VICTORIAN PRISON LIVES
ENGLISH PRISON BIOGRAPHY 1830-1914
(c) 1985 Philip Priestly
BREAKING-OUT
The ability to work the system in the way recommended by Stuart Wood
was not widespread in the prison population; a more common protest took
the form of violent assaults on the inanimate objects that constituted
confinement:
'few days passed but some desperate wretch, maddened by silence and
solitude, smashed up everything breakable in his cell...in a vain rebellion
against a System stronger and more merciless than death.'
For reasons not difficult to guess, women were more prone to vent suppressed
emotion on their immediate surroundings than on the persona representatives
of authority - although that was not entirely unknown either. A girl of
18 was confined in the 'penal' cells and Wandsworth when Henry Mayhew made
a tour of inspection. She 'had been singing in her cell against the prison
rules....She was drumming in passionate mood at the door of her cell. On
our looking in through the eyelet opening, we saw her sitting crouching
in a corner of the cell with only one garment wrapt around her, and her
blue prison clothes torn into a heap of rags by her side.' |
Restraint harness, GB, 19th century
|
'It might seem at first sight as if this system of periodical "breakings
out" which is largely adopted by the lower class of female prisoners, were
a mere unreasoning indulgence in temper; but it is not so', explains Felicia
Mary Skene, 'it has a distinct rationale of its own, illogical enough,
no doubt, but a well-considered method in the apparent madness.
From the movie "Moll Flanders"
The object of it si simply one of deliberate revenge for the pains
and penalties to which their imprisonment subjects them. The women are
perfectly aware that by these paroxysms of violence they give a great deal
of trouble and annoyance to the officers, whose duty is to carry out all
the unpleasant conditions of the sentences they have brought on themselves
by their offences against the law.' Susanna Meredith, anther prison visitor,
talked to a woman after one such outburst 'and began reasoning with her
on the foolishness of her conduct, at first wot no effect, but finally
she burst into violent fits of weeping, frequently repeating, "They have
treated me like a beast and I have become one." I argued and talked and
got her to finally tell me why she acted as she did, and she said, "Well,
I did it for variety. Oh, the monotony of a prison life! I had to smash
the glass of the cell and glass everywhere I could or I should have gone
mad."
Prison staff were not slow to interpret a 'breaking out', or 'smash-up'
as it was also known, as a public affront to their authority, nor to deal
with the offending prisoner accordingly. 'When the warders thought the
paroxysm had exhausted itself they would go to his cell, drag him out,
hustle him into the punishment cells, fasten his hands and feet into shackles
and leave him till morning. If he flared up and resisted in any way at
all he was "disciplined" by the warders, and the whole prison was disturbed
by his screams for mercy.' Steinie Morrison was a practices exponent of
this art, and the recipient of much staff violence. 'I smashed up the furniture,
and was set upon and beaten (always on the head) and then put in an empty
cell. I tore up my clothing, and was beaten again and then handcuffed.'
The handcuffs to which he refers were not ordinary ones:
Around my waist they put a leather belt a quarter of an inch thick,
and three inches wide. The belt they pulled as tight around my waist as
they possibly could, locking it behind with a hanging lock. At each side
of the belt was a handcuff in which my wrists were firmly locked in....
In a few days my wrists swelled up so big that the biggest handcuffs they
could find in the prison were not sufficiently big to fit with ease...
. Finally the skin broke. The matter all coming out caused the handcuffs
to rust; the rust got into the open wounds and my arms and wrists were
poisoned.
| Handcuffs had a history of use that paid no heed to age or sex. Visitors
to the chain room at Millbank were shown 'little baby handcuffs, as small
in compass as a girl's bracelet, and about twenty times as heavy' - objects
which impressed Henry Mayhew with a notion, that 'in the days of torture
either the juvenile offenders must have been very strong or the jailer
very weak otherwise, where the necessity for manacling infants?' The advent
of an ostensibly more enlightened nineteenth century, so Mrs. Pankhurst
claims, "Delicate women were sentenced, not only to solitary confinement,
but to handcuffs for twenty-four hours at a stretch.' |
Hiatt's Darby handcuffs
|
There was, also, a special mode of restraint reserved to women, called
'hobbling,' which consisted 'in binding the wrists and ankles of the prisoner
then strapping them together behind her back.' The 'hobbles' themselves
were 'strong leather straps and wood appliances which fasten the leg and
foot back behind the knee to the thigh, the arms being fastened down so
that the hands could not be raised to the mouth, and the unhappy individual
in the hobbles had only her knees to rest upon, and with her back to the
wall had to be fed like a baby.' Mrs. May Brick condemned them as 'barbarous.'
But beyond the handcuffs and the hobbles, the last destination of the recalcitrant
was the straitjacket. Susanna Meredith went to the cell of a prisoner who
had been 'smashing up', 'and saw a woman lying on a plank bed whose only
garment seemed to be a long green baize straitjacket which reached from
her neck to her feet, and was so narrow that it prevented her bending her
knees or moving in any way. She was spitting violently all around the cell,
so that no one could approach within any distance of her without risk.'
BIRMINGHAM
The use of all these methods of restraint was a source of some anxiety
to the central prison authorities, and of careful scrutiny for concerned
outsiders. mrs Fry was 'always fearful of any punishment beyond what the
law publicly authorizes, being privately inflicted by any keeper or officer
of a prison'. In 1853 a scandal occurred which fulfilled the worst of her
fears, and of those who thought like her. The conduct of discipline at
Birmingham Borough Gaol became the subject of local concern following revelations
at the inquest of Edward Andrews, a boy of fifteen who had hanged himself
in the prison on 7 April. A public meeting was held at which allegations
of severity and cruelty were made by two recently dismissed members of
the prison staff. A delegation of Birmingham citizens proceeded to memorialize
the Home Secretary, Lord Palmersont, in person. 'If a criminal must suffer
death', they urged on him, 'it should be by the doom of the law, and the
sentence should be carried out in a legal manner, but it should not form
part of any system that a man or any set of men should have the power to
inflict such a prison discipline as will daily lessen the prisoner's love
of life, until finally goaded to madness, and no longer able to endure
that discipline, he consummates his life of crime by the great crime itself
of self-destruction.' The proceedings of the Royal commission that followed
were focused on the activities of the Governor, Lieutenant Austin, RN.
He had worked as deputy to, and then succeeded as Governor, the renowned
penal administrator and reformer Captain Maconochie. Maconochie had first
formulated and then operated, in Van Diemen's Land, the mark system, which
was to become the cornerstone of English prison discipline. The Commissioners
questioned present and previous staff and prisoners of the gaol and uncovered
a legacy of severity and illegal punishment which led back to Captain Maconochie
himself. He, they say, had 'punished for prison offences by depriving prisoners
of their bed and of the gas, by keeping them from exercises, by preventing
them (even in the case of untried prisoners) from seeing their friends,
by compelling them to stand with their faces to the wall for all the working
hours during the day, and in some instances for several successive days
- all of them unquestionably illegal punishments.' Prisoner Richard Scott
was asked by one of the Commissioners:
Were you ever place in the hall by the old governor - Yes.
How were you placed? - Standing by the wall.
Without moving? - Yes.
(Dr. Baly) What prevented you moving? - I durst not; the governor stationed
me not to stir.
Encouraged by these precedents, and aided by a new chief officer lately
arrived from the county gaol at Leicester, Lieutenant Austin had waxed
inventive in his search for yet more stringent forms of constraint and
punishment. He had had made some leather collars or stocks, which were
produced to the Commissioners. 'They were of various sizes, but those which
appeared to have been most commonly used, were about 3 1/2 inches deep
at the deepest part in front, somewhat more than thirteen inches long,
and rather less than a quarter of an inch thick, made of leather perfectly
rigid.' The mode of use of the collar consisted in 'the prisoner being
first muffled in the straitjacket, having his arms tied together on his
breast, the leather stock fastened tightly round his neck, and being, moreover
'where the punishment was inflicted by day', in almost every case strapped
to the wall of his cell, in a standing position, by means of strong leather
straps passed round the upper parts of the arms, and fastened to staples
or hooks in the wall, so tightly as to draw back the arms into and keep
them in a constrained and necessarily painful position, at the same time
compressing them.' It was obvious 'that such a mode of restraint must necessarily,
if continued for several hours, be productive of great pain, - in truth
it must be an engine of positive torture. So strapped to the wall, prisoners
- chiefly boys were kept for periods of four, five and six hours, and in
some instances for a whole day, by way of punishment for the nonperformance
of the crank labour, and for other prison offences, frequently of a very
trivial character.'
As the Commissioners observed, these methods were not only used for
trivial offences, but like the handcuffs at Millbank were used with discrimination
of age. One of the victims 'Lloyd Thomas (the little boy of ten years old),
declared that he was kept in the jacket and collar, but not strapped to
the wall, for the whole of three consecutive days.' The evidence of another
boy, William Barnes, illustrates the experience of others besides himself.
WILLIAM BARNES sworn
How old are you? - Going on twelve.
When is your birthday? - I do not know.
Do you remember being put into the strait jacket? - Yes.
What was that for? - Why for ringing the bell on a Sunday.
What did you ring it for? - I did not know it;
I could not tell; I just went to touch the handle and the little door
fell open.
Did this strait jacket hurt you much? - Yes; about my arms and my body.
Did you cry out? - Yes.
What did you cry? - I cried out as loud as ever I could; I had as lief
be dead as alive then.
To add to the discomfort of the jacket, Isaac Shaw - aged 16 - was
drenched in water as well. 'The governor came, and by his order the crank-warder
threw
over the prison a bucket-full of cold water as he lay on the floor; the
governor himself threw over him two buckets-full more.' This treatment
was also applied to Edward Andrew, whose condition prompted a memorandum
from John Wood, the prison schoolmaster. Andrew, he said 'had the straitjacket
last Sunday morning, two hours. It made shrivelled marks on his arm and
body. A bucket of water stood by him in case of exhaustion. He stood with
cold, red, bare feet, on a sock soaked in water. The groundwas covered
with water. He looked very deathly and reeled with weakness when liberated
and previous to liberation.... Too weak and jaded to be taught; could only
be talked to; always appeared wild. His crime, talking and using obscene
language; was also threatened with trial before the magistrates.
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