“I sit there sometimes at work, not knowing what I’m doing.”
“I’ve good nerves. A man with bad nerves would soon snuff out in ‘separate’.”
“If a man had the spy-hole open even, so that he could see out, it would make a vast deal of difference. . . . I’ve seen numbers of men come on the public works from their ‘separate,’ quite silly.”
“I’ve seen many a man driven queer.” (This recidivist had served four terms of penal servitude.)
“I’ve seen men driven off their nuts.”
I could not get an admission from any prisoner that the suffering they underwent in separate confinement deterred them from coming back to prison. The two reasons they assigned for coming back to prison were:
(1) That they had so little chance outside. (2) Drink.
It is obvious, however, that the separate period is almost universally regarded as much the worst part of the sentence.
My reasons for believing that, in spite of this, separate confinement is not, in fact, deterrent were given in my open letter to the Home Secretary (the Nation, May 1st and May 8th, 1909); this belief has been strengthened rather than weakened in the course of this investigation. As a final result of these visits I record my deliberate conviction that no competent observer with any knack of getting at men’s feelings, and the opportunity of conversing in private and as a private person, with the prisoners could come to any other conclusion than that an immense amount of harmful and unnecessary suffering is inflicted by closed-cell confinement extending over the periods (especially the longer periods) now prevailing. It is my belief that if the authorities were able to adopt this method of getting at the real state of the case the system would not remain unaltered for a single day.