Owing to the repeated entreaties of the criminals who could hardly hope to escape the gallows, some show of classification was carried out, and when the inspectors visited Newgate they found the three certain to die in a day-room by themselves; in a second room were fourteen more who had every hope of a reprieve. The whole of these seventeen had, however, a common airing-yard, and took their exercise there at the same time, so that men in the most awful situation, daily expecting to be hanged, were associated continually with a number of those who could look with certainty on a mitigation of punishment. The latter, light-hearted and reckless, conducted themselves in the most unseemly fashion, and “with as much indifference as the inmates of the other parts of the prison.” They amused themselves after their own fashion; played all day long at blind-man’s-buff and leap-frog, or beat each other with a knotted handkerchief, laughing and uproarious, utterly unmindful of the companionship of men upon whom lay the shadow of an impending shameful death. “Men whose cases were dangerous, and those most seriously inclined, complained of these annoyances,” so subversive of meditation, so disturbing to the thoughts; they suffered sickening anxiety, and wished to be locked up alone. This indiscriminate association lasted for months, during the whole of which time the unhappy convicts who had but little hope of commutation were exposed to the mockery of their reckless associates.
The brutal callousness of the bulk of the inmates of the press-yard may be gathered from the prison punishment-book, which frequently recorded such entries as the following: “Benjamin Vines and Daniel Ward put in irons for two days for breaking the windows of the day room in the condemned cells.” “Joseph Coleman put in irons for three days for striking one of the prisoners,” in the same place. There were disputes and quarrels constantly among these doomed men; it was a word and blow, an argument clenched always with a fight. The more peaceably disposed found some occupation in making Newgate tokens, leaden hearts,[86] and “grinding the impressions off penny-pieces, then pricking figures or words on them to give to their friends as memorials.” Turnkeys occasionally visited the press-yard, but its occupants were under little or no control. The chaplain, who might have been expected to make these men his peculiar care, and who at one time had visited them frequently, often several times a week, had relaxed his efforts, because, according to his own account, he was so frequently stopped in the performance of his duties. In his evidence before the inspectors he declared that “for years he gave his whole time to his duties, from an early hour in the morning till late in the afternoon. He left off because he was so much interfered with and laughed at, and from seeing that no success attended his efforts, owing to the evils arising from association.” Latterly his ministrations to the condemned had been restricted to a visit on Sunday afternoons, and occasionally about once a fortnight on a week-day.
It is only fair to Mr. Cotton to add that, according to his own journal, he was unremitting in his attentions to convicts who were actually cast for death, and the day of whose execution was fixed. He had no doubt a difficult mission to discharge; on the one hand, the Ladies’ Association, supported and encouraged by public approval, trenched upon his peculiar province; on the other, the governor of the gaol sneered at his zeal, stigmatized his often most just strictures on abuses as “a bundle of nonsense,” and the aldermen, when he appealed to them for protection and countenance, generally sided with his opponents. Nevertheless the inspectors summed up against him. While admitting that he had had many difficulties to contend with, and that he had again and again protested against the obstacles thrown in his way, the inspectors “cannot forbear expressing their opinion that he might have shown greater perseverance, in the face of impediments confessedly discouraging,” as regards the private teaching of prisoners; and they went on to say that “a resolved adherence, in spite of discouragements the most disheartening, to that line of conduct which his duty imposed on him, would, it is probable, have eventually overcome the reluctance of some of the prisoners at least, and would have possessed so much moral dignity as effectually to rebuke and abash the profane spirit of the more insolent and daring of the criminals.”
The lax discipline maintained in Newgate was still further deteriorated by the presence of two other classes of prisoners who ought never to have been inmates of such a gaol. One of these were the criminal lunatics, who were at this time and for long previous continuously imprisoned there. As the law stood since the passing of the 9th Geo. IV. c. 40, any two justices might remove a prisoner found to be insane, either on commitment or arraignment, to an asylum, and the Secretary of State had the same power as regards any who became insane while undergoing sentence. These powers were not invariably put in force, and there were in consequence many unhappy lunatics in Newgate and other gaols, whose proper place was the asylum. At the time the Lords’ Committee sat there were eight thus retained in Newgate, and a return in the appendix of the Lords’ report gives a total of thirty-nine lunatics confined in various gaols, many of them guilty of murder and other serious crimes. The inspectors in the following year, on examining the facts, found that some of these poor creatures had been in confinement for long periods: at Newgate and York Castle as long as five years; “at Ilchester and Morpeth for seven years; at Warwick for eight years, at Buckingham and Hereford for eleven years, at Appleby for thirteen years, at Anglesea for fifteen years, at Exeter for sixteen years, and at Pembroke for not less a period than twenty-four years.”
It was manifestly wrong that such persons, “visited by the most awful of calamities,” should be detained in a common prison. Not only did their presence tend greatly to interfere with the discipline of the prison, but their condition was deplorable in the extreme. The lunatic became the sport of the idle and the depraved. His cure was out of the question; he was placed in a situation “beyond all others calculated to confirm his malady and prolong his sufferings.” The matter was still further complicated at Newgate by the presence within the walls of sham lunatics. Some of those included in the category had actually been returned as sane from the asylum to which they had been sent, and there was always some uncertainty as to who was mad and who not. Prisoners indeed were known to boast that they had saved their necks by feigning insanity. It was high time that the unsatisfactory state of the law as regards the treatment of criminal lunatics should be remedied, and not the least of the good services rendered by the new inspectors was their inquiry into the status of these unfortunate people, and their recommendation to improve it.
The other inmates of the prison of an exceptional character, and exempted from the regular discipline, such as it was, were the ten persons committed to Newgate by the House of Commons in 1835. These were the gentlemen concerned in the bribery case at Ipswich in 1835, when a petition was presented against the return of Messrs. Adam Dundas and Fitzroy Kelly. Various witnesses, including Messrs. J. B. Dasent, Pilgrim, Bond, and Clamp, had refused to give evidence before the House of Commons’ Committee; a Speaker’s warrant was issued for their arrest when they absconded. Mr. J. E. Sparrow and Mr. Clipperton, the parliamentary agents of the members whose election was impugned, were implicated in aiding and abetting the others to abscond, and a Mr. O’Mally, counsel for the two M.P.’s, was also concerned. Pilgrim and Dasent were caught and given into the custody of the sergeant-at-arms, and the rest were either arrested or they surrendered. A resolution at once passed the House without division to commit the whole to Newgate, where they remained for various terms. Dasent and Pilgrim were released in ten days, on making due submission. O’Mally sent in a medical certificate, declaring that the imprisonment was endangering his life, and after some question he was also released. The rest were detained for more than a month, it being considered that they were the most guilty, as being either professional agents, who advised the others to abscond, or witnesses who did not voluntarily come forward when the chance was given them.
Many of the old customs once prevalent in the State Side, so properly condemned and abolished, were revived for the convenience of these gentlemen, whose incarceration was thus rendered as little like imprisonment as possible. A certain number, who could afford the high rate of a guinea per diem, fixed by the under sheriff, were lodged in the governor’s house, slept there, and had their meals provided for them from the Sessions House or London Coffee-House. A few others, who could not afford a payment of more than half a guinea, were permitted to monopolize a part of the prison infirmary, where the upper ward was exclusively appropriated to their use. They also had their meals sent in, and, with the food, wine almost ad libitum. A prisoner, one of the wardsmen, waited on those in the infirmary; the occupants of the governor’s house had their own servants, or the governor’s. As a rule, visitors, many of them persons of good position, came and went all day long, and as late as nine at night; some to the infirmary, many more to the governor’s house. There were no restraints, cards and backgammon were played, and the time passed in feasting and revelry. Even Mr. Cope admitted that the committal of this class of prisoners to Newgate was most inconvenient, and the inspectors expressed themselves still more strongly in reprehension of the practice. The infirmary at this particular period epitomized the condition of the gaol at large. It was diverted from its proper uses, and, as the “place of the greatest comfort,” was allotted to persons who should not have been sent to Newgate at all. All the evils of indiscriminate association were strongly accentuated by the crowd collected within its narrow limits. “It may easily be imagined,” say the inspectors, in speaking of the prison generally, “what must be the state of discipline in a place filled with characters so various as were assembled there, where the tried and the untried, the sick and the healthy, the sane and the insane, the young and the old, the trivial offender and the man about to suffer the extreme penalty of the law, are all huddled together without discrimination, oversight, or control.”
Enough has probably been extracted from this most damnatory report to give a complete picture of the disgraceful state in which Newgate still remained in 1835. The inspectors, however, honestly admitted that although the site of the prison was convenient, its construction was as bad as bad could be. Valuable space was cumbered with many long and winding passages, numerous staircases, and unnecessarily thick and cumbrous inner walls. The wards were in some cases spacious, but they were entirely unsuited for separation or the inspection of prisoners. The yards were narrow and confined, mainly because the ground plan was radically vicious. These were evils inseparable from the place. But there were others remediable under a better system of management. More attention to ventilation, which was altogether neglected and inadequate, would have secured a better atmosphere for the unhappy inmates, who constantly breathed an air heavy, and, when the wards were first opened in the morning, particularly offensive.
Again, the discipline commonly deemed inseparable from every place of durance was entirely wanting. The primary object of committing a prisoner to gaol, as the inspectors pointed out, was to deter not only the criminal himself, but others from crime, and “to dispose him, by meditation and seclusion, to return to an honest life.” But at Newgate the convicted prisoner, instead of privation and hard fare, “is permitted to purchase whatever his own means or the means of his friends in or out of prison can afford, and he can almost invariably procure the luxuries of his class of life, beer and tobacco, in abundance. Instead of seclusion and meditation, his time is passed in the midst of a body of criminals of every class and degree, in riot, debauchery, and gaming, vaunting his own adventures, or listening to those of others; communicating his own skill and aptitude in crime, or acquiring the lessons of greater adepts. He has access to newspapers, and of course prefers that description which are expressly prepared for his own class, and which abound in vulgar adventure in criminal enterprise, and in the histories of the police, the gaol, and the scaffold. He is allowed intercourse with prostitutes who, in nine cases out of ten, have originally conduced to his ruin; and his connection with them is confirmed by that devotion and generosity towards their paramours in adversity for which these otherwise degraded women are remarkable. Having thus passed his time, he returns a greater adept in crime, with a wider acquaintance among criminals, and, what perhaps is even more injurious to him, is generally known to all the worst men in the country; not only without the inclination, but almost without the ability of returning to an honest life.”
These pungent and well-grounded strictures applied with still greater force to the unconvicted prisoner, the man who came to the prison innocent, and still uncontaminated, to be subjected to the same baneful influences, and to suffer the same moral deterioration, whether ultimately convicted or set free. The whole system, or more correctly the want of system, was baneful and pernicious to the last degree. The evils of such association were aggravated by the unbroken idleness; one “evil inflamed the other;” reformation or any kind of moral improvement was impossible; the prisoner’s career was inevitably downward, till he struck the lowest depths. “Forced and constant intercourse with the most depraved individuals of his own class; the employment of those means and agents by which the lowest passions and the most vulgar propensities of man are perpetually kept in the highest state of excitement—drink, gaming, obscene and blasphemous language; utter idleness, the almost unrestricted admission of money and luxuries; uncontrolled conversation with visitors of the very worst description—prostitutes, thieves, receivers of stolen goods; all the tumultuous and diversified passions and emotions which circumstances like these must necessarily generate, forbid the faintest shadow of a hope that in a soil so unfavourable for moral culture, any awakening truth, salutary exhortation, or imperfect resolutions of amendment can take root or grow.”