The English Prison System

by Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise

The comparatively few foreigners who had a personal acquaintance with our Institutions did not conceal their admiration for the order, method, discipline, and exactness which characterize our methods of dealing with crime; but, generally speaking, these legendary ideas prevailed.

The shadow of transportation, of the dark days of penal servitude, and of grievous floggings, hindered a true conception of English methods.

I looked forward to the London Congress as the occasion to dispel these illusions.

A short historical retrospect will show that it is only in comparatively modern times that 'Imprisonment' became the recognized method for the punishment of crime, and that prison reform, in the sense of moral improvement by imprisonment was formulated as a political duty, and became an earnest pre-occupation of statesmen and philosophers. Prisons, as places of punishment, were unknown to ancient Roman law. The 'carcer' was known only as a place for 'holding' prisoners, not for 'punishing' (ad continendos, non ad puniendos homines), and the object of punishment was frankly held by Roman legists to be only that of deterrence by fear. The 'carcer' is not mentioned in the list of Roman penalties: death by hanging, by being hurled from the Tarpeian rock, drowning in a sack; with exile, beating with rods, &c., were the methods with which as schoolboys we were familiar.

In that dark period of penal law, based, as it was, on the ideas of vengeance and intimidation alone, which lasted down to the French Revolution, we find little, or no, reference to Imprisonment as the punishment for crime. In the long list of punishments under the old French Code we find 'réclusion perpetuelle' as a punishment for women and a substitute for the galleys and banishment. There is too 'la prison perpetuelle,' but this was not an organized system, but really a euphemism for that mysterious disappearance of persons obnoxious to the Crown or the State by 'lettres de cachet,' or otherwise.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 marks the beginning of the reaction against these ideas, and the substitution of an orderly and methodical system of punishment. We find 'Imprisonment' formally installed for the execution of offences against the law in the French Code of 1791. At this time Mirabeau is said to have anticipated modern penitentiary science by publishing a remarkable report, declaring Prisons to be 'maisons d'amélioration,' founded on the principle of labour, separation, rewards under a 'mark' system, conditional licence, and aid-on-discharge. We seem to be reading a modern treatise on Prisons—a sudden gleam of light, bursting on an age darkened by the shadow of much unutterable cruelty in the punishment of crime.

But there were certain influences that had been silently operating for some time before this, and leading men's minds to a juster and truer conception of the purpose of punishment. Those influences were both ecclesiastical and secular. The influence of the Church in the middle ages has profoundly affected the modern idea of punishment. 'Le système pénitentiaire' is the direct heir of the 'pénitences' of the Church. In days when no distinction had yet been created between crime and sin, these were the expiation of both. The public 'pénitence' effected both repentance and example, as a warning to others. The private 'pénitence' worked by 'solitude,' to the moral value of which the early Church attached very great value—"Quoties inter homines fui, minus homo redii" was the guiding maxim which separated the monk from his fellow-man. 'Solitary confinement,' as we understand the phrase, dates from the old 'Detrusio in Monasterium' of Canonical law.

But while religious custom had rendered familiar the idea of deprivation of liberty as a means of effecting both repentance and expiation, the influence of the French philosophers and encyclopædists of the eighteenth century had destroyed the claims of the State to deprive a person of liberty by arbitrary process for indefinite periods, or for any period beyond that warranted by the strict necessity of the case. The famous treatise of Beccaria in the middle of the same century further determined the reaction against all arbitrary, unjust, and cruel penalties. He was the first of the utilitarians; every punishment which did not arise from actual necessity of social defence, was, to him and his school, tyrannical and superfluous. Its object was not to torment or afflict a sensitive human being beyond the strict limit of social utility. His propositions have become commonplaces now; but they were new in the age when they were written, and probably no work has exercised a greater influence in the domain of penal law.

It is true that, irrespective of the influence of the Church, and of the writings of philosophers, isolated experiments in the way of prison reform had been made in different parts of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of these anticipated in a remarkable way the principles in vogue to-day.

The Protestants of Amsterdam in 1593 built a prison for women, which had for its object their moral reform by work and religious influences. There are records of similar establishments in Germany and Hanseatic towns. In 1703, Clement XI. built the famous Prison, St. Michel, for young prisoners, and, later in the century, Villain XIV. built the celebrated cellular prison at Gand, which excited the admiration of our own Howard.