Captain Arthur Griffiths begins his work with a picture of the condition of affairs in the time of Howard, long before Millbank was built or thought of, and a terrible picture it is he draws.
Prisons were overcrowded, ill-ventilated, damp, pestiferous. The gaol fever, a disease now happily unknown, carried off, according to Howard, “more people than were put to death by all the public executions in the kingdom.”
And those were times in which capital punishment was inflicted for the most trivial offences. Prisoners brought into court communicated the infection to judges, barristers, jurors, and spectators; and at Taunton in 1730 bench and bar and hundreds of people in court died from the disease.
The prisons were not only pesthouses: they were places of torture, and gambling, and vice. The gaolers were inhuman wretches, as mercenary as they were cruel, and their chief aim was to make their positions profitable to themselves.
Howard’s revelations stirred first of all the Duke of Richmond, who built a new and improvised prison at Horsham for Sussex; and soon after that, when transportation to the American colonies was abandoned, the Legislature resolved to build a gaol to which should be sent criminals heretofore ordered for transportation.
Here it was hoped, to use the words of the Act, “that solitary confinement, accompanied by well-regulated hard labour and religious instruction, might be the means under Providence, not only of deterring others, but also of reforming the individuals and turning them to habits of industry.”
This extract contains the seed from which, after long controversy and the failure of a scheme which honest but unpractical Jeremy Bentham attempted to carry out, the Millbank Penitentiary grew; and it contains, too, it appears to us, the secret of the repeated failures which governor after governor and successive Legislatures met with when the great experiment was under trial.
The cost exceeded £350,000, which was a much larger sum at that date than it would be to-day to expend in a philanthropic enterprise, and is a proof of the earnestness with which the Government embarked in the task; but the money was almost thrown away.
It was for a long time the old, old story of zeal without knowledge.
Ministers and their advisers made the mistake of overrating the capabilities and moral qualities of the class they had to deal with.