Before leaving Dartmoor every prisoner has his photograph taken, and his carte-de-visite is supplied to the various police offices he has to go to for report.
On Wednesday all the prisoners for discharge that week have arrived in London, and in the morning a number of detectives come and take stock of them. The men stand in a row, and the detectives from Scotland-yard and Old Jewry, together with policemen from other stations, come and make themselves fully acquainted with the men who are to be let loose in their districts.
Each man is compared with his photograph and the written description of him. Of some men the police take no notice, or very little; others they take special care to become thoroughly acquainted with in every particular, and examine them most carefully. They know perfectly well who are likely to be in their hands again.
This ceremony, until very recently, took place in the Queen’s Bench Prison in the Borough—that old-fashioned prison for debtors, Chancery victims, and first-class misdemeanants; the prison from which Johnson, the celebrated smuggler, escaped; the place of which Sheridan said no man’s education was completed until he had been in the Bench; but the place around the walls of which so many associations cling, is now a thing of the past; its final doom was determined on some time back, and, like Temple Bar, it will live only in the remembrance of the public through the agency of contemporary chroniclers.
For a long time before its final doom it had undergone a remarkable change; it was neglected, forlorn, and its old glories had passed away.
No. 37.
PEACE PAYS A VISIT TO A JEW CLOTHIER.
No longer were its walls marked out with racquet courts—in the olden days the imprisoned debtor could not have lived without the racquet court—but debtors and Chancery victims were no longer confined there.
After the abolishment of the Imprisonment for Debt Act, it was abandoned, and shorn of all its former attractions—for it had attractions without doubt. It was used as a soldiers’ prison, and so it continued for some time, until at length that was discontinued, and the poor old Bench fell further into decay; it was merely used as a place from whence to discharge convicts.