Chapter XXXIV: Appendix: IV

MR. BLUNT’S MEMORANDUM ON PRISON REFORM, ESPECIALLY AS TO THE TREATMENT
OF POLITICAL PRISONERS

_Forwarded to the Home Secretary, Mr. Winston Churchill, M.P., 25th
Feb._ 1910

As the question of prison reform has become one of urgency in connection with the suffragette movement and the many women who have recently undergone detention for offences, more or less political, I offer these remarks founded on an experience of some years ago, which I think may be of use.

In the early months of 1888 I served a sentence under the Crimes Act in Ireland, of two months in Galway and Kilmainham gaols. My treatment was that of an ordinary prisoner with hard labour, though hard labour was not named in the sentence—that is to say, I was made to wear prison dress, sleep on a plank bed, pick oakum and perform the other duties assigned to hard labour prisoners. I was forbidden to receive visits or write letters, or to have any books to read but a Bible and a Prayer Book, except during the last week of my confinement, which was strictly silent and separate during the whole two months. With the exception of the plank bed, which prevented sleep for more than a very short portion of the long winter nights passed in darkness, I found little to complain of in the way of physical hardship. The cells were clean and fairly well aired, the food sufficient, and the exercise, a dull round in the prison yard, more than I needed. The oakum picking was so little a trouble to me that I came to be glad to secrete a piece of the tarred rope on Saturday nights so as to have it to pick on Sundays. It gave an occupation to the hands and slightly to the brain of the kind that knitting gives. It was pleasant to the sense of smell and to the eye. The life under these physical heads was hardly worse than one has to put up with on a sea voyage and may pass without special comment. The suffering inflicted on prisoners under the present system I found to be of a different kind, moral, not physical. But this was severe.

The silent and separate system in the treatment of prisoners was, I believe, introduced as a humanitarian reform with the idea of preventing the less depraved among these from contamination with companions wholly vicious. Some reform of this sort no doubt was needed. But I doubt if those who devised it either understood its full effects or intended that it should be pushed as far as has been the case. Carried out as we see it under the present regulations it is a punishment in addition to the loss of liberty which I do not think society has any right to inflict for less than the most serious crimes, while its effect on the sufferers is wholly evil. Judges who pass long sentences on comparatively innocent breakers of the law, and visiting justices who go the rounds of cells periodically and find all neat and clean, do not understand the severity of the suffering inflicted by leaving the minds of prisoners for long periods of months and years deprived of any spiritual sustenance whatever. It is starvation of a kind quite as real as the cutting off of meat and drink and more enduringly pernicious.

Perhaps I am the better qualified to speak on this head because my experience in the two gaols, Galway and Kilmainham, is diverse in regard to it. Galway gaol was an old-fashioned, rambling place, with cells of various sizes, and the one I was given was well-lighted, showing a good patch of sky and the windows of a building opposite, so that there was some pleasure to be got from watching the sea-gulls as they hovered overhead, and the jackdaws and sparrows, to which it was even possible to throw bread crumbs. The discipline was lax and the warders, most of them Nationalists, were entirely friendly. I was allowed to do many small things contrary to strict regulation, such as to sit on my blanket on the floor, instead of perched on a stool, to have a Bible with good print instead of the hardly readable regulation Bible, and even to scribble verses on its fly leaves. These small infractions of the prison code were connived at, if not permitted, and they mitigated the rigour of the cast-iron laws which rule gaol life, and so made it tolerable. The warders always stopped on their rounds for a few minutes to chat with me; they were polite and kind; the Governor of the gaol paid me a daily visit of a quarter of an hour; the chaplain brought me little packets of snuff besides his spiritual consolation. I was not unhappy. In the first fortnight I read the whole of the historical books of the Old Testament, which for a political prisoner and for one who, as in my case, was acquainted with the East are most consolatory reading from their description of free life in the desert and the trust they inspire in a final justice for the oppressed and the promises they hold out of vengeance on the wicked. “Thou shalt bring my soul out of trouble, and in Thy mercy Thou shalt destroy my enemies.” Thus Galway gaol was for me a house of penance rather than of punishment, and my time in it, for the first fortnight, a kind of spiritual retreat. I still look back on it with affection as a softening influence in my life.

A change, however, came with the visit of the Official Inspector of Prisons from Dublin. He happened to be a connection of my own, Charlie Bourke, a brother of the late Lord Mayo, and being a violent Unionist, he made it his business to put a stop to the irregularities he detected in the treatment accorded me. My quarto Bible was taken from me and a regulation one with small print, which hurt my eyes, was substituted. The friendly warders were reprimanded and eventually dismissed, not nominally on my account but later on, as occasion offered, on charges of drunkenness (all prison warders in Ireland at that time were addicted to drink, and so easily dismissable) and the small amenities of my life were stopped. Nevertheless, as long as I remained at Galway, things went fairly well. It was only on my removal to Kilmainham that I was subjected to the full rigours of prison discipline and came to understand the extent of its demoralizing influence and the hatred it excites against society and what is called the “law and order” which maintains it.

Kilmainham was a gaol of the scientific modern type, with cells all of one pattern set in a circle round an enclosed central hall in such a way as to enable the chief warder to have his eye on each one of them and so to prevent any irregularity on the part of his subordinates. The discipline was thus perfectly preserved and to the prisoners a cause of constant irritation as to spying. Here, no kind of familiarity was permitted nor the least show of kindness between warder and the men under his charge. All was gloom and severity. At Galway there had been a pleasant feeling, or what was near it, between them, at least when the Governor and Chief Warder were out of sight, the warders and prisoners being much of the same class, peasants born, with the same natural ideas, virtues, vices, and weaknesses. The Galway prisoners were none of them in gaol for serious crime, the most criminal among them being a man who had got drunk and stabbed a sheep at a fair. The most of them were very pious Catholics, as their demeanour in the prison chapel testified, and I suspect that their moral lives were at least as good as the warders’ and better than my own.

At Kilmainham, on the contrary, our inmates were thieves and pickpockets, the rif-raf of the Dublin streets, and a stricter rule was doubtless excusable. But, excusable or not, the effect was of the most deadening kind, deadening and at the same time exasperating. It is not good for any man to be treated for weeks and months only with contempt, and prisoners shut off in separate cells from their fellow creatures and subjected to ignominious treatment from callous masters (for such their warders were) lose all their self-respect as men, and acquire the ways of slaves. Silence and solitude when prolonged beyond a certain point of time have a physical effect upon the nerves and brain allied to mental disease and play havoc with the imagination. The sense of proportion in things is destroyed and the mind revolves upon the axis of its own imaginings to its spiritual hurt. I myself, though I had nothing really to reproach myself with, for all my crime had been to call a meeting in a proclaimed district at which I had not been given time to finish so much as a single sentence, felt myself drawn into sympathy with the Dublin criminals, my fellow sufferers, and into a revolt with them against the barbarities of civilization. How much more must it have been with these poor wretches condemned to long terms of an iron system of repression for deeds of which they were really in their hearts ashamed. Everything was done in Kilmainham to shut us out of the poor natural pleasures of light, air and sunshine, which the least beast, bird or insect can enjoy. The windows of our cells, high up and out of reach, were glazed with ground glass to prevent us from seeing the smallest patch of sky. All our actions were regulated as by machinery, and no word was spoken to us but of command. The prison chaplain was a man with a smug, false face, chosen for his subservience to the Castle, a weigher of his words and an economizer of his sympathies. The doctor was much such another, and the Governor, a worthy man I believe, at heart, was officially reserved in his brief visits to our cells. The silence of the place was a systematized oppression worse to my mind than the noisy discomfort of the rude prisons I had seen in the East, where men, perhaps in chains, are at least permitted to sit together in the sun and talk, if it is only of their sufferings. How willingly would I not have exchanged the cleanliness of my Kilmainham cell for the dirty prison yard at Aleppo where I had seen murderers and honest men placed cheek by jowl on a common footing of humanity. Here there was no humanity; it was forbidden by the rules and regulations of the Prison Board.

I left Kilmainham at the end of my two months in a spirit of revolt against all Society—a feeling which I am certain is the predominant one in every released prisoner at its gates—I left it without a smile with the eightpence halfpenny in my hand which I had earned by my good conduct—without a smile, though the worthy governor of the gaol had been good enough to tell me mine had been exemplary, and had added (good man) that instead of the customary advice given to prisoners on their discharge he would inform me of a pleasant piece of news—his wife had been brought to bed two days before, and it had been decided by him and her to name their child after me.

Such is an imperfect record of my experience of twenty-two years ago in a gaol managed on the silent and separate system. Certain alleviations in the treatment have, I understand, been since introduced, but the silence and the separation still continue without practical change in all English prisons. It is this part of prison discipline that I would see modified—I do not say abolished, for seclusion has its uses—but humanized and made less absolute.

Apart from crimes of violence which need to be treated penally—and for my part I should be quite prepared to see corporal punishment of the severest kind inflicted in cases of rape, wife-beating, cruelty to children, and the like, with capital punishment still for murder—I do not see any advantage in severity of treatment for crime unattended by violence, more than is necessary to keep loafers out of our gaols. The loss of liberty is in itself sufficient penalty to deter all but the most hardened, and for these hard labour is probably the only cure. Yet, even with the habitual thief, though he should be made to dig till he sweats and be put to labour of the least lenient kind, I see no reason that his taskmaster, the prison warder, should deny him a cheerful word, or look upon him sourly. Nor do I understand that the prison dress which he is forced to wear should be made the obvious garb of infamy it is. The Spanish Inquisition in its day clothed the heretics it burned in fantastic robes with the object of robbing its victims of all human sympathy. Our twentieth century prisons should make an end of this barbarity. It is an infamy to clothe a grown man, used to decent dress, in a boy’s jacket and knickerbockers and deny him skirt enough to cover his loins. I felt the indignity of this so strongly at the outset of my prison life that I rebelled (it was my only rebellion) and made appeal to the visiting justices, and with the result that a skirted coat was ordered me, as may be seen in the annexed photograph. Why should not all the convicts be thus provided? It should be no part of the prison system to degrade, even while it punishes the most severely.

Beyond and above this class of the hardened criminal, there need, I think, be two classes only—the one which should be in the nature of a reformatory rather than of what are now the second and third divisions, and the other identical with what is now the first division.

My second class, which is by far the most important, should be treated in some sort as a school, of which the warders should be the teachers, as well as guardians. This would, of course, require a quite different class of guardian from that from which our present warders are drawn and one much more highly paid. The kind of men for the work should be that which is found in Scotland Yard, and the result, I am convinced, would be well worth the cost. These should control the working shops by day and preside over the common midday meal, and the common recreation hour in the evening. The men would still be locked up in their separate cells at night, and also for one whole day in the week so as to give the warders their Sunday holiday, but it should be with books, writing materials, and some solitary game to play, a cup and ball, a box of wooden bricks or one of moveable letters.

With regard to the hour of recreation I have just mentioned, nothing struck me more strongly in prison than the immense waste of opportunity displayed—an opportunity of good, whether religious or of instruction, which nobody made use of. It has been said that “a prison is a convent without God”—and such is the fact. Gaol life has the austerity without the sanctifying motive. Yet it might easily be made, at least in Ireland, into a nursery of saints. In England, where we do not ask for saints, it might be turned to intellectual profit by any zealous humanitarian who would give his evening hours to the work of penny reading and lecturing. At present the English prison is a school without a teacher. I throw out this idea believing that devoted men would not be wanting for the work of instruction were it officially encouraged.

My first and highest class of all would be what is now the first division of misdemeanants. This should include, with others already enjoying it, all who for their opinion’s sake have disobeyed the law. The prisoners under this head should be treated more or less as prisoners of war are treated, honourably, that is, and as opponents whom the law has captured. England, I believe, is the only country of Europe where no distinction is made between political and ordinary offenders. It is time the two classes should be recognized as separate and the distinction legally drawn. The absence of it brings the law into contempt through the impossibility of persuading the public that a conscientious breaker of the law is a real criminal. And this leads me to what is the most important part of what I set myself to write, the position of the Government where it finds itself, as now, determinedly opposed by a small party of religious or political reformers who persist in infractions of the law to further their opinions.

As the law at present stands, it is probably impossible to deal satisfactorily with cases where assaults are committed or damage done to property so as to draw public attention to a public grievance; and until the magistrates who judge such cases are empowered to decide upon the motive of the act, whether it is public or private, there will always be confusion. A man resists the police in the execution of their duty, he breaks a plate glass window or he strikes a Prime Minister with a cane. He is arrested. His motive may be anything. It may be political, or it may be a personal grievance, or that he is hungry and wants to be lodged in prison, or merely that he is a drunken rowdy. The magistrate already possesses a certain option in these cases, but I think it should be obligatory on him, where the evidence is that the motive is honestly a public one, that he should send the prisoner to the first division. The argument put forward in recent cases by the Government, that political propaganda should not be allowed to be carried on in prison, and therefore that the second division should be enforced seems to me an unwise one, and one which has defeated its own end. The Government cannot stop the advertisement, and would do better in its own interests to give it full scope by allowing all the privileges accorded to first division prisoners. The public would not for more than a very short time interest itself in letters or interviews written in prison, unless indeed the political grievance was a just one, in which case it ought to be attended to and remedied. The Government has no right to order the seclusion of the second division merely to save itself from inconvenience.

As to more serious political cases which amount to crime, assassination, armed assault and the rest, they need not be considered here. The magistrate would refer the accused to the Assizes as untried prisoners. I am of opinion all the same that the nature of the sentences imposed requires special legislation. The Government has every right to inflict death on political assassins, or to detain them for life or for shorter periods in prison so as to prevent a recurrence of their acts, but not, I think, to confound them with ordinary criminals under penal servitude. They should be confined as State prisoners, or prisoners of war, under special conditions not personally degrading.

There remains the question of how to treat those prisoners who for political or other reasons refuse to conform to prison rules, with the mass of prisoners. Under the reformatory system I have proposed it would, I think, be found that refusals would seldom occur, and, if they did, that they could be dealt with by deprivation of privileges and relegation to a separate class for punishment. I do not believe in the continuation of the hunger strike to the point of death, or permanent injury to health, by any but political or religious fanatics. I would, however, risk that rather than continue the practice of forcible feeding, which is a form of torture no civilized Government has a right to inflict. As applied to political prisoners, it seems to realize the ideal of the mediæval torturers, that of inflicting the maximum of pain without touching any vital organ, and with the least risk to life or health. For the case of the suffragette ladies, I consider that the proper treatment would be to give them the fullest privileges of the first division, with leave to see their friends daily, and to provide their own food and their own medical attendance. If, under those circumstances, they continued to refuse food, the Government would be free of responsibility.

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT.

NEWBUILDINGS, SUSSEX,

_24th Feb._, 1910.

P.S. I cannot send in this memorandum without adding a word of protest (though it is rather apart from my general subject) against the modern practice of executing prisoners condemned to death within the precincts of our gaols. My experience of a prisoner’s feelings after he has been kept for even a short period in the solitary confinement of his cell, leads me to be sure that it is a great aggravation to the penalty of death that he should be denied the right, always extended to sentenced men in former times, of dying in the open air and in the presence of his fellow-men. Like many other so-called humanitarian reforms, the abolition of public execution was brought about very much less in the interests of the condemned man than to spare the feelings of those who condemned him, the soft-hearted public which, while it consented to his death, was shocked at being forced to see him die. To the man himself, shut in for weeks by the four walls of his prison, with nerves unstrung by solitude and that perpetual longing for a sight of trees and fields, and contact once more with the busy life he formerly enjoyed, it must surely have lessened by a great deal the pang of death to be set for one last half hour in the light of day outside those walls, and thus get a breath of the open air of Heaven, and with it the courage to endure his pain, even were it in the presence of an angry mob rejoicing to see him hanged. The thought of this was constantly with me in prison, and the horror which must come on a poor soul led out one morning from his cell to the gloomy prison yard, and there, without that small indulgence, strangled secretly by those in charge of him. It is not through inhumanity that these hideous new incidents of prison life and prison death have been devised, but through lack of imagination, and I have sometimes thought that before power should be given to any man to condemn his fellow-man to long punishment in gaol, he should have served his own personal month to teach him what it means.