Need of Women Doctors and Inspectors
Women doctors and inspectors should be appointed in all female prisons. Otherwise what can be expected of a woman of small mental resources, shut in on herself, often unable to read or write with any readiness; of bad habits; with a craving for low excitement; whose chief pleasure has been in the grosser kind of animal delight? The mind turns morbidly inward; the nerves are shattered. Although the dark cell is no longer used, mental light is still excluded. Recidivation is more frequent with women than with men. The jail taint seems to sink deeper into woman’s nature, and at Aylesbury numbers of the more abandoned ones are seldom for long out of the male warders’ hands.
Chastening Effect of Imprisonment on the Spirit
For a considerable period I was given work in the officers’ mess. Their quarters are in a detached building within the prison precincts, and are reached by crossing a small grass-plot which separates it from the prison. Each officer has a small bedroom, in which she sleeps and passes her time when off duty. All meals are served in the mess-room, and consist of breakfast at seven o’clock, lunch on turn between nine and eleven, dinner at twelve-thirty, tea at five, and supper whenever they are off duty. The cooking is excellent and varied. A matron is in charge of the commissariat department, and has four prisoners of the “Star Class” working under her. I did scullery work, which consisted of washing up all the crockery, glass, knives, forks, and spoons used at these five meals, besides all the pots and pans required in their preparation. As a staff of twenty-five sat down to these frequent meals daily, the work was very hard and quite beyond my strength. The “Star Class” of workers should not be kept at it more than six months at a time. Some of the life women have been in the kitchen and mess-room as long as three and four years, and, as neither the culinary arrangements nor the ventilation are modern, the consequent physical and mental depression arising from these defects, and the monotony of the work, is only too apparent.
I was not feeling well at the time, and soon after I had a long illness—a nervous breakdown, due partly to insomnia and partly to the unrelieved strain and stress of years of hard labor. My recovery was very slow. I was in the infirmary about eighteen months, and was glad when finally discharged, as the intervals between my letters and visits were shorter when I was in discipline quarters and could earn more marks. During the long years of my imprisonment I learned many lessons I needed, perhaps, to have learned during my earlier life; but, thank God, I was no criminal! I was being punished for that of which I was innocent. I believe it is God’s task to judge and ours to endure, but I could not understand what his plans and his purposes were. I believed they were good, although I could not see how eternity itself could make up for my sufferings. Perhaps they were intended to work out some good to others, by ways I should never know, until I saw with the clear eyes of another world. Still, the external conditions of life acted on my body and mind, and I scarcely knew at times how to bear them. I could not have endured them without God’s sustaining grace. I used often to repeat these lines:
“With patience, then, the course of duty run;
God never does nor suffers to be done
But that which you would do if you could see
The end of all events as well as he.”