Steady progress toward improved methods—Legislation to secure uniformity and proper principles of management—First effort to bring all local jurisdiction into line—Decision that all prisons must be under state control—Unification of system—Burden borne by the public exchequer—Remarkable results—Marked diminution in number of jail inmates—How convict labour has enriched the nations—Results at Portland, Chatham, Dartmoor—Extension of output—Chattenden and Borstal.

Forty years have elapsed since England was forced to revise her methods of penal treatment, and to replace the system of transportation beyond the seas with home establishments, rather hastily improvised to meet a sudden demand. Reference has already been made to the institution of "penal servitude," so-called, the process of expiation to which condemned felons were subjected in the newly devised state prisons. The flaws and failures that became prominent in the earlier phases of the system have also been touched upon, as well as the salutary changes introduced from time to time by the legislature. Year after year steadfast and consistent efforts have been made to improve and develop, to remove blots in administration, to remedy shortcomings; to reform offenders, while obliging them to labour to recoup expenditure and to secure thereby some restitution from them. A brief survey will show the existing conditions of the British penal system of to-day.

The chief reason of the merit of the British system is, that it is the growth of time, the product of experience. In the many changes introduced in this century, the great aim and object has been progressive improvement. The movement has all been forward. There has been no slackness in correcting errors and remedying abuses since John Howard struck the key-note of indignant protest. Reform may not always have gone hand in hand with suggestion, but that has been because of the quasi-independence of the prison jurisdictions. British prisons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were largely controlled by local authorities upon no very uniform or effective principles, although act after act of Parliament was passed for the purpose of betterment. In 1823 and 1824 two acts first laid down the rule that health, moral improvement and regular labour were as important objects in prison maintenance as safe custody. At the same time, some attempt at classification was made, and it was ordered, for the first time, that female prisoners should be controlled only by female officers. In 1835 a fresh act insisted that all prison rules should be subjected to the approval of the Secretary of State; a proper dietary was made essential, without the "stimulating luxury" of tobacco. Classification, too, was again tried, but without good results, and the rule of separation at all times except during divine service, labour or instruction, was gradually adopted in theory and practice. Inspectors of prisons were appointed to exact obedience to the new laws. In 1839, an act permitted, but did not actually order, the confinement of each prisoner in a separate cell. The dimensions of these cells were stipulated, and it was insisted that they should be certified as fit for occupation. A surveyor-general of prisons was also appointed to assist and advise the Secretary of State as to prison construction.

The first substantial progress was made in the building of Pentonville, a prison which has served as a model for all prisons. Although copied in a measure from the old Roman monastery prison of San Michele, and following in design the famous Cherry Hill Penitentiary of Philadelphia, Pentonville was really a type in itself, and embraced so many excellences that it has never yet been greatly improved upon. In the six years following the establishment of Pentonville, fifty-four new prisons were built in England, providing cells for eleven thousand prisoners; but in 1850 a select committee of the House of Commons reported that several prisons were still in a very unsatisfactory condition, and that proper punishment, separation, or reformation in them was impossible. Parliament even then was strongly urged to entrust the supreme control of all prisons to one central authority, wholesome advice which was not accepted for nearly thirty years. But, although convicts sentenced to longer terms, which were usually carried out beyond the seas in the manner described in the earlier chapters, obtained much attention, the successive recommendations to improve the small outlying gaols, for short terms, were very imperfectly adopted.

The next great step was the Prison Act of 1865, which grew out of the report from a committee of the House of Lords, and which strongly condemned the lack of uniformity in the prison buildings, and in the punishments inflicted. Many of the practices which still prevailed even at that late date (1865) were really a disgrace to our civilisation. In some of the prisons the inmates lay two in a bed in dormitories without light, ventilation or control. Warders were afraid to enter them after dark. There was no uniformity in labour, or in the hours in which it was performed. In one prison the inmates lay in bed for fifteen hours daily. One of these gaols, which existed until the passing of the Act of 1865, and which was situated in the heart of a densely populated seaport town, has been described by its last governor. It was an ancient edifice, consisting of four parallel two-storied blocks. The lower story opened on a corridor, the windows of which were unglazed and communicated with the outer air. Above each cell door was a barred opening without glass, which served as a ventilator. In wet weather the rain poured into the passage; in a snow storm the snow flakes drifted through the cell-ventilators upon the bed which was just beneath, and which was often covered in the morning with snow an inch or two deep. There was no heating apparatus, and the place was desperately cold in winter. On the first floor there were a number of larger cells in which as many as seven prisoners were associated together, day and night, so crowded that the beds were stowed upon the floor, while hammocks were also stretched across them above. Sunday was the worst day of the week in this horrible old prison. After morning service, the prisoners took their dinners with them to their cells and were then and there locked up till the following morning. No one could get out, even if he were dying; there was no communication with officers or others outside. Here, in an atmosphere laden with fetid exhalations, amid filth of all kinds, the wretched prisoners were imprisoned for eighteen consecutive hours. These modern "black holes" were far worse than that of Calcutta in that their unfortunate inmates had daylight in which to observe with loathing and disgust the indecencies which surrounded them. Nor was it only in the accommodation provided that these poor creatures suffered. They were continually ill-used by their warders, who harassed and harried them at every turn. Each officer had a prisoner to wait upon him as a personal attendant, called his "lackey," who was always at his heels serving him hand and foot, and performing every menial office except that of carrying his keys. The outgoing governor who escorted his successor (my informant) around the gaol was imbued with the same brutal, reckless spirit, which he displayed by rushing into a cell, seizing a youthful prisoner by the shoulders, and shaking him violently, after which he threw him roughly upon the ground with the brief explanation, "You've got to show them you're master sometimes." The boy had not been guilty of any misconduct whatever.

In this gaol, all kinds of work was performed for the private benefit of the officers, a practice very generally prevalent in the gaols until a much later date. It was of the governor's perquisites to employ prisoners for his own behoof. There was jubilation in his family when a clever tailor or seamstress "came in;" new suits were at once cut out and made for the governor, his wife or his children. His house was fitted and half furnished by prisoners; they made arm-chairs, picture-frames, boot-racks. In one prison I heard of an excellent carriage constructed by a clever coach-builder who had gotten into trouble, and whose forfeited hours were thus utilised for the governor and not for the taxpayers. In another gaol an unexpected inspection revealed the mouth of a mysterious pipe leading from the kitchen, which when followed to its outlet was found to convey the grease and scourings straight to a flower bed in the governor's garden.

This deplorable state of affairs continued without change long after 1865. Twelve years later the uniformity sought by the act of that year had not been secured. Justices had not in every case realised their duties and responsibilities. Many prisons remained defective. All differed in their treatment of prisoners, and the criminal classes were themselves aware of the differences. It was a common practice for intending offenders to avoid a locality where the gaol discipline was severe. To secure the same measure of punishment in each institution was all the more important since criminals had learned to avail themselves of the many modern facilities for travelling from place to place, and crime was no longer localised. The same reason added another argument in favour of making the support of prisons an imperial rather than a local charge. It was a little unfair, too, that a district which had already suffered by the depredations of an evil-doer should bear the heaviest part of the expense of his correction. With these, there was a still stronger reason for concentration. Some relief of local taxation was earnestly desired, and the assumption by the public exchequer of prison expenditure seemed to promise this in an easy and substantial way, more particularly as the transfer of control would be accompanied by a revision of the means, and followed by a diminution in the number of prisons required. Such arguments fully justified Mr. (afterward Viscount) Cross in introducing the measure known as the Prison Act of 1877, which was passed that year, and contemplated great changes in the system as it then was; the first and chief being the transfer and control of all local prisons to a board of commissioners acting for the state.

All these have now taken effect, and after a test of twenty years may fairly be judged by the results achieved. Certainly the uniformity desired has at last been attained. Every prisoner now finds exactly the same treatment, according to his class and sentence, from Land's End to the Orkney Isles. Whether only an accused person, a debtor, misdemeanant, or condemned felon, he is kept strictly apart, occupying a cell to himself, the dimensions of which assure him a minimum air-content of 800 cubic feet, and which has been duly certified by one of the government prison inspectors as fit for his occupation, being lighted, heated, ventilated, and provided with bell communications, which are electric in some of the new prisons. From the moment he passes into the prison until he again finds himself on the right side of the gate, he is under exactly the same discipline, whether he is in the gaol of Bodmin, Newcastle, Norwich, Liverpool or Carlisle. Everywhere his bath awaits him; his prison clothing, if he is convicted, is furnished him; his first and every succeeding meal is based upon a dietary framed by medical experts after the most mature deliberation. His day's task is fixed. If he is able-bodied, he must do six hours at more or less severe labour, breaking stones, making cocoa mats with a heavy beater, making sacks, digging, pumping, and so forth. This, the most irksome phase of his prison life, continues for one month, or more exactly, until he has earned 224 marks in the first series of the progressive stages which have been ingeniously adopted to secure industry and good conduct. Every prisoner holds in his own hands the ability to modify the penal character of his imprisonment, and by the exercise of these two qualities may gradually earn privileges and improve his position.

Whatever the cause—and it is easier to state the effect than apportion it among the causes that have produced it, there has been a steady diminution in the numbers sentenced to imprisonment, as compared with increased population in the years succeeding 1878, when the new system came into force. In that year the population of England and Wales stood at twenty-five millions and 10,218 was the number imprisoned of both sexes. In 1904 the general population was 33,763,468, while no more than seventy-nine hundred were imprisoned. And during the intervening years there has been a continuous falling off in the number of imprisonments.

"It certainly seems justifiable to infer from these figures that our penal reformatory system has been made effective," says Du Cane, in his "Punishment and Prevention of Crime;" "and the remarkably steady and sustained decrease ... must be considered to show that recent legislation, with which it so remarkably coincides in point of time, has in principle and execution not only completely succeeded in promoting uniformity, economy, and improved administration, but also in that which is the main purpose of all—the repression of crime." The decrease is even more remarkable in the convict prisons, those which receive the more serious offenders, sentenced to penal servitude.

The convict population of Great Britain is now just about half what it was some five and twenty years ago. Going back to 1828, when the population of the country was barely fifteen millions, there were in all,—in the penal colonies at the Antipodes, at Gibraltar and Bermuda, the Hulks at home and the Millbank Penitentiary, just fifty thousand convicts, or ten times what the total is to-day with a population of nearly thirty millions. Carrying the comparison a little further, there were 3,611 sentenced to transportation in 1836; in 1846, 3,157; in 1856, 2,715; in 1866, 2,016 (combined with penal servitude); in 1876, 1,753 to penal servitude alone; in 1886, 910. In 1891 only 751 imprisonments are recorded. This progressive decrease is doubtless largely due to the growth of that more humane spirit which has in recent years mitigated the severity of punishment, and which prompts the judges to avoid the heavier penalties, as is shown, for instance, by the fact that in 1836 there were 740 life sentences, while in 1891 there were only four. It may be attributed also to the admitted punitive efficacy of penal servitude. That it is sufficient to visit even serious offences with shorter terms, a practice much facilitated by the recent reduction of the minimum period from five to three years, is amply shown by the record.

A few words must be devoted to the work of the convicts in the great British prisons. At Portland, during the years from 1848 to 1871 the convicts quarried no fewer than 5,803,623 tons of stone, all of which was utilised in the now famous breakwater, a stone dam in the sea nearly two miles in length and running into water fifty or sixty feet deep. The now presumably impregnable defences of the island, Portland Bill, the great works on the Verne, the barracks, batteries and casemates, were executed by convicts, who, as these works progressed, performed all the subsidiary services of carpentering, plate-laying, forging, and casting the ironwork. The enlargement of Chatham dockyard, a great feat of engineering skill, begun in 1856, was accomplished by convict labour. The site of St. Mary's Island, a waste of treacherous shore so nearly submerged by the tide that the few sheep that inhabited it were to be seen daily huddled together at the topmost point at high water, is now occupied by three magnificent basins capable of floating almost the entire British fleet. In fourteen years the convicts made one hundred and two million bricks for the retaining walls of these basins and excavated all of their muddy contents. The first, or repairing basin, has a surface of twenty-one acres; the second, or factory basin, twenty acres; the third, or fitting-out basin, twenty-eight acres. These basins were skilfully contrived to utilise the old watercourses which intersected the island. The bottom of the basins is twelve feet below the old river bed, and thirty-two feet below St. Mary's Island, which has been raised about eight feet by dumping on it the earth excavated from the basins. The whole island has been surrounded by a sea-wall and embankment nearly two miles in length, principally executed by convict labour. Work of a very similar nature and extent has been carried out at Portsmouth, and the enlarged dockyard there was given over to the admiralty a few years ago.

Dartmoor was an ideal penal settlement: a wild, almost barbarous place when the labour of the convicts was first applied to its development—to fencing, draining, making roads and parade-grounds, and to converting the old buildings into suitable receptacles for themselves and their kind. But the eventual employment of the prisoners was to be the farming of the surrounding moorland as soon as it was reclaimed; and this work has in effect occupied the Dartmoor convicts for more than forty years. What they have accomplished is best told by experts. The following is extracted from a report in a recent number of the Royal Agricultural Society's journal.

"The management of the prison farm, Princetown," reads the report, "has converted a large tract of poor waste land into some of the most productive enclosures in the kingdom. The farm, which lies in the wilds of Dartmoor, at an elevation of some fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred feet above the sea, ... comprises in all two thousand acres, the whole of which was mere common or unenclosed waste land prior to 1850.... The land is divided into square fields of from fifteen to twenty acres by high stone walls, built of granite boulders raised in the prison quarries or from the land as the work of reclamation proceeds. An excellent system of reclamation, with scientific rotation of crops, has been devised. If the herbage fails, or becomes unsatisfactory, the land is again dug up ... but so good has been the management ... that the greater portions of the pasture laid within the last fifteen or twenty years are now in far too good a condition to require rebreaking. One field which twenty years ago was mostly rushes is now able to carry a bullock per acre through the summer. No purer or cleaner pastures are to be found anywhere.... Sixty-seven acres of meadow land have been laid out for irrigation and utilisation of the sewage from the prison establishment, which at times numbers upwards of one thousand persons. A dairy herd of forty-five cows is kept, and all the cows are reared.... A flock of four hundred sheep, 'Improved Dartmoors,' is kept and has frequently been successful in the local show-yards. The wool, for so high a district, is remarkably good and of long staple. Pony mares and their produce are run on the fields. One of the ponies bred on Dartmoor won first prize in its class at the Royal Show at Plymouth. Thirty acres of garden are devoted to the growth of garden vegetables, of which all kinds are grown, and much success has been obtained with celery and cucumbers. The whole of the work is done by convicts, without the aid of horses except for carting."

A great extension of convict labour has been seen in recent years. It has been employed in novel ways which would have been impossible but for the excellence of the present prison organisation and of the discipline now enforced. In 1876 a small prison for one hundred inmates was erected at Chattenden, near Upnor, on the north bank of the Medway. It was intended to house convicts to be engaged in constructing new magazines at Chattenden for the war department. The prison was built by a detachment of prisoners sent across the river from Chatham convict prison, and then by tramway to the site of the proposed work. The tramway passed through dense woods, and the site of the prison was surrounded by thick undergrowth. These seemingly hazardous operations were carried out without a casualty of any kind; no gang chains were used; no escapes, successful or frustrated, were recorded. The work was continued for nearly ten years, when the magazines were finished, and the prison, which throughout had been treated as a branch of the great headquarters prison at Chatham, was closed. During these ten years, besides the prison buildings, this small party had put up five large bomb-proof magazines, in addition to the formation and drainage of the roads, traverses and slopes adjoining. The experiment at Chattenden afforded an example of the use to which convict labour can be put, and of the circumstances under which comparatively small works can be undertaken by a small body of convicts in a separate prison erected for the purpose. A number of the buildings, being easily removable, have since been taken down to be otherwise made use of.

It is only fair to observe here that the same experiment had been made under the Austro-Hungarian government by M. Tauffer. This eminent prison official had recommended the adoption of the "progressive system" as far back as 1866, and had carried it out under his own direction at Leopoldstadt and Lepoglava, where his prisoners were employed on outside labour at the rate of thirty or even forty to each overseer, and yet no escapes occurred. These prisoners built another prison at a distance from Lepoglava, and were lodged for the purpose in sheds and outhouses beyond the prison walls. The doors were not even locked at night; there were no bolts or bars, the only barrier to escape being the rule that no one should leave the building after the hour for retiring at night.

The work at Chattenden had, however, been preceded by other similar and more extensive undertakings in England. The first was the preparation of a new and very simple prison edifice at Borstal, near Rochester; the second, the erection of the great separate prison at Wormwood Scrubs, with which I was myself closely identified from the beginning. The prison at Borstal was to house convicts who were to be employed under the war department in building fortifications for the defence of Chatham arsenal, and indirectly of London. As a preliminary measure, a boundary fence was erected at Borstal around the site of the new prison, and this work—but this alone—was performed by free labour, the very timber for the fence having been prepared in the prison at Chatham, four miles distant, which served as general centre and headquarters for the Borstal as well as the Chattenden prison. Parties of selected convicts were despatched daily to Borstal, under escort, of course, but without chains, and travelled back and forth in open vans. Temporary huts were put up for cooking, storage and the accommodation of the guard, and within sixteen weeks the prison buildings were so far advanced that forty cells were ready for occupation by prisoners, and the establishment was then regularly opened as a prison. During this sixteen weeks there had been no accidents, no escapes, no misconduct. The convicts employed in this really "intermediate stage," having a larger amount of license and liberty than Sir Walter Crofton had ever dreamed of giving a prisoner, had behaved in the most exemplary manner. Within a year afterward, when the number of convicts had gradually increased to more than two hundred, all necessary buildings had been put up to accommodate a total population of five hundred prisoners.

The completion of the prison left the convicts free to carry out the works for which they had been brought to Borstal. But the very nature of these works was such as to startle prison administration of the old school, and to forbid, at first thought, the employment of convicts upon them. The site of the proposed forts was quite in the open country, and the first of them, Luton, at least two miles from Borstal prison. How were the convicts to be conveyed to and fro, without loss of time, without unnecessary fatigue, and above all, without risk of losing half the number by the way? A novel plan was boldly but happily conceived, and its absolutely successful adoption constitutes an epoch in prison history. It was decided to lay down a narrow gauge railway, along the line the forts were intended to cover, and send the prisoners to their work by train. Part of this plan was the invention of a special kind of railway-carriage, constructed with a view to safe custody, and this very unique and ingenious contrivance has since been constantly employed. These carriages are small, open, third-class carriages, with a sliding gate of iron bars. When the train is made up, a chain passes along the exterior of these gates, and it is padlocked at each end. The warders on duty occupy raised seats at each end of the train, and have the convicts under supervision continually. The compartments hold from eight to ten men each, and a train-load is made up of from eighty to a hundred convicts. The engines used are the once famous little locomotives that were sent out to the Sudan for service on the Suakim-Berber railway. Extreme simplicity characterises all these arrangements, yet they are perfectly suitable and quite sufficient. The same device was tried with success at Portsmouth convict prison, for the conveyance of convicts to Whale Island, distant a mile or more from the prison.

The effectual guarding of the convicts when at work was, however, a matter of equal importance. This, with the experience of many years gained in all varieties of outdoor employment, has been reduced almost to a science at Borstal. The works are enclosed by a wall ten feet high. There is a ditch on the inner side, and there are wire entanglements on the inner side of the ditch. The convict-laden train runs within the palisading and its passengers are marched to the various points on which they are employed. Some of these are in the open beyond the palisading; but outside all, on a wide outer circumference, are sentries of the civil guard, on high platforms at regular intervals, commanding the ground between them. No fugitive could pass them unobserved, as they are on such a radius that they would have the fleeing convict a long time under their eyes while he was approaching. In addition to this, an elaborate system of signaling has been devised by means of semaphores at the highest points. These are worked by good-service convicts, men in the last year of their sentence, who can be trusted to use field-glasses and to communicate promptly any news that has to be sent on. In this way escapes are signaled, or a call for help made, if help be required, in event of disturbance among the parties at work. Escapes have no doubt occurred at Borstal, but they have been few and far between, always resulting in recapture, except in one or two instances.

Thus we have traced, in this and the preceding volume, the course of the beginning and the development of the prison system of Great Britain. Much that we now rightly consider inhuman marked its early history, in common with the conduct of all prisons of that early day. The period of deportation is certainly gloomy enough, until we stop to consider the splendid secondary results that have grown out of it in the building up of an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth in the southern hemisphere. The prison system of Great Britain, as it is to-day established, is perhaps as advanced as any in the world, while the future promises advance and improvement wherever the one is called for and the other is possible.