he says to himself: Prison,—good; loss of liberty,—never mind; a jailer,—there must be one: a warder,—there must be one also,—but the reality comes and the prison turns out to be a military jail, a cold and dismal room; loss of liberty turns out to be a complete loss of your own personality ”

“ Over a thousand Frenchmen were in the Winchester prison, who lay all day indolently in their hammocks and were provided with no work. Several prisoners were confined in the dark hole, sentenced to it for forty days, on half allowance, to meet the sum expended in payment for their recapture after escape, on the same principle as that which obtained in France. ”

“ Few prisons the like of Vincennes have been erected. Those tremendous towers, those almost impenetrable walls, those double and triple doors garnished with iron, the trenches forty feet in depth, those wide outer galleries to give the sentries command at every point—what more could genius and industry invent to combat the prisoner's passion for liberty? ”

“ When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and pronounced the prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison, with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by solitary penitence." ”

“ Should an angel from some happy world, in his flight near our earth, pause and contemplate the old prison at Windsor, he would hasten back and inform his companions that he had seen a hell. That place was designed or ignorantly constructed, as a fit house in which Revenge might feed in luxury on the tears of distress, and dance to the groans of despair. Every prisoner could read the spirit of the place in the massy walls—the iron grates and doors—and the noonday twilight of the cells ”

“ Sustained then by my own personal experience and observation, I say fearlessly, that the solitary confinement plan, is an unwise, unfeeling, and ruinous innovation upon the Penitentiary discipline. Every body knows that it adds to the terror of such places; evinces a cruel recklessness of the feelings and personal comfort of the prisoner; and has the effect to convince him that the government is not his friend. This destroys his confidence in its mercy, and creates in him a disposition for revenge, which will eternally baffle all efforts for his reformation. ”

“ During my imprisonment at Winchester, a circumstance took place, which, though trivial at the time, had much to do with me some time afterwards. One day, as I was taking exercise in the ring, a visitor stepped on to the ground. I immediately recognised in the stranger the chief superintendent of the prison where I had served three months. It seems that he had come from the north to prove a conviction against a man then awaiting trial in Winchester. ”

“ The Winnipeg jail, with all its defects and limitations, was a palace to some that he had known. It was not the fear of the issue to his trial that drove sleep and hunger from him. Death, exile, imprisonment, had been too long at his heels to be strangers to him or to cause him fear. In his heart a fire burned. Rosenblatt still lived, and vengeance had halted in its pursuit. ”

“ The old and the new prisons have a space between them wider than divides the poles. The key that turned a lock of the Châtelet, Bicêtre, or the Bastille will open no cell of any modern prison, French or English. Punishment is systematised, and has its basis in two ideas,—the safety of peoples living in communities, and the cure of certain moral obliquities; or, it is quite without system, and means only the vengeance of the strong upon the weak. Between the prison which was intended either as a living tomb, or as a starting-place for the pillory, the whipping-post, or the scaffold ”

“ The Commissioners, Samuel M. Hopkins, Stephen Allen, and George Tibbets, of the New York Legislature, say, "we believe that we do but repeat the common sentiment of all well informed men, when we say, that as long as it is necessary to confine several prisoners in the (p. 185) same room, our State Prison at New York can be no other than a college of vice and criminality." ”

“ There we found the suffragists who had preceded us, locked in cells.
The first thing I remember was the distress of the prisoners about the lack of fresh air. Evening was approaching, every window was closed tight. The air in which we would be obliged to sleep was foul. There were about eighty negro and white prisoners crowded together, tier upon tier, frequently two in a cell. I went to a window and tried to open it. Instantly a group of men, prison guards, appeared; picked me up bodily, threw me into a cell and locked the door. Rose Winslow and the others were treated in the same way. ”

“ DESIGN OF PENITENTIARIES IN RESPECT TO THE TREATMENT OF CONVICTS, ACCORDING TO THE VIEWS OF THE DIRECTORS OF THE CONNECTICUT STATE PRISON, WITH REMARKS. "Upon the subject of the general treatment of the convicts, and the discipline of the institution, we would remark that the State Prison is designed to be, and emphatically is, a place of PUNISHMENT. The feelings of humanity and mistaken mercy should not be suffered to interpose, to disarm its punishment of that rigor due to justice and the violated laws of the land. ”

“ There is always a keeper in every shop while the prisoners are at work, and he is armed with a sword. A guard is placed on the wall during the day, armed with a gun, loaded with a ball and buck shot; and at night there is one in the entrance of the prison to prevent escapes.
Such is the general history of the prison up to 1830, when a new prison, on the plan of solitary confinement, was erected. This contains about one hundred and seventy small cells, in which the prisoners are confined separately during the night. ”

“ He shook them by the hand, and De Thou embraced them; after which they left the apartment, their eyes filled with tears, and hiding their faces in their cloaks.
"Barbarians!" exclaimed the Abbe Quillet; "to find arms against them, one must search the whole arsenal of tyrants. Why did they admit me at this moment?"
"As a confessor, Monsieur," whispered one of the commissioners; "for no stranger has entered this place these two months."
As soon as the huge gates of the prison were closed, and the outside gratings lowered, "To the terrace, in the name of Heaven!" again exclaimed Grandchamp. ”

“ And such being the character of the inmates, their friends who visit them are naturally of the same type—the lowest outpourings of the slums; and it is not surprising to find that the arrangements of the prison are made to fit its ordinary inmates. The innocent man is a negligible quantity, and no arrangements are made for him or his visitors."
"But shall we not be taken to Reuben's cell?" asked Miss Gibson. ”

“ Mazas as the prison of the prévenus, the receptacle of all persons accused of serious crime and detained on reasonable presumption of guilt, was intimately associated with the passing criminality of Paris for fifty years. Every Ishmaelite, charged with raising his hand against his fellows, passed through its forbidding portals to emerge once more, if fate was kind to him, or if convicted, to disappear into its inner darkness. Confinement in a trial prison is the most painful phase in the criminal’s career. He is a constant prey to sickening anxiety, or the plaything of exaggerated hope. ”

“ If this principle had been acted upon in the Windsor Prison, many years of suffering would have been spared to human hearts, and many a soul would have gone with less guilt to judgment. That prison is called a Penitentiary.—As properly might hell be called heaven. The spirit of the penitentiary system finds there no place to lay its head. Not the reformation of the convicts is sought, but their earnings ”

“ Prisons are as numerous as ever, and almost every season sees a new one erected. The annual volume of crimes is as huge and black as ever. The gloom of these earthly hells is undissipated by the charm of operative benevolence. And though it is two thousand years since the foundations of christianity were laid in the earth—that heavenly principle which was to say to the prisoners, "go forth,"—the notes of its rejoicing ascend in faint association with the deep-toned sigh of despair and misery, which is hourly bursting from the grated cell. ”