One of the first and most obvious consequences is the necessity of reorganising--or, rather, of organising--the prison staff. It is unnecessary to show here, for it has often enough been shown by those who are familiar with the inside of a prison, that practically the prisoner is always at the mercy of the warder. The philanthropic head of the department, at a distance, must always count for less than the warder, philanthropic or otherwise, on the spot. Whatever educative and socialising influences the prison may possess must pass chiefly through the hands of the warders with whom the prisoner comes chiefly in contact. It is not necessary to investigate the character and conduct of the average warder. Those who appoint him and are satisfied with him are the responsible parties. It is enough to say that the prison warder of to-day is about as well fitted for the treatment of criminality as the hospital nurse of a century ago was fitted for the treatment of disease. Every one now recognises the immense importance for the inmate of a hospital of good nursing by a trained nurse; the doctor himself is the first to proclaim the essential nature of skilful and intelligent nursing. Yet the criminal, in all his manifold variations, with his ruses, his instinctive untruthfulness, his sudden impulses, his curiously tender points, is just as difficult to understand and to manage as the hospital patient, and unless he is understood and managed there is no hope of socialising him.
In Italy, France, Belgium, and Switzerland there are, I believe, institutions for the training of prison attendants, but as yet they have been of little effect, as they have not apparently been conducted in connection with the prison, nor on a scientific basis. Their establishment is a pressing necessity; no person should be appointed to any position involving the care of criminals who has not been qualified by training in such a school. He would here become acquainted with the peculiarities of the various classes of criminals; he would learn to work with them and to instruct them; and, not least, he would learn to rate at its proper value the difficult and important profession on which he was entering. It is this sense of a noble social function, full of privileges as well as responsibilities, which has raised nursing to its present high position and has brought into the ranks of nurses so large a leaven of capable and refined women.
At the same time the education of the criminal need not be entirely in the hands of officers the greater part of whose time is passed within the prison. There is considerable force in the remark of Dr. Wey, the able physician of the Elmira Reformatory, concerning the advantage of the prisoner having highly skilled teachers, fresh from the outside world and mingling daily in the affairs of men. The barrier which has, in most civilised countries, been set up between the criminal and the outside world must be to some extent broken down. This is necessary in the interests of both parties. The criminal cannot be too carefully secluded from his fellow-criminals, neither can he have too much of outside socialising influence, if he is to be won back from the anti-social to the social world. In some of the colonies, it is said, good results have come of voluntary visiting. It is necessary, however, that this should be judiciously regulated so as to exclude fanatical, inexperienced, and merely curious persons. Mr. Tallack tells us some amusing stories concerning the results of allowing ignorant and foolish visitors. Thus a gentleman, by talking of hell-fire, succeeded in so thoroughly exasperating a prisoner that the latter seized him, and exclaiming, “I have hell enough here already without you bringing me more of it,” would have administered summary chastisement had not a warder appeared. It is obvious that the more we restrict the intercourse of criminals in prison between themselves the more necessary it becomes to supplement the limited staff by assistance from without, which, while carefully chosen, must be chiefly voluntary. On the other hand, if we are to learn to know the criminal thoroughly, so as to learn at once how to treat him and how to protect ourselves from him, we must have a certain amount of access. “The time has now come,” as Dr. Maudsley has well said, “when we ought to use our prisons as we do our hospitals, not for the care and treatment of their inmates, but for the advancement of knowledge and the improvement of man’s estate.”[105] And M. Tarde, speaking, as a _juge d’instruction_, from a different point of view, insists in his well-known work, _La Criminalité Comparée_, on the need of every law student completing his course by an obligatory attendance of six months at the _Clinique Criminelle_ of a prison.
When we have caught our criminal we put him at once into solitary confinement. If rigidly carried out this plan has the advantage of secluding the criminal from his fellows. Regarded as a rational method of treatment, cellular confinement is a curious monument of human perversity. That it should have been established shows the absolute ignorance of criminal nature which existed at the time; that it should still persist shows the present necessity for a widespread popular knowledge of these matters. It may be possible to learn to ride on a wooden horse, or to swim on a table, but the solitary cell does not provide even a wooden substitute for the harmonising influences of honest society. To suppose that cellular confinement will tend to make the criminal a reasonable human being is as rational as to suppose that it will tend to make him a soldier or a sailor, a doctor or a clergyman. The mistake here is the old one that has vitiated so much of human action where the criminal is concerned--the mistake, that is, of supposing that at all points he is an average human being. Solitary confinement on a refined and cultured human being may produce a deep and lasting impression; a period of solitude, indeed, is for every intellectual person of immense value in helping him to know himself; though even here, if compulsory and unbroken, it can scarcely be without demoralising effect. But the case is quite different when we turn to the vacuous-minded, erratic, and animal person who is usually the criminal. Solitude produces in him, as Professor Prins remarks, no intellectual activity, and no searching of conscience; it serves merely to deepen his mental vacuity and to deliver him over to unnatural indulgence in the one animal appetite of which he cannot be deprived.[106] Professor Prins points out, as does Prince Krapotkine, that the cell excludes all the bracing influences of struggle; the morality of the cell is submission, punctuality, quietness, politeness to warders. A moral life shut up in such a frame has nothing in common with social morality. Beltrani-Scalia, formerly Inspector-General of Prisons in Italy, is of the same opinion, and remarks that “the cellular system looks upon man as a brother of La Trappe.”
Dr. Wey, of Elmira, states the rational method of treatment when he remarks--“Education means occupation, either mental or physical. The time of the convict should be so employed in his shop-work and school duties as to leave him no leisure moments in which to revive the past, and live over again in memory his criminal days or plan for the future; but each hour should bring to him its employments and engross his attention till the time for sleep.”[107] The experiments in the treatment of the criminal which are being carried on at Elmira are probably of more wide-reaching significance than any at present carried on elsewhere. It is worth while to consider them somewhat in detail. I select an experience carried on during 1886 and recorded by Dr. Wey, who had charge of it. On June 5th, 1886, Dr. Wey selected eleven dullards between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine. For a period of one to two years previously these men had made no progress. “In physiognomy they presented features indicative of criminal tendencies. Not one had learned a trade, but all had made a precarious living as common labourers, tramps, hostlers, and street-loafers. One was convicted for assault in the first degree; five for burglary in the third degree; one for grand larceny in the first degree; three for grand larceny in the second degree; one for rape, and one for attempted rape. The environment of most of the men previous to conviction was bad, many of them confessing to have had intemperate parents, while one told of an insane, and another of an epileptic mother.” All however were well nourished, and their functions, save that of the skin (five had acne and one ichthyosis) well performed. “An idea of their mental attainments can be formed from the fact that one could neither read nor write; one barely do either; four understood the successive steps necessary to work an example in long division, but never could obtain the correct answer; while the balance came to grief upon the shoals of rudimentary arithmetic from notation to simple division. Their stock of information was surprisingly small, being generally limited to a slight knowledge of the things they liked to eat and the work they preferred to do.”
The treatment adopted included a special dietary, bathing, massage, gymnastics, and a continuation of the usual school-work. The daily industries of the shop, etc., were suspended.
The food was varied each day, and was sufficient in quantity without being excessive; it was weighed out to each, and provided at a common table, instead of, as usual, in the cells, in unrestricted quantity. The experience at Elmira shows that better results are obtained when the amount of food is restricted than when it is unlimited in quantity. Dr. Wey is strongly in favour of a diet consisting chiefly of milk and bread and butter.
The bathing and massage formed a very important part of the treatment. The routine, after several trials, resolved itself into three baths a week--_i.e._, one tub and two vapour baths one week, followed the next week by two tub baths and one vapour. “The tub bath consisted in placing a man in a tub of water heated to about 100° F., and leaving him there to rub and soap himself for fifteen minutes or longer. From the tub he was placed upon a marble slab, where he was drenched with hot and cold water and sponged. After this the body was spatted until the skin was in a glow, the muscles pinched and kneaded, passive motions of the joints employed, followed by a brisk rubbing with a coarse wash-towel or Turkish bathing mitten, all this being done by a professional trainer, who was available at the time. Being obliged to make use of the facilities at hand, the vapour bath was the moist instead of the dry or heated air, and consisted of turning steam into a room, and maintaining an atmosphere of 115° F.” This was followed by massage as before. After the bath the men usually slept until dinner time.
After dinner they were put through two hours or more of active physical exercise. In the beginning this consisted of the drill employed in the case of raw recruits, supplemented by dumb-bell exercises. At first they were an awkward squad, slow to comprehend an order and deliberate in its execution. It was some weeks before they were able to march in line and to keep step.
On November 7th the class was discontinued, and the men were assigned to various shops and employments.
The results of this treatment were in every respect remarkable. As they slowly advanced in their studies an increased mental activity was noted, and the workings of the mind were less forced and laborious than at the beginning. In mental arithmetic they made progress, and were able, with comparative ease and rapidity, to add three or four single numbers. “The drill and discipline they were subjected to wrought an improvement in their physical condition. The baths and stimulation of the cutaneous system brought the skin to the highest degree of functional activity, overcoming the integumentary disorders of five noted in the beginning. The daily drill and dumb-bell exercises hardened and developed muscles that previously were soft and flabby, and the entire muscular system acquired firmness and power. The setting-up drill improved the carriage and conferred a rapidity of action not before indulged in. The aimless shuffling gait gave way to a carriage inspired by elastic muscles and supple joints. The faces parted with the dull and stolid look they had in the beginning, assuming a more intelligent expression, while the eye gained a brightness and clearness that before was conspicuous by its absence. With physical culture and improvement there came a mental awakening, a cerebral activity never before manifested in their prison life. The purely animal man with his ox-like characteristics seemed to recede before the intellectual. Their progress in school-work was not steadily onward, but intermittently progressive.” Whereas in the six months before the class was formed the men had obtained less than 10/11 of a mark (for demeanour, labour, and school) per man each month, during the six months that followed the breaking-up of the class the number of marks earned was 7-7/16 per month per man. There was a simultaneous and rapid improvement, moral, physical, and intellectual--an improvement that was common to all, although more pronounced in some, and which was very encouraging, considering the material of which the class was formed. A year later several had been released on parole, and were demonstrating their ability to maintain themselves honestly, while only two of them, still in prison, were not doing well.[108] The results of this and similar experiments have been so satisfactory that a fully-equipped gymnasium and Turkish bath are now in course of erection at Elmira. “Here,” Dr. Wey tells me, “we propose to treat those who are in arrears both in body and mind, and prepare them for work and study in the schools of letters and trades. By this plan it is possible to impress later the mind to a greater degree than could be done by taking up its cultivation at the time the man comes to us.”
In 1888, when the Yates bill became law, the productive prison industries of Elmira had to be suspended. “Within less than a month,” writes Dr. Wey, “from the passage of the bill, all the men who previously were employed in productive industries (industries yielding revenue) were being drilled in military evolutions and tactics. In other words, idleness was avoided by turning the prison into a military school. The men received from four to six hours of drill daily, which was sufficient to prevent them from rusting in their cells. By this means the health of the men was maintained, and opportunity was afforded for increasing the scope of school-work, trades, and letters. A drum corps was formed, and instruction given others in instrumental music, with the sequence that to-day [29th October 1889] we have a drum and fife corps of about twenty, and a band composed of twenty or more wind instruments.[109] Two afternoons a week are devoted to military work, the balance being devoted to technical instruction. The effect of the military drill and discipline was so good in the way of a health measure and in improving the carriage of the men that I doubt if it will soon be discontinued. It was another phase of the application of physical training.” The report of the able superintendent of Elmira, Mr. Z. R. Brockway, fully confirms these conclusions.
Just now the industries of New York prisons are partially re-established. The Fassett bill, passed in the spring of 1889, enabled various industries to be apportioned to the various prisons, one prison not to compete with another, and the number of men engaged in any one industry in a prison not to exceed five per cent. of the total number engaged in the same industry throughout the entire state. The question of productive prison industry is still, however, far from settled.
The physical and industrial education is not the whole of the training given at Elmira. A third, and scarcely less important, factor is the moral and æsthetic training. There is no official chaplain at Elmira. “There is,” says Mr. Brockway, “in the minds of men, as observed during imprisonment, an unexplained but actual repugnance to professional, official, and stereotyped religious phrases, while for the noble character of the practical Christian, in common affairs, unheralded and unnamed, there is among prisoners a quick and favourable response.” Although there are no resident chaplains, various ministers and others--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish--attend frequently, and hold services, lectures, classes, etc. The class in Practical Morality, originated a few years ago by Professor Collin, has been judiciously managed, and has proved a valuable feature in the work. The æsthetic culture has been chiefly carried on by means of the systematic study of literature. The results in this department have been unexpectedly encouraging. At first the men met the attempt with sullen stupidity as a new task imposed upon them. Gradually this impression was conquered; the men slowly began to acquire an eager appetite for Chaucer and Shakespeare, for Emerson and Browning. The applications for admission to the English Literature class became very numerous, and at one time there was so great a run on Jowett’s Plato at the Reformatory library that a special regulation had to be made concerning its issue. It is satisfactory to learn that this taste has, in many cases at all events, survived incarceration, as a wholesome recreation for leisure hours. “In my work with the class in English Literature,” writes the instructor in that department, Mr. Douglas, “I proceed on the basis that the earnest obligatory study--let me emphasise the word _study_--of mental and moral beauty developes or creates the mental and moral faculty of appreciation; and, furthermore, that mental and moral habits may be formed just as certainly as physical habits, and without any more conscious co-operation of the individual than is required in physical practice.” It has been mentioned already that a newspaper, the _Summary_, is published within the Reformatory; it contains both local and general news, as well as passages from good authors; the inmates contribute to this paper, and at one time it was ably edited by a prisoner. It has been said, with justice, that the _Summary_ compares favourably with the average American newspaper published outside prison walls.
The prison, as Professor Collin remarks, must be “a moral hospital.” As Sir Thomas More said long ago, the end of punishment is “nothing else but the destruction of vices and the saving of men.” Mr. Brockway, and those who are working with him, have clearly realised this; the training they give is rational and scientific, and hence its success. During the thirteen years from the opening of the Reformatory to the end of 1889, nearly 4000 prisoners were received at Elmira on an indefinite sentence. Over 2300 of these were paroled, and of these 15.2 per cent. only are estimated as having “probably returned to criminal practices and contact.”
Elmira is at present the most promising direction in which we can turn for light on the treatment of the criminal. Its wholesome and improving discipline stands in favourable contrast to the lax indulgence and shameful neglect of the criminal which coexist generally in the United States. The system is not perfect, and it has been unfavourably reported on by some observers. It is undoubtedly a defect that the prisoner must be released, whatever his condition, at the expiring of his legal maximum sentence; this is, however, an inevitable compromise. Notwithstanding all defects, Elmira is full of encouragement, for it shows us a community awakening to an active sense of its duties, so long forgotten, towards those weaker members who, if neglected, become so dangerous to themselves and to others. “It is an interesting sight,” remarks Dr. Wey, “when the school is in session, to see a group of men, felons every one, gathered about an instructor, intently listening as he makes clear some step in the work in hand not fully or clearly understood, going through the various processes, one by one, and explaining until the dullest mind can comprehend. It is not expected that, with the comparatively limited time for instruction, these men will become skilled mechanics. But rather the idea has been to train the hand and eye, and teach the use of tools, to awaken an ambition to pursue a lawful calling, and appreciate the value of a practical knowledge of a trade, so that when the time shall come that they pass beyond the prison doors, and again come into contact with society, they will not be handicapped by the same conditions that formerly operated to their detriment; but with increased resources of mind and body will be enabled to occupy a higher and more self-respecting place.”[110] The example of Elmira is spreading in America; in Ohio, for instance, youthful criminals are being brought up on the broad basis of manual training, and among the branches of industry taught are farming, fruit-growing, carpentry, shoemaking, painting, tailoring, baking, laundring, housework, vocal and band music, telegraphy and printing. On the continent of Europe--especially, perhaps, in Germany--the system is beginning to attract attention; and while it would be too sanguine to conclude that Elmira has solved the question of the treatment of the criminal, there can be no doubt as to the value of its contribution to this difficult problem.[111] It can scarcely be necessary to say that in any effectual treatment flogging can have no part. It would not have been necessary to say a word on this point if within very recent times an English Parliament had not been found so lamentably ignorant of historic evolution in this matter, of the results of experience, and of rational principles, as to pass a Corporal Punishment Bill. The objections to flogging are by no means of a sentimental character. We have seen that the instinctive criminal, although often cowardly enough, is by no means peculiarly sensitive to pain. Flogging is objectionable because it is ineffectual (as was shown long since), and because it brutalises and degrades those on whom it is inflicted, those who inflict it, and those who come within the radius of its influence. These facts are well known to those who have more than a superficial acquaintance with the insides of prisons, and should have been ascertained by those individuals who presume to legislate, before they voted in the face of reason and experience. To flog a man for whatever offence, however brutal, is to sanction his brutality. Capital punishment, which is brutal like flogging, is comparatively free from the brutalising influence of flogging. The method of flogging is so obviously unfit to humanise and socialise any human being, that the impulse to inflict it can only spring from a relic of savagery of the same kind as that which inspires the criminal, without his excuse of a morbid or defective organisation. It can only be said in excuse of those who advocate it that they have no experience in the matter. Those who have witnessed it have, however, recorded their experiences. Thus, to mention one instance, Sir Robert Rawlinson, after giving a vivid account of flogging as he has himself seen and heard it, adds:--“I will strive in my mind to judge those members of Parliament who now advocate the revival of corporal punishment charitably, by considering that they have never seen it as I have feebly attempted to describe it: the degraded man lashed to the triangles, the white clean skin of an Englishman exposed to the cool morning air, to be scored, cut up, and scarred into a pulpy, blood-smeared lump of living human flesh. Take the vision away: it is too hideous even to remember.” Even if there were less evidence as to the ineffectual character of flogging as a deterrent, and to its bad influence on the _morale_ of a prison, we cannot afford to flog any human being. It is well to meditate on the words of Dostoieffsky, who was familiar with the various forms of flogging, and has recorded his convictions in his _Recollections of the Dead-House_. After giving his opinion that “the rods are the most terrible punishment in use among us,” and speaking of the demoralising influence of flogging on those who inflict it, he concludes:--“Let me add that the possibility of such a licence acts contagiously on the whole of society: such a power is seductive. A society which regards these things with an indifferent eye is already infected to the bone. The right accorded to a man to punish his fellows corporally is one of the sores of our society; it is the surest method of annihilating the spirit of citizenship.” Flogging has not yet reached among us the extension which it then had in Russia and in Siberia, but its character and influence remain the same, and the warning seems to be still needed.
With the indeterminate sentence must always be associated conditional liberation--_i.e._, liberation by ticket-of-leave or on parole, liable to revocation in case of misbehaviour. It is not, however, necessary to insist on this, as the principle has long been practically recognised in England and elsewhere. It exists in Belgium, some of the American states, Hungary, Saxony, Switzerland, the Grand Duchy of Baden, etc.
A very desirable accompaniment to any system of dealing with criminals is a sound system for their registration and recognition. The method originated by M. Alphonse Bertillon is now adopted in France, Russia, Japan, Spain, Italy, the Argentine Republic, and some parts of Germany, and it is being adopted in several of the United States. By this method the height, the length and width of head, the measurements of left foot, of outstretched arms, of trunk when seated, of fourth finger of left hand, of left arm, length of ear, colour of eyes, and any marks are recorded, together with the photograph, profile and full face. The method of classifying the photographs in its simplest form was thus generally described by M. A. Bertillon a few years ago (_Revue Politique et Littéraire_, 28 April 1883). Suppose we have 80,000 photographs. They are first divided according to the sex, the men on one side, the women on the other. These latter do not reach 20,000. The 60,000 men who remain are divided into three classes according to height; the short numbering about 20,000, the middle-sized numbering about 20,000, and the tall 20,000. Each of these divisions is divided into three series according to length of head. These new divisions, to the number of nine, contain rather more than 6000 each. Each of these sub-divisions is then divided into three groups according to length of foot, each group containing about 2000 photographs.
Each of these groups is again sub-divided into three, according to length of outstretched arms (_grande envergure_). Each of these groups contains about 600, and they are further sub-divided with reference to age, colour of eyes, and length of middle finger. Thus by means of four new anthropological characters (sex, height, age, and colour of eyes have long been noted) 80,000 photos can be easily divided into groups of 50. The measurements can be taken in two or three minutes, and require no special intelligence. When an individual stands as regards height at the border of two classes, he is put into both.
Thrusting a man into prison, when everything is said, is a measure only to be taken with the utmost circumspection, after consideration of the individual’s antecedents, and a clear conception of the ends to be attained by imprisoning him. To relegate almost indiscriminately to prison the miscellaneous army that file through a police court is an ignorant and dangerous policy; there is little hope of good result, and a considerable chance of evil result. If the period is for a few weeks only no permanent beneficial end can be anticipated, even under the best of conditions; while during so short a period no useful work can be commenced, so that there is a direct incitement to idleness. When the prison has been decided on, the period of detention must be indefinite, according to the results attained in the opinion of those competent officers specially appointed to form such decisions, and the liberation will be conditional.
It is a wholesome sign of progress that in so many European countries substitutes for the prison, in the case of minor offenders (_i.e._, occasional criminals), are being anxiously sought and gradually adopted. One cannot avoid seeing how many individuals are unnecessarily condemned even to penal servitude. In our convict prisons there exists a very excellent plan, entirely in accordance with rational principles, of forming what is called a “Star” class of convicts--that is, a “special class of those not versed in crime.” The authorities “cannot speak too highly of the general tone and behaviour” of these men, their “decidedly good disposition,” “keen anxiety to gain a knowledge of some sort of trade,” sense of “the moral degradation in which they have placed themselves,” etc. Their industry and freedom from prison offences are so marked, “and the special reports on the subject have been so uniformly to the same effect, that it is no longer necessary to call for such reports.” This is all very gratifying, but it is not at all clear that these men should have been convicts at all. There are other and more satisfactory methods of dealing with such persons.