[104] American Prisons, by the Rev. F. H. Wines, the able secretary of the National Prison Association. A great amount of valuable information is compressed into this little pamphlet. Mr. Wines has endeavoured to ascertain if the variation in usual length of sentence in different states has any relation with amount of crime in that state. He was not able to find any connection. “Apparently, the length of jail sentences pronounced by the court has no effect either to increase or to diminish crime.” If this is so, there arises, as he remarks, the question, “What useful purpose do our jails subserve?”
[105] “Remarks on Crime and Criminals,” Journal of Mental Science, July 1888.
[106] It is unnecessary to consider here the relation of solitary confinement to insanity. This is still somewhat of a vexed question. The difficulty lies in the fact that the prisoner is frequently already predisposed to insanity. Everything depends on how the isolation is carried out. There is no question that cellular confinement, if sufficiently prolonged, leads to insanity. There is a very extensive literature dealing with this subject.
[107] H. D. Wey, Physical and Industrial Training of Criminals, p. 55, New York, 1888.
[108] See Dr. Wey’s Physical and Industrial Training of Criminals, a valuable little work, in which all the details of this and similar experiences are given with care and fulness.
[109] Sufficient attention does not appear to have been given to music in prisons. It is a civilising influence to which the criminal is often very sensitive. An able administrator at the convict prison at Toulon long since recognised this with happy results.
[110] For some further information concerning Elmira, see Appendix E.
[111] It is perhaps worth noting that the highly intelligent and eclectic administration of Japan have adopted a very similar system, described in an interesting letter by Mr. H. Norman, the travelling commissioner of the Pall Mall Gazette, under the title of “An Ideal Prison” (Pall Mall Gazette, 18th October 1888):—“Two days previously I had visited the house of the most famous maker in Japan of the exquisite cloisonné ware—the enamel in inlaid metal work upon copper—who rivals in everlasting materials the brush of Turner with his pigments and the pencil of Alma Tadema with his strips of metal. And I had stood for an hour behind him and his pupils, marvelling that the human eye could become so accurate and the human hand so steady and the human heart so patient. Yet I give my word that here in the prison at Ishikawa sat not six but sixty men, common thieves and burglars and peacebreakers, who knew no more about cloisonné before they were sentenced than a Hindoo knows about skates, doing just the same thing—cutting by eye-measurement only the tiny strips of copper to make the outline of a bird’s beak or the shading of his wing or the articulations of his toe, sticking these upon the rounded surface of the copper vase, filling up the interstices with pigment, coat upon coat, and firing and filing and polishing it until the finished work was so true and so delicate and so beautiful that nothing except an occasional greater dignity and breadth of design marked the art of the freeman from that of the convict. C’etait à ne pas y croire—one simply stood and refused to believe one’s eyes. Fancy the attempt to teach such a thing at Pentonville or Dartmoor or Sing-Sing! When our criminal reaches his prison home in Tōkyō he is taught to do that at which the limit of his natural faculties is reached. If he can make cloisonné, well and good; if not, perhaps he can carve wood or make pottery; if not these, then he can make fans or umbrellas or basket work; if he is not up to any of these, then he can make paper or set type or cast brass or do carpentering; if the limit is still too high for him, down he goes to the rice-mill, and see-saws all day long upon a balanced beam, first raising the stone-weighted end and then letting it down with a great flop into a mortar of rice. But if he cannot even accomplish this poor task regularly, he is given a hammer and left to break stones under a shed with the twenty-nine other men out of 2000 who could not learn anything else.” And in regard to punishment Mr. Norman observes:—“On leaving the dormitories we passed a small, isolated square erection, beaked and gabled like a little temple. The door was solemnly unlocked and flung back, and I was motioned to enter. It was the punishment cell, another spotless wooden box, well ventilated, but perfectly dark, and with walls so thick as to render it practically silent. ‘How many prisoners have been in it during the last month?’ I asked. The director summoned the chief warder and repeated my question to him. ‘H’tori mo gozaimasan—none whatever,’ was the reply. ‘What other punishments have you?’ ‘None whatever.’ ‘No flogging?’ When this question was translated the director and the little group of officials all laughed together at the bare idea. I could not help wondering whether there was another prison in the world with no method of punishment for 2000 criminals except one dark cell, and that not used for a month. And the recollection of the filthy and suffocating sty used as a punishment cell in the city prison of San Francisco came upon me like a nausea.”
[112] Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart, § 188 ff.; and Ulrich Jahn, “Ueber den Zauber mit Menschenblut und anderen Theilen des Menschlichen Körpers,” in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1888, Heft ii., p. 130.
[113] The popular excitement over “Jack the Ripper,” and the Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, may be specially mentioned as having produced a large number of crimes. They are, however, by no means isolated examples.