The Separate System.—Under which the prisoners are not allowed to associate with each other, but receive frequent visits from gaolers, warders, chaplains, and other persons who are likely to bring beneficial influence to bear upon them. Each man has his own cell, in which he sleeps and works. His exercise is conducted in such a manner as to prevent contact with other prisoners. He is allowed books and given daily instruction. Under this system perhaps the best results are obtained.
The Silent System.—A system under which the prisoners associate with one another but are forbidden to communicate. This system cannot be strictly enforced, and as it converts trifling matters into serious offences, it makes the prison life a state of petty persecution.
The Combined System.—A system which the prisoners are kept apart during the night but work together during the day. This system has been adopted in New Zealand, and in the following description of the value of imprisonment it will be understood that it is to this system that reference is made.
A man is sent to prison because he has proved himself unfit to be at liberty. His attack upon society was evidence of this, and society punishes him by taking away the liberty which he has thus abused. His dread of the prison increases as he comes under the shadow of its grim walls, and, once having passed within, a feeling of remorse and desperation seizes him. Its intensity or weakness will depend upon his temperament. He is soon told in the most emphatic manner that he is to regard himself as a felon; that he is to live with felons as a felon and observe the habits of a felon. He is given a uniform coarse in texture clumsy and grotesque in appearance and branded over with the broad-arrow and with his prison number. In this garb it is impossible for a man to preserve his sense of self-respect. If he should not be amenable to the prison discipline he may be held up to ridicule by being compelled to wear a parti-coloured uniform. However can a man be expected to reform who is held up to the ridicule of felons? It matters not from which class of life he is drawn, what his age is, or the nature of his offence, he is thrown into the company of the worst criminals in the land. If he were a cultured man, or a man who had known no associates in his crime, or if his æsthetic taste was considerably developed it matters not; he must do the same work and mix in the same company as the most ignorant and most brutal. To utterly disregard these qualities is to ignore the wide-open channels along which the most powerful reformative influences may be transmitted. If his recovery is to be considered these are most substantial assets. They are, as it were, "the general health" of the patient suffering from a local lesion. Yet our prison system not only ignores them but patiently sets to work to destroy them, as if their possession were an additional offence on the part of the criminal. Prisoners who try to keep aloof from their associates may often be made to suffer very considerably for it. Others, craving for some association, soon fall in with men whom they would have regarded, a few days previously, as impossible companions. The almost entire absence of elevating influences makes it easy for the concentrated power of evil to become irresistible. The gloom of the prison rises, the fear of the law vanishes and the new born tendency to crime becomes a confirmed habit. A man needs either a very strong will indeed, or else to be supported by powerful social traditions to enable him to resist the evil influences of prison life. A few men do resist and maintain their sense of self-respect in spite of all indignities and bad influences. Some sink as under a torture; some sink and are enticed and absorbed into felony. These last will plan their future crimes while they are serving their first sentence. Henceforth the prison is their home.
What purpose is thus served? Why should a man who has lost self-respect be continually reminded of it? If a man is diseased he is not placed amongst filthy conditions and the emblems of sickness and death crowded upon him. His removal from all unhealthy surroundings is the first essential necessary for his recovery, and the same should be observed with the criminal. He should be entirely removed from criminal surroundings and efforts made to eradicate the criminality which has expressed itself. Society has not the right to degrade a man, much less to school him in crime. If he prove absolutely incorrigible (a very difficult matter to ascertain) he should be banished from society for all time either by life-long imprisonment or by death. If not, the carrying out of his punishment must be performed with a very sacred sense of responsibility. All manner of means are taken to relieve and cure the physically sick; much greater surely should be the means employed to heal the morally and socially sick.
Another matter wherein our prison system might be justly criticised is the scale of diet provided for the prisoners. No one asks that they should be given luxuries, but it might at least be recognised even in prison that one man's food is another man's poison, that one fattens where another starves, and that variety is essential to good health. A prisoner who was serving a very long sentence once said to the author, "fancy having the same dinner every day of your life." Let one fancy it, boiled beef every day except Sunday, when roast beef is provided. The same meal every day, the same clothes to wear every day and all day, and the same routine to go through. What wonder is it that in the confirmed criminal many faculties appear to have atrophied. They have obeyed a law of nature. The popular comment is no doubt—"what else do you expect? They deserve it all, they have brought it upon themselves." We expect that our criminals should at least be treated like the by-products of our mills and factories, i.e. made the most of. Bitter prejudices must give way to the dictates of reason and humanity.
Practically the "combined system" produces no good results. It satisfies neither justice, humanity, nor economy. Neither is it efficient to afford protection to society. It satisfies prejudice and vengeance alone. The only system of imprisonment which is of any value and which the State ought to consider is one which converts the gaol in every essential into a "crime-hospital."
Concerning life imprisonment much apprehension exists in the public mind. The prevailing idea is that this sentence implies incarceration for a period of twenty years. This is due perhaps to the fact that in England the sentences of "lifers" are reconsidered at the end of that period, and in the majority of cases a pardon is granted. The New Zealand prison regulations contain this section (116) "No rule for the remission of life sentences will be laid down. Such sentences are passed on persons guilty of the very gravest offences; and the Governor will only extend the royal prerogative of mercy to such persons in exceptional cases." Under certain conditions life imprisonment is the only way of dealing with criminals who refuse to reform. Those conditions do not exist in our New Zealand prisons, and a life sentence served within their walls is the most cruel form of punishment our laws allow. The prisoner enters the gaol with a long, dark, hopeless future before him. As the years roll by not one ray of light brightens his lot. He can never better himself. He suffers, he is meant to suffer, the loss of all he holds dear (and even a murderer holds some things dear). This absolute loss, this complete severance of all ties, produces a most agonising mental state and afflicts the poor wretch with untold horrors. He is made to drag out an existence under most unnatural conditions, conditions in which every effort he makes towards self-improvement is a useless one, every aspiration is routed, the natural affections crave in vain for an object to fasten upon, and where an artificial atavistic process is set in motion so powerful as to defy the resistance of all in time. This is no imaginary picture, a man is a man, and one of the cruellest tortures to submit him to is to deprive him absolutely of hope and make good his evil because it requires an effort which is useless, and evil his good because it is easier and costs the loss of nothing. Perhaps the majority of lifers are those whose sentences have been commuted from the death penalty. Such a sentence is in reality the death penalty carried out under slow process extending over many years. Gradually remorse and despair do their work upon the natural instincts, the mind and the body. The man becomes brutalised, insane and dies. An exception here and there may be pointed out; but given twenty men of same age and good health, and sentence ten to twenty years, and ten to life imprisonment, and the chances are that (under reasonable conditions) the ten with the defined sentence will survive it, whereas of the lifers the majority will be insane within twelve years. The following testimony will, however, be of greater weight:—
The Directors of the State Prison in Wisconsin in their report for 1881 add:—
"The condition of most of our life prisoners is deplorable in the last degree. Not a few of them are hopelessly insane; but insanity, even, brings them no surcease of sorrow. However wild their delusions may be on other subjects, they never fail to appreciate the fact that they are prisoners. Others, not yet classed as insane, as year by year goes by, give only too conclusive evidence that reason is becoming unsettled. The terribleness of a life sentence must be seen to be appreciated; seen, too, not for a day or a week, but for a term of years. Quite a number of young men have been committed to this prison in recent years under sentence for life. Past experience leads us to expect that some of them will become insane in less than ten years; and all of them, who live, in less than twenty. Many of them will, doubtless, live much longer than twenty years, strong and vigorous in body perhaps, but complete wrecks in mind. May it, therefore, not be worthy of legislative consideration whether life sentences should not be abolished and long but definite terms substituted, and thus leave some faint glimmer of hope even for the greatest criminals?"