Debtors' prison

“ In most of the states, if not in all of them, certainly in all the free states, there is no such thing as keeping a man in prison for life merely for the non-payment of a fine which he has no means to pay. The same spirit of humanity which has abolished the imprisonment of poor debtors at the caprice of their creditors has provided means for discharging, after a short imprisonment, persons held in prison for fines which they have no means of paying. ”

“ The lot of these debtors was a most pitiable one, for a creditor had power to imprison a man for an indefinite term of years, and the unfortunate debtor, held within the four walls of his prison, could earn no money to pay the debt that was owing, and unless friends came to his rescue, was utterly at the mercy of the oft-times barbarous jailor. ”

“ There were a few desultory and ineffective movements towards discharging poor debtors, but the matter did not greatly interest mankind, and there seemed to the eighteenth century mind no very clear reason why a debtor once in prison for debt should ever be released. To-day, in the same way, it is difficult to persuade the average citizen that there is any injustice in a debtor being sent to prison for debt. ”

“ The Rules are a certain liberty adjoining the prison, and comprising some dozen streets in which debtors who can raise 155 money to pay large fees, from which their creditors do not derive any benefit, are permitted to reside by the wise provisions of the same enlightened laws which leave the debtor who can raise no money to starve in gaol, without food, clothing, lodging, or warmth, which are provided for felons convicted of the most atrocious crimes that can disgrace humanity. ”

“ Most of our readers will remember that, until within a few years past, there was a kind of iron cage in the wall of the Fleet Prison, within which was posted some man of hungry looks, who from time to time rattled a money box and exclaimed in a mournful voice, ‘Pray remember the poor debtors; pray remember the poor debtors.’ The receipts of this box, when there were any, were divided among the poor prisoners; and the men on the poor side relieved each other in this degrading office. ”

“ Much, however, as the prisoners might grieve, it was of no use kicking against an Act of Parliament, and those prisoners who did not take advantage of the Insolvent Debtors Act, were transferred to the Queen's Prison, which in its turn ceased to be a debtor's prison, and was used by Military offenders, until it was sold on Oct. 30, 1879, and pulled down in that and the following year. Now, legally speaking, there is no imprisonment for debt, but people are only committed for Contempt of Court. ”

“ In the year 1837 any person who owed another any sum of money, however small, was liable to be arrested for debt, and if he would not pay he could be thrown into prison and kept there till he did pay. Thousands of unfortunate debtors were kept in prison for the whole of their lives on account of some miserable debt which, if they had been out of prison, they could have paid off in a short time. ”

“ Many are the painful details of the misusage of debtors, and of the power given to one class of the community to oppress the other. The laws relating to debtor and creditor in England were for centuries unsound, illogical and unequal, and productive of untold misery to enormous numbers of innocent people. The great debtors’ prisons of England will live in history rivalling in their callous neglect and distinctly inhuman treatment the more notorious receptacles used by high-handed and cruel tyrants for the coercion of their helpless subjects. ”

“ Yet to-day thousands of debtors go to prison because they have not means to pay their creditors. The difference between killing and imprisoning a debtor is a difference in degree only. The principle is the same. The object of the creditor is, perhaps, in the first place, to get repaid his debt; when he finds this is impossible the death or imprisonment of the debtor merely satisfies his desire for revenge. The ancient Romans were, in one way, a more practical people than ourselves, for they threw the costs of this revenge direct upon the creditor, whereas we throw it upon the taxpayer. ”

“ It will be seen that there have always been two schools of thought among politicians. One school was clear, that to tamper with imprisonment meant ruin to trade; the other held—what I take to be the true gospel—that a man ought not to be allowed to obtain credit on the security of his body.
Until the end of the eighteenth century the harshness and cruelty of imprisonment for debt received little attention. The history of the debtors’ prisons, the Fleet, the King’s Bench, the Marshalsea and the City Compters, are pages of the story of our law that no one can read to-day without shame. ”

“ In the prison there are many kinds of debtors: there is the debtor who is always angry at the undeserved misery of his lot: sometimes his wrongs drive him mad in earnest: then the poor wretch is removed to Bedlam where he remains until his death. There is, next, the despairing debtor who sits as one in a dream and will never be comforted. ”

“ Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within it a much closer and more confined jail for smugglers. Offenders against the revenue laws, and defaulters to excise or customs who had incurred fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated behind an iron-plated door closing up a second prison, consisting of a strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which formed the mysterious termination of the very limited skittle-ground in which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles. ”

“ It was said by a legal writer that 'no man can enter into a Chancery suit with any reasonable hope of being alive at its termination, if he has a determined adversary.' Bowen says that Dickens' pictures of the English law 'contain genuine history.' The horrors of the debtors' prison are well known, and nearly 4000 persons were sometimes arrested for debt in one year. ”

“ The rest of us were knocked about by the Turnkeys, or abused by the Gaoleress, Mrs. Macphilader, pretty much as they liked. We were, however, not so badly off as some of the poor prisoners—sheep-stealers, footpads, vagrom men and women, and the like, or even as some of the poor Debtors—many of whom lay here incarcerate years after they had discharged the Demands of their Creditors against them, and only because they could not pay their Fees. We Blacks [286] were always well supplied with money; and money could purchase almost any thing in a prison in those days. ”

“ In practice the wind is very much tempered to the shorn lamb, and a period of twenty-one days is generally the maximum imprisonment ordered. In practice, also, debtors will beg, borrow, and perhaps do worse rather than go to prison, and the result is that the percentage actually imprisoned is small. This, to my mind, has very little bearing on the question whether the system is a wise one in the interests of the State and of the working-man. ”

“ By this indulgent mode of procedure, debtors are generally enabled either fully to settle their affairs, or liberally to compromise with their creditors, so that few are sent to prison on account of the embarrassment of their circumstances.
A man may not be arrested in his own house in Holland, or even standing at the door of it, though all the previous citations should have been made; and should his wife be lying-in, he is humanely privileged, during the period of her illness, to go abroad without any molestation from his creditors or bailiffs. ”

“ His Most Excellent Majesty has been graciously pleased to ordain that certain prisoners now suffering the penalty of the law for crimes and misdemeanours shall be released from imprisonment and that all those civil debtors not in prison, whose debts may be small and due not to fraud but to real poverty, shall be discharged and that their debts shall be paid. ”

“ At one time the Ludgate debtors, accompanied by the keeper, went outside and beyond the prison to call on their creditors, and try to arrange their debts, but this practice was discontinued. There were fifteen rooms of various sizes, and as the numbers imprisoned rarely exceeded five-and-twenty, the place was never overcrowded, while the funds of several bequests and charities were applied in adding to the material comfort of the prisoners. The Giltspur Street Compter received sheriffs’ debtors, also felons, vagrants, and night charges. ”

“ Clichy is also a prison for debtors, where a cell is shown which was for two years inhabited by a man of forty years of age, who had been sent there for a very singular sort of debt—namely, the money he owed for the wet nurse's milk which he had imbibed while an infant, the amount of the debt at the period of his incarceration having accumulated to twelve thousand francs! ”

“ Some women were active in prison reform in matters of reviews to insure that no man was in gaol without due cause, overcharges for bed and board, brutality, and regulation of prisoners being placed in irons. Many men and women left money in their wills for food and clothing for prisoners, especially debtors. Wills often left one-third of the wealth to the church, the poor, prisoners, infirmaries, young girls' education; road, wall, and bridge repair; water supply, markets and almshouses. ”

“ The debtor, we will suppose, by a train of unavoidable misfortunes, fails; here is no crime, nor even a fault; and yet your laws put it in the power of the creditor to throw the debtor into prison and confine him there for life! a punishment infinitely worse than death to a brave man! ”

“ I should be in favour of more stringent measures being taken against the fraudulent debtor, for one meets him every day, well-to-do and smiling, with a bill of sale on his furniture and everything in his wife’s name. But he is the curled darling of the law. He makes use of the law to protect himself and his frauds, and the Debtors Act, which was intended to abolish imprisonment for debt, has no terrors for him, whilst under its provisions hundreds of weekly wage earners are imprisoned. ”

“ They fear totally to abolish this absurd custom, because they dread that credit will suffer. Why—credit is altogether begotten in confidence, and never arises from the preconceived intention on the part of him who gives it, to avail himself of this law against him who receives it. Larceny and theft are punished by a limited imprisonment, with an allowance of food; but debtors, who commit no crime, may linger and languish—and starve in gaol. ”

“ The old law that enabled a creditor to lay hands on a small debtor and carry him away to prison was stigmatised as barbarous, and repealed accordingly, but to wreck and desolate his home is even more cruel. At all events, and although a prisoner, he was only so until such time as his family could raise money for his ransom, and with his ransom his domestic affairs resumed their peaceful and comfortable course; but the breaking-up of a home is very often irrevocable. ”

“ We no longer suffer them to appeal at the prison gates to the charity and compassion of the passers-by; but we still leave unblotted in our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of succeeding ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction. Not a week passes over our heads but, in every one of our prisons for debt, some of these men must inevitably expire in the slow agonies of want, if they were not relieved by their fellow-prisoners. ”

“ To clap into prison a man who could not satisfy his creditors, and thereby to encourage the indolent debtor in his indolence and to dry up for the industrious debtor all possible sources of industry, was perhaps, in this country as in France, the summit of folly ever attained by legal enactment. ”

“ Battey, (from which I had dated my letter,) and took me to Providence in a carriage, and put me in jail as a debtor, on a debt of five hundred dollars, created for the occasion by the wisdom of my father. My father-in-law desired to imprison me as a criminal, (as I had anticipated,) but my father’s counsels prevailed, and I was saved from a felon’s doom. In those days, debtors were incarcerated, and I was confined in a dark cell, by locks, and bars, and bolts, as all Providence feared I would escape, and kill my father and father-in-law, and perhaps others. ”

“ He is convinced, of his own experience, that imprisonment for debt does no one any good, neither the man who owes, nor the man who is owed, nor the onlookers who have to contribute to the support of destitute debtors. ”

“ The system of imprisonment for debt is in itself impolitic, unwise, and cruel in the extreme:—it ruins the honest man, and destroys the little remnant of good feeling existing in the heart of the callous one. It establishes the absurd doctrine, that if a man cannot pay his debts while he is allowed the exercise of his talents, his labour, and his acquirements, he can when shut up in the narrow compass of a prison, where his talents, his labours, and his acquirements are useless. ”

“ Once caught in the meshes of the law it was not enough to pay the original debt, and the creditor, when he received it, could not release the debtor until the attorney’s costs were liquidated. The records of the King’s Bench show that hundreds of debtors who in the first instance owed no more than ten pounds were still detained for twice or three times the amount claimed by the attorneys. ”

“ The unfortunate debtor cannot have a room to himself, nor can the malefactor, when preparing for the other world, be accommodated with a place of retirement to deprecate the wrath of the offended Deity. The insufficiency of the jail, in point of security, occasions a guard of soldiers to be kept in the lower part of it and even with that precaution many atrocious offenders have escaped, insomuch that the sheriff of the district has refused to confine debtors, unless the prosecutor offer to take upon himself the risk of an escape. ”