It always seemed to me that the standpoint of the Board of Directors, established in 1864, and which continued without change until very recently, was altogether wrong. They appeared to think that in their dealings with other men the only course was to be the application of "force, iron force," as one of the governors expressed it. The very great majority require no such application, and the few difficult ones could easily be managed in another way. Certainly it is necessary that all prison discipline be penal, but it is not necessary that it be ferocious and inhuman, as certainly is the English. Starvation, the crank, the plank bed, the fearful cold of the cells are not measures necessary in dealing with any man.
Whatever they could think of to harden, to degrade, to insult, to inflict every form of suffering, both physical and mental, which a man could undergo and live, was embodied in the rules they made. Their prisons were to be places of suffering and of nothing but suffering.
So far as the directors were concerned the regulations were carried out to the letter, but each prison is under the control of a resident governor, with a deputy governor to assist him. These gentlemen are always men of good social position, retired officers of the army, who have seen the world and have experience in controlling men. They are rarely inclined to unnecessary severity, but are generally willing to apply the rules with as much consideration as such rules admit. The governor's discretion, however, is limited, but daily contact more or less with men whom he sees to differ very little from free men, and whom he sometimes finds to be even better than many he knows who are not, but who perhaps ought to be, on the wrong side of the bars, makes him unwilling to throw too many sharp points on the path which has to be trodden by men for whom he often cannot help feeling considerable sympathy.
I have more than once heard governors express their disapproval of the starvation system and of the ferocity of treatment toward men who some day or other must go back to society.
Under such governors the new arrival speedily finds out that to a certain extent his comfort depends upon himself. No man can make a bad thing good or trick himself into believing that suffering is pleasure. If pain be not an evil, it is an exceedingly good imitation, and the wisest philosopher is just as restless under the toothache as the most perfect idiot.
PENTONVILLE PRISON.