The committee of supervisors, who were virtually the rulers of the prison—which was another mistake—fell into a similar error.
The governor and officers seem to have done the same; and nothing but trouble was in store for Millbank for many years to come.
The story of the first volume is a sad one.
It is one long series of struggles between well-meaning but weak authorities and turbulent incorrigible prisoners in a chronic state of insubordination. Even this was not all.
The place was built on a faulty site; structural defects were constantly appearing, and the prisoners more than once were laid prostrate with a then mysterious disease, which turned out afterwards to be due to unsound sanitary and dietetic conditions.
Leniency was the key-note of the prison system. Men and women the most depraved, the most irreclaimable, were to be reformed by moral suasion. There was practically no punishment, no discipline, no order.
The governor was fettered by the supervisors, the officers were lax because there was no organisation, and the consequence was there was constant mutiny, escapes, or attempts to escape, which, despite altered arrangements and new regulations, continued for years.
It was not until long after—not until transportation to the new Australian colonies commenced—that this evil was cured, and it is instructive at the present juncture to read that it was cured by the use of the lash.
No other form of punishment was so efficacious; no other mode of correction so feared. The prisoners who witnessed the sufferings of their fellows appear to have been cowed.
The women, who were always worse than the men—and here Captain Griffiths receives ample confirmation in a work published by a prison matron in 1862—seem only to have been controlled when it became known that they too might be treated—though it does not transpire that they ever were—with the same severity.