with reference to every consideration of humanity and social
policy, requires no comment.
One other establishment closes the catalogue. It is the House of
Correction for the State, in which silence is strictly maintained,
but where the prisoners have the comfort and mental relief of
seeing each other, and of working together. This is the improved
system of Prison Discipline which we have imported into England,
and which has been in successful operation among us for some years
past.
America, as a new and not over-populated country, has in all her
prisons, the one great advantage, of being enabled to find useful
and profitable work for the inmates; whereas, with us, the
prejudice against prison labour is naturally very strong, and
almost insurmountable, when honest men who have not offended
against the laws are frequently doomed to seek employment in vain.
Even in the United States, the principle of bringing convict labour
and free labour into a competition which must obviously be to the
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disadvantage of the latter, has already found many opponents, whose
number is not likely to diminish with access of years.
For this very reason though, our best prisons would seem at the
first glance to be better conducted than those of America. The
treadmill is conducted with little or no noise; five hundred men
may pick oakum in the same room, without a sound; and both kinds of
labour admit of such keen and vigilant superintendence, as will
render even a word of personal communication amongst the prisoners
almost impossible. On the other hand, the noise of the loom, the
forge, the carpenter’s hammer, or the stonemason’s saw, greatly
favour those opportunities of intercourse – hurried and brief no
doubt, but opportunities still – which these several kinds of work,
by rendering it necessary for men to be employed very near to each
other, and often side by side, without any barrier or partition
between them, in their very nature present. A visitor, too,
requires to reason and reflect a little, before the sight of a
number of men engaged in ordinary labour, such as he is accustomed
to out of doors, will impress him half as strongly as the
contemplation of the same persons in the same place and garb would,
if they were occupied in some task, marked and degraded everywhere
as belonging only to felons in jails. In an American state prison
or house of correction, I found it difficult at first to persuade
myself that I was really in a jail: a place of ignominious
punishment and endurance. And to this hour I very much question
whether the humane boast that it is not like one, has its root in
the true wisdom or philosophy of the matter.
I hope I may not be misunderstood on this subject, for it is one in
which I take a strong and deep interest. I incline as little to
the sickly feeling which makes every canting lie or maudlin speech
of a notorious criminal a subject of newspaper report and general
sympathy, as I do to those good old customs of the good old times
which made England, even so recently as in the reign of the Third
King George, in respect of her criminal code and her prison
regulations, one of the most bloody-minded and barbarous countries
on the earth. If I thought it would do any good to the rising
generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment
of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more
cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post,
gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the
purpose. My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as
utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws
and jails hardened them in their evil courses, or that their
wonderful escapes were effected by the prison-turnkeys who, in
those admirable days, had always been felons themselves, and were,
to the last, their bosom-friends and pot-companions. At the same
time I know, as all men do or should, that the subject of Prison
Discipline is one of the highest importance to any community; and