Pictures and Problems from London Police Courts

by Thomas Holmes

Briefly, then, I would suggest: Short sentences; abolition of ticket-of-leave; interesting work and more of it; less time alone, and more with the schoolmaster; gradual improvements in conditions as a reward for industry and good behaviour; some relaxation at intervals, such as lectures with magic lanterns, concerts, etc. The Home Secretary now allows lay officers of religious organizations to conduct missions in various prisons. I would go much further, for I would have lecturers who can speak well and interestingly upon various subjects invited to speak to the prisoners. I would have good singers and first-class musicians invited occasionally to give the prisoners a concert. I would have also the prisons supplied plentifully with books, and constant additions made to the library. I would have a looking-glass in every cell, that prisoners might at any time take knowledge of themselves. I would have every warder master of a trade, or able to teach something useful, for work that interests must be the great factor in the reformation of intelligent prisoners.

I may be asked, ‘What kind of work would you suggest?’ I reply at once, ‘Any kind of interesting work for which a market can be found.’ ‘But you become a competitor in the labour market.’ This cry, I know, would be raised, but it is a very stupid cry. See how the present system works. Numbers of men and women are detained in prison for long periods. During their detention they work at stale, uninteresting tasks, upon which there is no profit; consequently the community has to keep them. When released, numbers of them enter the ‘Arks,’ ‘Elevators,’ or ‘Bridges’ of the Salvation Army, or the labour homes of the Church Army, and proceed to work for nothing, becoming indeed and truth very serious competitors in the labour market, as the wood-cutters and mat-makers will tell you.

I cannot conceive how it can be wrong for a man to earn his own living while in prison. Neither can I conceive the wisdom of allowing to great trading organizations rights and privileges which we would withhold from the State. But I can see the absurdity of keeping a man in prison for years, during those years giving him unremunerative work, and handing him over when released to some society, to continue working for nothing. The cheapness of his labour when at liberty is the danger, not the work he may do in prison. The absurdity is seen to be the greater when we remember that a large proportion of the male prisoners are married, and ought when released to set to work to keep, or, at any rate, try to keep, their families. During their detention society has in many instances been maintaining or assisting those families, and it certainly seems hard that society should have to continue doing so when the husbands are at liberty, but are working for large trading organizations. The place for the married man when discharged from prison is his home; there his battle for social salvation will best be fought, and there it will have to be fought if fought at all. A half-year’s, or even a whole year’s sojourn in a shelter or labour home will not help him, for he has to come out and face the world, and by some means make a beginning. The recommendation of the shelter, or labour home, is by no means superior to the recommendation of prison—in fact, they are of equal value.

I look with something approaching dismay at the multiplication of these institutions throughout the length and breadth of our land. To the loafing vagrant class—a very large class, I know, but a class not worthy of much consideration—they are a boon. These men tramp from one to another, and a week or two in each suits them admirably, till the warm weather and light nights arrive, and then they are off. This portion of the ‘submerged’ will always be submerged till some power takes hold of them and compels them to work out their own salvation. But there is such a procession of them that the labour homes, etc., get continual recruits, and the managers are enabled to contract for a great deal of work. In all our large towns there are numbers of self-respecting men—men who have committed no crime save the unpardonable sin of growing old. Time was when such men could get odd clerical work, envelope and circular addressing, and a variety of light but irregular employment, at which, by economy and the help of their wives, they made some sort of a living. But these men are now driven to the wall, for their poorly-paid and irregular employment is taken from them.[1] ‘Too old to live!’ is the cry, and the labour home has no pity for such men; indeed, these places are as pitiless as commercial life itself, for no one over forty need apply.

Now, it needs no saying that the healthy single man under forty is of all men the best able to help himself; his wants should be small, and if he cannot supply them, then there is something wrong with him. No one can help such men till they know what that something is. The shelter, labour home, or elevator are of no possible use to the intelligent, industrious, and enterprising criminal. Yet these are the dangerous men; but, after all, they are the men of whom there is hope; for where there is industry and enterprise there is backbone, and men with backbone can be saved—many of them, if not all; but they must not have the prison brand or the brand of any organization upon them.

Four years ago such a man came and claimed my help. I had seen him in the cells when he was committed for trial. I knew he would get a sentence of some years. He said: ‘Will you help me when I come out?’ I told him that if I was alive when his sentence expired he had better come and see me. I heard nothing of him while he served his three years, but one morning he was waiting for me and reminded me of our conversation. He evidently had some faith in me, so I returned the compliment and gave him a decent rig-out. I had no work to give him, but I supplied him with lodgings for a fortnight. He ultimately got work for himself, and passed from my knowledge till three weeks ago, when he called on me, exceedingly well dressed and evidently thriving. He had left his situation and was going to a superior one; he showed me a testimonial that his employer had given him, stating that for three years he had been a good and faithful servant.

A more remarkable case was that of a man who had undergone several terms for making counterfeit coin. He wrote to me from prison reminding me that I had spoken with him in the cells, telling me when his time would expire and asking for an appointment. I did not remember him, and had not much faith in his intentions, so I did not reply to him. But he came to see me, and I was rather impressed in his favour, so I took him up. I found he was a clever tinsmith, without wife or friends. I could not get him work, so I bought him tools and metal and hired a small place for him to work in. He went straight, and got on fairly, for he has now a little shop front in which he displays his wares. This happened four years ago, and I believe him to be living honestly. He has paid me for the tools, and though he lives miles away he sometimes looks me up.

I might tell of others, but I refrain. I tell of these because I know, in spite of my brilliant failures, that many criminals can be saved; and I would not have it inferred, because I tell in this chapter of the failures, that success has not smiled upon me. It has; but it required effort and the application of common-sense to bring it about. There is no royal road to save them; for it is individually, not in the mass, that such can be redeemed, and any plan for rescuing them which does not give scope for individuality and does not allow for the temperament, characteristics, and abilities of these men is sure to be a failure in the long-run. The attempt to deter men from crime by squeezing all of them into the same mould while they are in prison is a dismal and disastrous failure; it deters them not. The attempt to redeem them when at liberty by pressing them into another mould in any institution is equally certain to result in failure. Destroy a man’s individuality and you destroy the man.

With a wise prison system and properly qualified prison officials, societies for the aid of discharged prisoners would be unnecessary, for their occupation would be gone. Each prison ought to contain its own Prisoners’ Aid Society, and what is to hinder the governor, chaplain, and doctor being at the head of it? But we want, first, a system that will be sufficiently elastic, and, secondly, officials who will seek to understand it before much good can be done in this direction. Given a system that seeks to humanize, that prepares prisoners for their liberty by a gradual improvement in their conditions, approximating more and more closely to a state of freedom as the day of release draws nigh, a system that shall not convert the eyes of men into the eyes of hunted animals, and that shall not make his heart a sealed book, a system that shall deliver men from senseless drudgery and damning monotony—then, and not till then, will prisoners, officials, and aid societies have a fair chance, for this must be the keynote of any reform.

Listen: ‘I know how many nails there are in the floor within reach of my eye, and the number of the seams also; I am familiar with the stained spots, the splintered furrows, the scratches, and the uneven surface of the planks. The floor is a well-known map to me—the map of monotony—and I con its queer geography all day and at night in dreary dreams. I know the splotches on the whitened wall as well as I know the warts and moles on the hopeless faces opposite me. My mind is a mill that grinds nothing. Give me work—work for heart and mind—or my heart will lose its last spark of hope, and my brain its last remnant of reason.’ Can these words be beaten for lucidity and pathos? I think not. They are the reputed words of a prisoner, and have appeared in one of our London papers.