Tragedies in Prison
Above others there are four tragic prison episodes which, once witnessed, can never be forgotten:
1. Breaking bad news to a prisoner—telling her that a dear one in the outside world is dying, and that she may not go to him; that she must wait in terrible suspense until the last message is sent, no communication in the mean time being permitted.
2. Receiving an intimation of the death of a beloved father, mother, brother or sister, husband or child, whose visits and letters have been the sole comfort and support of that prisoner’s hard lot.
3. The loss of reason by a prisoner who was not strong enough to endure the punishment decreed by Act of Parliament.
4. The suicide, who prefers to trust to the mercy of God rather than suffer at the hands of man.
Why should a woman be considered less loving, less capable of suffering, because she is branded with the name of “convict?” She may be informed that her nearest and dearest are dying, but the rules will permit no departure to relieve the heart-breaking suspense. In the world at large telegrams may be sent and daily bulletins received, but not in the convict’s world.
Death is a solemn event under any circumstances, and reverence for the dead is inculcated by our religion, but to die in prison is a thing that every inmate dreads with inexpressible horror. When a prisoner is at the point of death, she is put into a cell alone, or into a ward, if there is one vacant. There she lies alone. The nurse and infirmary officers come and go; her fellow prisoners gladly minister to her; the doctor and chaplain are assiduous in their attentions; but she is nevertheless alone, cut off from her kin, tended by the servants of the law instead of the servants of love, and it is only at the very last that her loved ones may come and say their farewell. Oh! the pathos, the anguish of such partings—who shall describe them? And when all is over, and the law has no longer any power over the body it has tortured, it may be claimed and taken away.
The case of the prisoner who becomes insane is no less harrowing. She is kept in the infirmary with the other patients for three months. If she does not recover her reason within that period, she is certified by three doctors as insane and then removed to the criminal lunatic asylum. In the mean time the peace and rest of the other sick persons in the infirmary are disturbed by her ravings, and their feelings wrought upon by the daily sight of a demented fellow creature.
And the suicide! To see the ghastly and distorted features of a fellow prisoner, with whom one has worked and suffered, killed by her own hands—such scenes as these haunted me for weeks; and it needed all my reliance on God to throw off the depression that inevitably followed.