Confinement

“ I am aware that the motive is to prevent the possibility of seeing a fellow-prisoner; but I think a prison for separate confinement should be so constructed that the culprits may at least see the sky—indeed, I should prefer more than the sky—without the liability of seeing fellow-prisoners. My reason for this opinion is, that I consider it a very important object to preserve the health of mind and body in these poor creatures, and I am certain that separate confinement produces an unhealthy state both of mind and body. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The horror which makes it practically impossible in civilized countries to legalize punishment by solitary confinement and the nervous collapse which such confinement brings about are indications of how deep-seated is this desire. ”

“ Confinement, with labour, is simply the enforcement of that which has hitherto been his daily lot. But what must a prison be to him whose intellect has received the polish of the world's poetry, who has known what it is to feed more than the belly, to require other aliment than bread and meat? ”

“ My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it. I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between 10 and 4 without ease or interposition. ”

“ There, prostrate and indiscriminately huddled together, they gradually recovered from the effects of that terrible confinement, where 547 human beings were, without a breath of fresh air, kept for above two hours crushed together in a space only about three feet in height, and with a superficial extent not equal to that of their bodies, unless in a sitting position! ”

“ Having tasted captivity before, I was in a mood much less doleful than my comrade when I found myself confined to a dingy chamber, and cut off from communication with my countrymen, who were marching with their king in hostile array through the realm of Scotland. But ere long I began to find the confinement as irksome as it was to him, and to concentrate all my faculties on a project of escape. In order to execute it, I perceived the necessity of securing the co-operation of our gaoler. ”

“ Solitary confinement would have made me a permanent enemy of society.
There were no smiles and soap in that Military Prison, no scissors, no sanitation. There was nothing human or clean about it. Nothing but destruction will rid it of its vermin, or scour it of its taint of disease and death.
Perhaps the lack of scissors was the amenity of life whose absence I most deplored. Try to do without a cutting instrument for a month, and you will realise why it was that some sort of cutting edge was the first need of primitive man and remains a prime necessity to-day. ”

“ The worst thing, I repeat, was the deadly monotony of the confinement for a period which would end only when the war ended. Any labour should be welcome to a healthy-minded man. It was a mercy that the Germans set prisoners to grading roads, to hoeing and harvesting, retrieving thus a little of the wastage of war. ”

“ The confinement, and this scanty and meager diet for men who were brought up in a land of liberty, and ever used to feast on the luscious fruits of plenty, soon brought on a pale and sickly countenance, a feeble and dejected spirit, and a lean, half animate body. This bad state of living, I solemnly believe, has been the serious cause of inducing many valuable citizens of the United States to enter the king’s service, to the great injury of their country.
The prisoners are counted every night as they are ordered below by the guard ”

“ Nothing, by papa's description, can exceed the excellency of the arrangements as far as the airiness and cleanliness of the cells, and even the comforts of the prisoners, are concerned, but the system is one of strict solitary confinement. ”

“ The additional rigour which thus the slave seems to consider confinement to be, would be a recommendation to some persons, and perhaps the feeling is in the main right; for if the crime is great, the punishment should be adequate, and by this means of confinement [430] no degradation of the human being is occasioned. Hopes may be entertained that the time which is given for reflection, and the depression of spirits which is produced by the loneliness of the situation, may bring about a correction of error ”

“ I was in separate confinement in Millbank, and I suppose it is necessary to explain, for the benefit of those who never had the good fortune to live in a prison, that separate confinement means that the convict so sentenced is to be shut up in his cell with light work, sewing or picking coir, and to have one hour's exercise per day, which consists in walking in single file, with long distances between the prisoners, around the exercise yard, and then turning an immense crank, which pumps water into the corridors. ”

“ But strip it of its towers, fill up the fosse, unbarricade the doors, call it simply a confinement, and suppose ’tis some tyrant of a distemper, and not of a man, which holds you in it, the evil vanishes and you bear the other half without complaint. ”

“ Allowing you to perfect yourself in your art, it wisely guards other people against the perhaps injurious influence of your productions, and in any case it completes logically, finishes, enforces, and makes clear the meaning of your solitary confinement. What does solitary confinement in our prison mean? ”

“ Several were captured from time to time, but all died after short confinement. Every effort to subdue their ferocity, whether by force or by persistent kindness, utterly failed; they were never other than morose, bellicose, and treacherous. ”

“ And yet, between 1793 and 1815, literally hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war were held in captivity by the various nations engaged in the conflict, and this confinement meant for the great bulk of them years of misery, long vistas of monotonous restraint, periods of indifferent treatment, occasionally great physical suffering, and, worse than all, for many, moral deterioration and degradation inseparable from the conditions in which they dragged out their existence. ”

“ Restraint is only comparative. The strait-waistcoat is the narrowest zone of confinement, and the padded room but a little wider. Next to these comes the locked gallery for a class, then the encircling high wall for the entire lunatic community; and lastly, that aërial barrier the parole, for those who can be trusted to go beyond the asylum. The efforts of philanthropists will not, [Pg 155] we are convinced, cease, until all the methods of confinement, down to the parole, are removed; or at least so disguised as to hinder their present irritating action upon the inmates. ”

“ Confinement, dirtiness, and deprivations, have an evil operation on the mind. I have observed some who had a little refinement of manners, at the commencement of their captivity, and regarded the situation and feelings of others near them, with complacency, but have lost it all, and sunk into a state of misanthropy. We, Americans, exercise too little ceremony at best, but some of our prisoners lost all deference and respect for their countrymen, and became mere hogs, the stronger pushing the weaker aside, to get the most swill. ”

“ In such cases, there is nothing but death, which the most obdurate villain would not endure to be relieved from it, after a confinement generally of less than thirty days. In these cases, it is difficult to tell, whether the cold, the hunger, the pangs of a guilty conscience, the fear of death, the wretchedness of being subjected to revenge and malignity, is the greatest cause of suffering, and whether each of them is not equal to the pain of solitary confinement. Stripes, in comparison with solitary confinement, in such circumstances, are not severe. ”

“ If they ever were adjudged competent to enter society again, they would be released when that time came. Neither under a right understanding, and a humane, scientific and honest administration, would it be necessary that places of confinement should be places of either degradation or misery. ”

“ From this moment I gave up both house and goods to be plundered, without having in view any place of refuge but the street, ill suited, it must be owned, for such a purpose, and especially so to a woman expecting her confinement hourly, and to little children of too tender an age to make their own way—some of them, indeed, being unable to walk or speak—and having no hope but in the mercy of God and His gracious protection. ”

“ Solitary confinement, for example, I take to be one of the most cruel, and, generally speaking, one of the most unjust of all punishments; for it is incapable of being correctly measured, and it almost always renders the offender worse. ”

“ Long confinement falls, of course, intensely harder on a stranger than on a native. The latter, I suppose, can never quite divest himself of an interest in passing events, which the former, at the best of times, can but faintly share: besides which, most Americans—not purely political prisoners—have either a definite term of captivity to look forward to, or are, in one way or other, subject to the chances of exchange. ”

“ It was a hot day when the troops landed, and the sight of neat farm-houses, rich fields, and green pastures, seemed to increase the lassitude occasioned by their long confinement on ship-board, rather than invigorate them, and it required the exercise of rigid authority and unceasing care to keep them from straggling away to the cool shelter of trees. ”

“ In the war in which we were engaged one hundred years before, there is abundant documentary evidence to show that, although the conditions of that time made close confinement within prison walls a cruel necessity, nevertheless, in the treatment of our captives, the dictates of humanity were carried out, as far as was possible, without defeating the main object of our Government—the termination of the war with peace, safety, and honour for England. ”

“ What struck me most in the internal arrangements was the comparative liberty that existed inside the vast building; for, with the exception of a few prisoners in solitary confinement, all seemed free to roam about in the corridors or the large quadrangle to their hearts’ content; and although a warder with a large bunch of keys accompanied us on our round, in no case did he find occasion to use them, for all the doors were unlocked. I was informed that it is only at night the prisoners are locked in. The system is certainly a curious one. ”

“ The fact is, that society, obliged to defend itself against criminals, has invented no more fearful suffering than what is called “close confinement.” There is nothing that will sooner demoralize a man, crush his will, and utterly conquer the most powerful energy. ”

“ Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory. ”

“ Some of the recorded cases of long confinement there make one marvel afresh at what man has inflicted and endured. In a country in which a policy of extermination was to be put into practice this horrible tower was an obvious resource. ”

“ John Clay, who was for many years chaplain of Preston Gaol, in discussing the question of prison discipline, says: “If we regard the prisoner as a moral patient, the paramount object is to render him as amenable as possible to the reformatory process. The tendency of separate confinement is to lower the bodily organs and weaken the faculties. ”

“ Solitary confinement is the saddest and cruellest punishment that can be inflicted by man on his fellow. The prisoner in the Bastille, when his reason reeled through prolonged silence and loneliness, was saved from mental collapse by the friendship of a rat ”

“ A man who served as guard in the prison under the present warden, but left in 1907, affirms that barbarities were not the exception at that time, but the "horrible custom. The dark hole is a reality; men were kept there weeks at a time, to my certain knowledge, within stifling walls, chained standing for intolerable periods, with great suffering. The public understands 'solitary confinement' to mean a cell by one's self; but this cell is a dark dungeon below earth level. ”

“ By the banishment of the man-slayer from his own city, and his confinement to the city of refuge, where he was in a manner a prisoner, God would teach us to conceive a dread and horror of the guilt of blood, and to be very careful of life, and always afraid lest by oversight or negligence we occasion the death of any. ”

“ The peculiarities of this system were the complete isolation of the prisoner from all human society, and his confinement in a cell of considerable size, so arranged that he had no direct intercourse with or sight of any human being, and no employment or instruction. ”

“ Every prisoner on first entering the convict service has to undergo nine months of separate confinement in a cell by himself, working in that cell, and never leaving it except for exercise or to go to chapel. ”

“ In war, policy must take place of feeling; but why exercise unnecessary cruelty? And this is what the English Ministers unquestionably did, when they found the number of prisoners increasing. Then commenced, for our unfortunate countrymen, the odious system of confinement in hulks; a species of torture, which the ancients would have added to the horrors of the infernal regions, had their imaginations been capable of conceiving it. ”

“ Having calculated the probable date of the confinement, it is the better wisdom to curtail all out-of-door visiting, shopping, social engagements, etc.,—everything in fact out-of-doors except actual exercise, for two weeks previous to the confinement date. The usual walk in the open air should be continued up to the actual confinement day. ”