'If any man will not work neither let him eat,' is a motto strictly adhered to by the authorities; for no prisoner is allowed meat-dinner who is not employed at hard labour. Those not so engaged are only given porridge and bread-and-milk. When labouring at hard work, prisoners have a meat-dinner every Tuesday and Thursday. Eight ounces of beef without bone and one pint of soup is the allowance. The first class have an additional meat-dinner on Sundays. There is, we see, considerable advantage to be gained by the prisoner, to reward his ambition, should it prompt him to move upward into a higher class. Now this is no trifling matter, for the very essence of good prison discipline is the subordination of mere punishment to reformation; and this system of classification tends not only to preserve a man's self-respect, but to fan the spark of hope that otherwise might be extinguished in his breast.
The justly celebrated novel Never too late to Mend has made the public in some degree familiar with the 'silent system' of prison discipline. This system has been found not to work when sentences are for a long period. Speech is discovered to be more than a luxury, being essential to the mental health of prisoners. None now are condemned to the silent system except those who are imprisoned for only a short time. And how great is the punishment of not being allowed to speak, is proved to the chaplain by this one fact. Nowhere are prayers so diligently responded to and hymns sung with such will, if without musical taste, as in the chapel of a military prison, for prisoners recognise the service as an opportunity of convincing themselves that they have not become dumb. Until this explanation was given by the governor, I was full of admiration for religion, afterwards discovered to be more loud-sounding than genuine.
Prisoners condemned to solitary confinement are forced to turn to the wall on the approach of visitors or the superior officers of the prison. 'Has my face assumed any terrific aspect? Am I so much worse-looking than usual?' This is the thought that naturally comes into one's mind on walking through a military prison for the first time. Each man takes a quick glance at your Gorgon head, and then, fast as lightning, turns his back to you and his face to the wall, until your apparently baneful or bewitching influence has passed.
Another humiliation to which prisoners have to submit is that of having their hair frequently cut short. A man must sink very low indeed before he lose altogether personal vanity. It would seem as if there were a peacock as well as an angel and a beast in each of us. For this reason the regulation that requires the hair of all prisoners of the third class to be cropped every fortnight is no slight punishment. It is especially felt by those who leave the prison without having been promoted to the second and first classes, in which a prisoner's hair is permitted to grow during the last fortnight of imprisonment. How can a man shew himself in respectable society, or take off his hat to a lady, when that common act of courtesy would reveal the fact that his hair was cut by—government?
Some may desire to know whether flogging has or has not been entirely abolished. To the question, we answer: 'Yes; except for aggravated breaches of prison discipline.' Nor is it easy to see in what other way such cases can be dealt with. A man, let us suppose in a fit of sulky stubbornness, does not attempt to pick his oakum. He is brought before the governor, and sentenced to lose his supper and bed; that is, to be obliged to sleep on the floor. On going back to his cell he says to himself: 'What can I do now to avenge myself on the authorities?' and he acts on the impulse that seizes him, which is to break the window and destroy everything in his cell. Probably this sort of stubborn ill-conditioned character is a coward; and if this be the case, nothing is found to bring him to his senses so well as twenty-five lashes administered in the presence of the governor and medical officer.
The punishments which we should like to see abolished, if others without equal or greater disadvantages could be discovered, are the crank and shot-drill. 'What is the crank?' may be asked by happy people who have never had to do with prisons in any way. It is, we answer, a Sisyphus' wheel that the prisoner is forced to turn twelve or fourteen thousand times each day, for no other reason than because the useless monotonous exercise is sufficiently hateful to him to be a real punishment. 'To what purpose is this waste?' we may ask. Why is this wheel not made to pump water or grind corn or do some other useful work? Why should a man be degraded into a machine, and made to turn a wheel merely for the sake of turning it? Will he not in this way lose all self-respect? Yes; these are the unanswerable arguments against the crank. But then its very uselessness is urged as an argument for its retention. Suppose, for instance, that prisoners are employed in gardens where vegetables are cultivated for barrack-use, what will be the consequence? That soldiers will desire to abandon their own profession for Adam's calling, and for this purpose will designedly get into prison. If, again, the crank-wheel be utilised in any way, men will feel that they are useful members of society, and will probably prefer their new work to the dull routine and irksome duties of barrack-life. Almost the same remarks are applicable to shot-drill, or the very humiliating process of lifting six times each minute for three hours per diem a thirty-six pound cannon-ball, for no other reason than to put it down again three paces from where it originally lay. Nothing can be more fatiguing and worrying than this process of putting the shot there and back, there and back, there and back! But then we must again remark, that to make prisons very comfortable is absolutely to make them useless.
Almost all the inmates of military prisons are sentenced for such crimes as these: Desertion—the commonest crime of all—making away with kit, breaking out of barracks, insubordination. How is desertion to be stopped? This is now a very difficult problem with the authorities, and almost all officers give it as their opinion that the plague of desertion can only be stayed by again having recourse to the system lately abolished of branding the letter D on the deserter's side. In the absence of this Nota bene, there is nothing to prevent a soldier from enlisting over and over again in different corps, in order to get a bounty and new kit on each occasion.
As regards insubordination, when you speak to a prisoner on the folly of having resisted or disobeyed a non-commissioned officer, he will generally give an answer somewhat as follows: 'Well, sir, when I came back from foreign service I had a little money, and with this I drank with some comrades more than was good for me. There is a corporal [or sergeant] in the barrack-room who is always down on me; and upon that day, having had a little too much, I could not stand his going on at me; and so I—though indeed I tried to help myself doing so—just struck him between his eyes.' There is no doubt that nine out of every ten soldiers in military prisons have got into trouble through drink. A soldier was once overheard describing the advantages of the Cape as a station in these words: 'Drink is cheap, and you are always dry.' Men of this stamp fill our military prisons.
In some cases the crime of insubordination is provoked by the petty bullying and offensive manner of non-commissioned officers, though their superiors do their best to check them. Officers are now easily accessible, and are ready to give the youngest private an impartial hearing. In all respects the position of a British soldier is now greatly improved. Indeed it is not too much to say that life in a military prison now is quite as endurable as was existence out of it to the well-conducted soldier of forty years ago.