Temple Prison

“ The interior of the prison is entirely unlike anything of the sort in the United States. The prisoners, about two hundred in number, committed for political and criminal offences, are confined in large, unfurnished rooms, whose floors are of stone, and whose only ornaments are iron posts and chains. Sad-looking, half-naked creatures stared at me in silence as I entered, and then resumed their walks and conversation. Separate wards were reserved for the Chinese and Negro offenders, and a large, neat chapel, where Mass was celebrated every Sunday, was at hand for the accommodation of all. ”

“ It is perched, like a bird of ill omen, on a rocky ledge, where all might see it in passing over the high-road. Thus, in the early day, the traveler on entering the county town encountered, first, the stocks and whipping-post; continuing his route, he in due time came to the gallows, at the town's end. The exterior of the jail is not especially repulsive, now that it is no longer a prison; but the inside is a relic of barbarism—just such a place as I have often imagined the miserable witchcraft prisoners might have been confined in. The back wall is of stone. ”

“ The streets swarm with the children of the tenements, which line them with towering piles of unclean brick and mortar; and the pedestrians who navigate them, and who hang about the outside of the prison, as if held there by a spell and only awaiting their turn to pass within its walls, are for the most part of that skulking, evil class which knows the interior of the jail quite as well as its outer barriers, and the ways which lead to its frowning gate. For many years the passenger traffic of the New York Central Railroad was embarked at a depot occupying the block above the Tombs. ”

“ 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 ”

“ One hundred and thirty convicts with terms ranging from 2 to 15 years, too busy with their day’s labor or their evening’s sports to think of evil, are building the new penitentiary or tilling the soil. Only nine hours a day, that time allotted for sleep, are the prisoners under lock and key. They go about their various duties under the direction of a guard or overseer, but the shotgun or rifle, usually accompanying such officer, is conspicuous by its absence.
The prison gives promise of being the ideal penal institution of the world.
The site is ideal for the work to be accomplished. ”

“ The prisoner’s quarters are in the wings, which extend from either side of the keeper’s quarters. In the gloomy office, men with that indescribable prison air all such officials bear, lounge about, and come and go on business. There is iron everywhere, from the huge bolts on the outer doors, and the door inside of them, to the barred windows and other doors beyond number, that open and shut with a sullen clangor that goes echoing through the stone passages as if it would never die away. The smell of the jail is as powerful in its way as these evidences of its actual strength. ”

“ In the outskirts stands a great prison called the Eastern Penitentiary, conducted on a plan peculiar to the State of Pennsylvania. The system here is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.
“I was accompanied to this prison by two gentlemen officially connected with its management, and passed the day in going from cell to cell and talking with the inmates. Every facility was afforded me that the utmost courtesy could suggest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There is no march to the gibbet through a throng of spectators as in most of our own jails. The doomed man gets his last glimpse of the sky through a stone funnel down which no ray of sunlight ever finds its way. As far as I remember, from my London days, the only sign the outer world has of the work going on within the prison walls is the hoisting of a black flag over the lodge, and I know not if even this ceremonial is still observed. From the gallows to the grave in Newgate used to be but a step. ”

“ Our allowance of food was small and coarse, but our room was the best in the jail—neat and spacious, and with nothing about it necessarily reminding us of being in prison, but its heavy locks and bolts and the black, iron lattice-work at the windows. We were prisoners of state, compared with most slaves who are put into that Easton jail. But the place was not one of contentment. Bolts, bars and grated windows are not acceptable to freedom-loving people of any color. ”

“ The infliction of punishment more or less uniform was thus aimed at. On the other hand, new and careful regulations were framed to secure the moral and material well-being of the inmates of the gaols. The law made it imperative that every prison should have a prison chapel, and that daily and Sunday services should be held. The chaplain’s duties were enlarged, and the principle of toleration accepted to the extent of securing to all prisoners the ministrations of ministers of their own form of belief. Steps were taken to provide the illiterate with secular instruction. ”

“ Sitting tonight in our lonesome cell, bounded on three sides by blank and barren walls of steel, through our two-by-six door, constructed of massive bars of iron, there comes to us the conversation of our fellow prisoners, as with head pressed close against the bars to catch the other fellow's words, we listen to the talk of the men "committed for crime"—men strong and healthy, who should be engaged in some honest labor, but, instead, are "doing time" for a broken law. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 1579 we learn from the chronicles that the prisoners used to eat in a little low parlor next the street, and that they always had an audience staring at them through the barred windows, such as nowadays honors the repasts of the wild beasts in the zoo. During 152 this year the prisoners petitioned for an enlargement of the prison and for a chapel, both of which requests seem to have been granted. ”

“ Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence; and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter nights there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great gaol, with walls and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors. ”

“ As such it is the first impulse of rude, primitive justice; and it was the mode of punishment which was at once the simplest, the most natural, and the most easily administered. Indeed in many cases it was the only mode possible. How would our modern reformers punish such offences? By putting the malefactor in prison? But where was the prison on the desert? The penalty of imprisonment was unknown among the Hebrews in the time of Moses. Twice a man is said to have been "put in ward" until the Divine sentence could be declared. ”

“ Works Without Pay.
If you were to ask a prisoner to what church Brother Herr belongs he would no doubt plead ignorance, as no faith nor creed is known in his work among the men. He makes no distinction between chapel-goers and non-attendants, and will do a favor for the worst man in prison as readily as for the leader of the chapel quartet; but ask the same prisoner, "Who is it that speaks to judge and the warden about the sick mother who longs to see her imprisoned son before she dies? ”

“ But it does not sound strange at all when we hear from the other side: "You can't trust that man—he's been a convict."
Through the genius, the energy, the spiritual enthusiasm of that remarkable woman known among prisoners as "The Little Mother," the barrier between the churches and the prisons is recently and for the time giving way on the one side. The chaplains are taken for granted as part of the prison equipment, and their preaching on Sunday as the work for which they are paid. ”

“ The visiting chaplains always bring a choir with them, and to them we give our heartfelt thanks, with a God bless you. I love to read of the progress made in these penal institutions where reform is practiced. I am sure the prisoners must take an interest in it all, for it is all for their own good. The Stillwater prison and Elmira prison must be models of neatness and good order, with a perfect system of discipline. It would be well for all prisons to copy them. If prisons are supposed to be erected for the purpose of reformation, why not make them in reality what they are intended to be? ”

“ In the prisons and reformatories the inmates should be taught the habits of industry and obedience to law and order, under humane and strict discipline.
There should be a complete separation of the first offender and the individual subject to reformation, from the weak-minded, physically deformed, and old and confirmed criminals; a reformatory for boys and first offenders, a separate prison for women and an industrial school for girls, with a parole system in each of the institutions. ”

“ Neither do I consider the present system, as practised at Sing Sing, the state prison of New York, as tending to reform the offenders; it punishes them severely, but that is all. Where corporal punishment is resorted to, there always will be feelings of vindictiveness; and all the bad passions must be allowed to repose before the better can gain the ascendant.
The best system that is acted upon in the Penitentiary at Philadelphia, where there is solitary confinement, but with labour and exercise. ”

“ The treatment of political prisoners in jails is really disgraceful. In the Punjab the policy actually put into practice seems to be to make the jail life of these people as hard and unbearable as possible. ”

“ On the ground-floor or Hall Gallery were a chapel, a tap-room, a coffee-room and eighteen chambers for prisoners; on the first floor twenty-five rooms, on the second twenty-seven, with prisoners’ committee-room, the infirmary and a “dirty billiard table, kept by the prisoners who slept in that room.” This billiard table was open to outsiders, and Howard saw “several butchers and others from the market playing, who were admitted as at any public house. Besides the inconvenience to prisoners,” says Howard, “the frequenting a prison lessens the dread of being confined in one.” ”

“ It is decided that the attack upon the management of the penitentiary is to be initiated from the 'outside." A released prisoner is to inform the press of the abuses, graft, and immorality rampant in Riverside. The public will demand an investigation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 1787 it was taken up again, and the Philadelphia Prison Society was formed. The first president of the society was Bishop William White, the first Protestant Episcopal Archbishop of Pennsylvania, and he held the office for forty years. The society’s first work was to have the chain gangs, employed at cleaning the streets and repairing the roads, abolished. The next was to secure a separation of the sexes in the common jail. Then the separation of actual criminals and of persons merely accused but not yet found guilty of crime demanded attention. ”