Prison

“ At present, every Prison is more or less a Training School for Crime, an introduction to the society of criminals, the petrifaction of any lingering human feeling and a very Bastille of Despair. The prison brand is stamped upon those who go in, and that so deeply, that it seems as if it clung to them for life. ”

“ The prison is an incubator for those who are young in crime, a place of torture for those who possess the finer feelings of humanity, that is precisely the class of people, usually, who ought not to be sent to prison; but to habitual offenders, the confirmed recidivists, precisely the class of people on whom the prison ought to work as at once a reforming and deterring influence, it is simply a welcome and comfortable home. It is a well-known fact that the prison is preferred to the workhouse. ”

“ I have been in prison North, South, East and West, I have been in the dismal, solitary cell for one year, have been put in large tanks of ice water, have been punished over and over again, but it has always made me more of a demon. ”

“ This great prison is, you know, a model of its kind, on the solitary, sanitary, and moral improvement system; excellent, no doubt, compared with that which preceded it. The prisoners are numerous,-and as soon as many of them get out they take the greatest pains to get in again; such are the comforts of gaol life contrasted with that outside. Yet they seem to me often like a herd of brute beasts, fed and stalled by rule in the manner best to preserve their health, and keep them from injuring their neighbours; their bodies well looked after, but their souls—they might scarcely have any! ”

“ June morning the sudden thought of the prison would crash with cruel discord; at times everything most bright and beautiful would but the more sharply accent the tragedy of prison life. Deep below the surface of my thought there was always the consciousness of the prison; but, on the other hand, this abiding consciousness made the ordinary trials and annoyances inseparable from human life seem of little moment, passing clouds across the sunlight of a more fortunate existence ”

“ The prison walls are frowning behind him; the prison cell is his only home; the tin pan of coarse food, which is handed to him as he lines up with hundreds of others after the day's work, is the only substitute for the warm home-hearth, the lighted supper table, the merry give-and-take of family life that eases a man after his day's toil. ”

“ A great light in the prison shone
⁠That made the people blind:
Rise up, rise up, new-ransomed one,
⁠And taste the sun and wind:
For I have gotten a golden key
To set all lonesome prisoners free.
Yea they shall soar, shall spring aloft ”

“ From such freedom of communication on my jailer's part, I began to hope for additional information, which never came. It was in vain that I conjured her to tell me where my prison was situated, whether at the edge of the city, or far away in the country, or to suffer me to have a glimpse from a window of my vicinity. To all such entreaties she was pitiless, and I was left to that vague and vain conjecture which so wears the intellect. ”

“ But the only really humanising influence in prison is the influence of the prisoners. Their cheerfulness under terrible circumstances, their sympathy for each other, their humility, their gentleness, their pleasant smiles of greeting when they meet each other, their complete acquiescence in their punishments, are all quite wonderful, and I myself learnt many sound lessons from them. ”

“ In a state prison, almost every action of the prisoners, not particularly mentioned in the By-Laws, is either a crime or not, according to the whim that happens to be in the breast of the keeper at the time it is done. ”

“ But, looking back, you see the great high wall of the prison, and remember that the little spot in the prison yard and the sky overhead is all the glimpse of the world that these poor men get, and, no doubt, is all that some of them ever will get, for some of them are shut in there for life. ”

“ The prison from here looks like a great hive of human creeping things impelled to their joyless labours and unwilling seclusion by some hidden force, the very reverse of natural, and which has in it no element of organic life, cohesion, or self-sufficing reason. ”

“ That gloomy-looking prison on your right is a prison for women; once it was a convent for Lazarists: a thousand unfortunate individuals of the softer sex now occupy that mansion; they bake, as we find in the guide-books, the bread of all the other prisons; they mend and wash the shirts and stockings of all the other prisoners; they make hooks and eyes and phosphorus-boxes, and they attend chapel every Sunday:—if occupation can help them, sure they have enough of it. ”

“ But this being, cut off from the world without leaving any discoverable trace, and whose disappearance apparently caused no void—this captive, distinguished among captives by the unexampled nature of his punishment, a prison within a prison, as if the walls of a mere cell were not narrow enough, has come to typify for us the sum of all the human misery and suffering ever inflicted by unjust tyranny. ”

“ Surely and steadily the men enclosed behind the walls of the old Prison rose into the ranks of the utterly reliable, the indefatigable, the fearless and the fine, or sank into those of the shifty, unhearty, unreliable, and unworthy—save the few who remained steadily mediocre, well-meaning, unsoldierly, fairly trustworthy—a useful second line, but not to be sent on forlorn hopes, dangerous reconnoitring, risky despatch-carrying, scouting, or ticklish night-work. ”

“ THE prison is asleep. A light, easily roused slumber has gradually drawn its quieting mantle over the bodies stretched out on wooden beds or benches and covered with spotted blankets, or simply the ordinary grey cloaks of the prisoners. ”

“ If you have means and intelligence, you make your prison tolerable; you can get used to it, and even grow dependent upon it—but it is a prison still. The best-behaved convict eyes his warder with a cruel thought somewhere at the back of his mind. ”

“ The prison is hard by, in an adjacent court-yard—of the buildings foul and dismal place, where some men are shut up close, in small cells like ovens; and where others look through bars and beg; where some are playing draughts, and some are talking to their friends, who smoke, the while, to purify the air; and some are buying wine and fruit of women-vendors; and all are squalid, dirty, and vile to look at. ”

“ 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 which 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 jail, with walls, and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One meets strange characters in prison, characters which are at once recognized as being natural to the place, as are bats or owls to a cave. Prison characters, like all others, are seen by different men in different lights. For instance, a visitor passing along a corridor, and glancing through the iron gates or observation-holes of the cells, sees only the quiet, and, to him, sullen-looking convict, with all the crime suggesting bumps largely developed on his shaven head. ”

“ Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,
In prison pine with bondage and restraint.
And with remembrance of the greater grief
To banish the less, I find my chief relief. ”

“ So cruel prison how could betide, alas,
As proud Windsor, where I in lust and joy
With a king's son my childish years did pass
In greater feast than Priam's sons of Troy?
Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour: ”

“ Go through the prisons of our State and nine times out of every ten the prisoners will tell you they never would have thought of getting into prison; in a moment of temptation they fell and the world turns from them when the walls of the prison separates them from the outer world. ”

“ I thought, “being in prison.” It required no flight of the imagination, no tags of theory, to understand what the effect of this manner would be on an ordinary prisoner.
Mrs. Lawrence and I waited together in the passage. Presently a wardress came up to us with a paper in her hand and began reading out the prison rules, which we were told had to be strictly observed under pain of punishment. There were a great many dealing with a variety of subjects. She read very fast like a wooden automaton, as if she herself were weary of this too frequent job. ”

“ A prison should be like a fortress in a state of siege: officers on duty, guards posted, sentries always on the alert, every one everywhere ready to meet any difficulty or danger that may arise. No “free” person should pass the gates [111] but officials actually on duty inside. ”

“ Every prison of course has its half-witted clients, who return again and again, and may be said to live in the prison. But this young man struck me as being more than usually half-witted on account of his silly grin and idiotic laughter to himself, and the peculiar restlessness of his eternally twitching hands. ”

“ Unless one accepts dire vicissitudes, he will not attain. To me prison is freedom, troubles rest me, death is life, and to be despised is honour. Therefore, I was happy all that time in prison. When one is released from the prison of self, that is indeed release, for that is the greater prison. When this release takes place, then one cannot be outwardly imprisoned. When they put my feet in stocks, I would say to the guard, ‘You cannot imprison me, for here I have light and air and bread and water. ”

“ Inside the gate, in the centre of an immense yard or walled sand plain, the Governor and Comptroller-General stood; and as the long line of convicts filed by, each saluted in military fashion, and passed on to the prison. ”

“ It is not far from the Court House to the prison, a wholesomely situated building on a hill, made of concrete, with an attap roof. The whole building is one hundred feet long by thirty feet broad. There are six cells for solitary confinement. A jailer, turnkey, and eight warders constitute the prison staff. The able-bodied prisoners are employed on the roads and other public works, and attend upon the scavengers' cart, which outcome of civilization goes round every morning! ”

“ One of these life-men writes as follows:—"Dear Little Mother:—Nobody knows better than I do myself what the League has done for me and the men here. I have been in prison over twenty years, and know what I am talking about. Without it prison would be much like what it was before. I hope that with all the disappointments you are bound to meet with, you will continue to believe that there are hundreds of men in our great prisons who are in earnest. ”

“ Those who have stood outside the walls of Clerkenwell or Coldbath Fields prison, and have watched the opening of the gates whence prisoners emerge into a freedom which is almost paralysing in its first effects, will tell you how the appearance of these poor wretches is greeted in low muttered tones by silent slouching men {274} and women who await their coming. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These orders were accordingly made known to the prisoners; and on the morning of the third of April, they were ordered on deck, with their hammocks, baggage, &c., in readiness to march to a prison, the very name of which made the mind of every prisoner “shrink back with dread, and startle at the thought;” for fame had made them well acquainted with the horrors of that infernal abode, which was by far the most dreadful prison in all England, and in which it was next to impossible for human beings long to survive. ”

“ The prison is a conspicuous object for many miles around. It is worked on the silent system, and each prisoner has his or her work to do at the invisible results of the crank, or in making cocoa-matting, or in picking oakum. ”

“ Before my detention, I had thought that a prison would be at least a place of repose, where I could give myself up to study; but this was not the case at all, at least not in those where I stayed. Every moment the keeper, the jailers, the turnkeys, the purveyors, etc., came in. We were made to go down to the clerk's office to attend to our commissions. I could not read one single hour without interruption. One thing which I have heard spoken of, and which I have certainly verified, is the habit prisoners have of being destructive. It arises from their standing in need of a thousand things. ”