Next day as she left the place of her temporary detention the other women were at their cell windows, and vociferously cheered the first subject of the new discipline as she went forth into the world. Convicts thus treated soon began to give themselves airs.
One charged with stealing the matron’s tea was so hurt as to be thrown into fits. Some of the women refused to have their hair cut short, and were allowed to retain their locks.
One Sunday the Chancellor of the Exchequer and some friends were at the prison service when a riot arose from the objection of some women to brown bread. The Chancellor addressed the men after the women had been removed, and promised to represent their complaint to the Home Secretary. The rebellious spirit, however, continued, and eventually had to be suppressed by punishments. The failure was charged on the officials, not on the system, and the Penitentiary continued to be conducted, as Captain Griffiths says, like a big school.
The populace called it “Mr. Holford’s fattening-house,” and it was suggested that the guards and warders were not needful to keep the rogues from getting out, but to prevent honest people from rushing in.
One of the services which Millbank has rendered in return for the half million of money squandered on it may be said to be the complete explosion of the idea on which penitentiaries were based.
Millbank was the first penitentiary, and the last, in the full sense of the word.
From the very first the place was a perpetual source of anxiety and dispute.
Before it was finished Sir Robert Smirke had to be called in to rebuild it, and it had only been opened a few years when one of the most terrible epidemics in prison history broke out among its occupants, necessitating their removal to the hulks.
When it was again occupied the same weak system seems to have prevailed.
The power of persuasion to reform criminals was thoroughly believed in, and nobody seemed to doubt that a year or two in Millbank would change any rogue into an honest man, if he were at all capable of reformation.