I submit that no unprejudiced man can regard this closed-cell confinement as a humanizing influence, except in the rarest cases, or maintain that it helps to reclaim men and women.
I refer again to this paragraph in the Report of your Committee:
“It” (the detention of convicts in closed-cell confinement at local prisons) “is certainly a practical convenience in the sense that the expense of sending convicts immediately after sentence to convict prisons, either singly or in detachments, is curtailed by the system of gathering prisons. This consideration alone is not sufficient to justify the practice.”
I am credibly informed that the whole matter is one of administration, and can be modified without Act of Parliament. I appeal, then, to you, sir, who have already done so much towards reforming our prison system, to work for the abandonment of this custom of confining convicts in closed cells for nine, six or three months, or any less period, either in local or in convict prisons; to substitute therefore work in association from the commencement of sentence; or, where such is not immediately possible, work in separate cells with open doors. And I would further appeal to you to advocate the reduction of the twenty-eight days, closed-cell confinement endured by prisoners serving sentences of hard labour.
Than this great and necessary reform I can conceive none that will, at a single stroke, remove so much harmful and unnecessary suffering, or do more to reconcile our Penal Laws with Justice and Common Sense.
(2)
(From a Letter to Sir Evelyn Ruggles Brise, K.C.B., Prison Commission, Whitehall, July, 1909.)
“. . . I was at X. Prison on Tuesday, at Y. Prison yesterday. Saw all the officials, and talked with twelve convicts. . . .
“It was suggested to me at X. that I ought to stay some days there and see every convict. I would be willing, if you will allow me, to stay some days at X. Prison, see every convict, and keep record of the answers obtained from each one as to the effect on him of separate confinement. I think they would speak to me freely. From all I hear, and certainly from its situation and general airiness and lightness, X. Prison is the best of the four collecting prisons, and there would be no danger of getting an impression more unfavourable to separate confinement than I should get from seeing each convict in all four prisons.
“An expression used during our conversation the other day leads me for a moment into the deeper and wider significance of this question. It was the expression ‘a downright enemy of society’ used of a certain class of prisoner. I have been thinking over that phrase ‘a downright enemy of society’ to see if one more meditation on it would correct the conclusions of a hundred previous meditations, but I do not feel that it has. I think of it like this: Every now and then, seldom enough but still too frequently, we come across children, in all classes, who, from the age when they begin to act at all, show that there is something in them warped, distorted, inherently inimical to goodness. It is in them, of them, a taint in their blood, a lesion of their brain. They grow up. They are not insane, but they have a blind spot, a place in their souls or internal economy—or whatever you like to call it—that some mysterious, rather awful, hand has darkened. They are doomed from their birth by reason of that blind spot sooner or later to become criminals, that is, to commit some action which is not consonant with the actions of those who are born without this blind spot; some are not found out, some are. When found out they are known as ‘the criminal type.’ They form a portion, not perhaps a very large one, of our convicts. Can those, who have had the good fortune to be born like their fellows, punish these unfortunates for the sake of punishing them, for the sake of avenging society? I cannot bring myself to think so.