Whilst here, I visited the state-prison, the first I had seen where the
Auburn system is pursued; that is, solitary night-cells, silence, and
labour in gangs. The building itself is a fine one, having nearly four
hundred cells, enclosed within external walls, round which run galleries
that command a view of the interior of every cell without disturbing or
annoying the confined; the whole covered by a common roof of the
strongest kind, lighted and ventilated in the best manner.
The merits of this plan will be fairly set forth long before this trifle
meets the public eye, a commission being now in progress throughout
these States for the purpose of relieving England from the stigma of
having no means of employment in her prisons less brutalizing than the
tread-mill.
I here saw about two hundred convicts actively employed at various
trades, preparing granite for building, doing smiths' work, making
shoes, brushes, &c.; all very clean, but certainly not looking very
healthy.
A single overseer went the rounds of each building or department, and
kept the hive in motion, without a word spoken, unless in reference to
the task in hand. Whilst passing through the masons' shed, I noticed two
persons make inquiries of the superintendent: their questions were to
the point, given in few words, but with an air perfectly free and
unrestrained, and were replied to in the like manner.
Upon the value of this system as a preventive of crime, according to my
view of human nature, I may be allowed to express a doubt, as well as of
its applicability to the condition of Great Britain; but viewing it in
the abstract, without such reference, I confess no philanthropic object
ever struck me as so completely illustrative of the principles of true
benevolence. This was, in fact, returning good for evil, in the most
Christian sense of the word; "chastening as a father chasteneth." It
would appear that a convict must be unnaturally hardened not to quit
this abode a better man. Let him arrive here, however outcast, vile,
ignorant, knowing no honest calling, broken in health and savage in
spirit, here he will find teachers, masters, physicians, all provided
for him by the community whose laws he has violated. His spirit is
soothed, his health is recruited, his ignorance enlightened: he is made
master of a sufficient calling; and, when restored to society, is able
to contrast the value of the meal earned by the honest sweat of his brow
with the bitter fruit of idleness and crime.
Such is the result contemplated by the benevolent promoters of the
prison system of this country, which everywhere has societies of
voluntary philanthropists who watch over and study to improve it. One is
ashamed, after this, to avow a doubt of its success in practice, since
it almost amounts to an admission that man is indeed the brute our
European legislators appear to think him.
The subject is, at least, one that demands from England a rigid inquiry,
when we call to mind what a den of debasement, what a sink of soul and
body, a prison yet is amongst the most civilized and humane people in
the world.