PRISON CELEBRITIES.
I WAS surprised at the number of respectable men—such as solicitors, an
ex-officer of Guards, a bank manager, a man of title, stockbrokers,
cashiers, ex-officers of the army and navy, clerks, clergymen, etc.—in
Coldbath Fields. Some of these had quite lost (supposing they ever had
any) their pristine semblance of respectability; others, again, retained
the appearance of persons of education, and spoke and deported themselves
as such. A lamentable instance of the fatal effect of associating with
the scum, and the ease with which a young man of good position can
acquire the style and appearance of a vagrant, was exemplified in young
B—. He was not more than 25 or 26, had been a subaltern in the — Guards,
and came, moreover, of a good county stock; and yet in six short months
he had so far degenerated as to be punished on the day his sentence
expired for stealing a loaf from a fellow prisoner.
A worthy old man with grey hair and venerable appearance, and who might
have passed for the chairman of a board of directors, appeared every
morning at mine and other cells in the passage with a dust-pan, and with
methodical precision removed the sweepings. He told me he had been a
solicitor with a large connection, with chambers in — Street, and had a
wife and grown-up family in a comfortable house in a well-known suburb.
His imprisonment was perceptibly telling on him, and his hair and beard
grew whiter every day.
A bustling, business-like man, one day attracted my attention. He was
connected with the stores, and brought me a new pair of boots. He had
been the manager of a London bank, and undergoing retirement for six
months for some error regarding the ownership of £300.
A tall, smart-looking man that was pointed out to me, was, I was
informed, an individual who attained notoriety some two years ago over a
mining scheme. He was suffering two years’ incarceration for a
miscalculation of over £7000.
A man who called himself Count H—, and an ex-convict to boot, was
languishing for a year, because certain noblemen had had the bad taste to
object to his having obtained money from them by false pretences. This
nobleman! had a mania for petitioning the Home Office (I will give a
specimen of his style hereafter).
In addition to these, numerous individuals who had been gentlemen in
their day were known to me by sight. Conspicuous amongst them, was an
old jail bird and ex-convict, who had 20 years ago been a captain in the
army, and ever since had existed (and still is) in prison, for terms of
seven, five, five, two, and one years. All the starch had been
thoroughly wrung out of him, though he occasionally stood on a
dilapidated kind of dignity. I once asked him where a friend of his had
gone. He replied, “I don’t know; we don’t speak now; he’s no gentleman.
Will you believe it, he had the impertinence to doubt my word.” As his
word had been doubted a good many times during the past 20 years, I was
considerably amused by this assumption of dignity.
Many prisoners are under the impression that they have only to petition
the Home Office to procure a remission of their sentence. It seems
perfectly immaterial to them, whether they have the slightest grounds for
this assumption or not, and it frequently happens that, instead of
mitigating their offence, they put matters in a more unfavourable light
by airing their grievances, whilst others make a rambling statement
referring to every subject but the one particularly concerning
themselves.
Count H— was a specimen of this class. He was undergoing a well-merited
12 months’ imprisonment for defrauding the Dukes of S— and M— and other
noblemen of sums of money, by representing himself as the son of some
individual, which he certainly was not. It is, of course, possible that
he may (to use a vulgar expression) have been “changed at nuss,” though
the fact that he had previously undergone five years’ penal servitude for
a similar offence minimizes the probability that he was acting under a
misapprehension. The Count! had no sooner taken up his quarters than he
expressed a desire to petition the Home Secretary. A “form” being
supplied him, which he retained four days, eventually reappeared so
blurred and smeared with blots and erasures that its transmission was
impossible. A second attempt was more successful, and the following
exhaustive specimen of penmanship and veracity struggled up to the Home
Office, and eventually struggled back:—“That your petitioner, on being
discharged from Pentonville Convict Prison, at the expiration of five
years’ penal servitude, found that certain moneys and property, valued at
several hundred pounds, had been stolen by his agent, who collected his
rent on his estates in Italy; that being at that time without funds to go
abroad, he had written to the Duke of S— and Duke of M— and others,
asking for a loan until he received his rents. That his father really
was Count H— and a friend of these noblemen, and that the charge of false
pretences was consequently incorrect. That he had held diplomatic
appointments, and been decorated for gallant service, and that he
possesses a coronet with S.P.Q.R., all of which clearly proves his
identity. In conclusion, your petitioner appeals to you with confidence
as a lawyer of renown, and a scion of the noble house of Vernon.—Signed,
H—.”
I have corrected “the Count’s” spelling as far as possible; the logic and
composition were, however, past redemption. The rogue evidently knew the
Home Secretary’s claim to “Royal descent,” as delicately hinted at in the
concluding paragraph.
Another individual petitioned against his hair and beard being cut, on
religious grounds, and quoted the Law of Moses as forbidding these
formalities. This specimen did not, I believe, leave the establishment.
I was frequently struck by the vast difference in the sentences awarded
in what appeared to me to be parallel cases, and tried in vain to
discover any system that might be supposed to regulate them. It cannot
be denied that a great difference of opinion exists apparently amongst
judges on the subject of crimes and their punishment, and that whereas
one judge will administer justice with harshness, another will attain the
same desirable end with a regard to humanity. With these respective
characteristics, the criminal classes are thoroughly conversant, and it
would astonish the Bench if they heard how accurately their respective
peculiarities are summed up. Thus one judge is credited with being very
severe on conspiracy and long firm cases, whilst another is supposed to
be “down” on burglars, whilst it is generally conceded that a plea of
guilty will invariably fare better than one of not guilty. For my own
part I fancied I had noticed that conspiracy is considered the most
serious offence, and that two men conspiring to defraud another of £50
will run the risk of a severer punishment than the individual who unaided
steals £500.
I will quote a few first offences which, apparently similar, differ
considerably as regards their sentences:—
(_a_) A solicitor for passing a forged cheque for £18 that had been paid
to him: 18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour.
(_a_) A bank manager for appropriating £300: six months’ imprisonment
with hard labour.
(_b_) A wine merchant for complicity in a forged cheque, £52: sentence,
18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour.
(_b_) A commission agent for forging a £600 bill of exchange: 12 months’
imprisonment with hard labour.
(_c_) A clerk (with twenty years’ good character and recommended to
mercy), for forging £50 and stealing employer’s cheque: sentence, twenty
months’ imprisonment with hard labour.
(_c_) A City man, for a fraudulent mining scheme and forgery, whereby he
obtained £7000: sentence, two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.
(_d_) A shopman, for robbing his employer of £50: sentence, three months’
imprisonment with hard labour.
(_d_) A beggar boy, for stealing 1s. 6d.: sentence, three months’
imprisonment with hard labour.
There are men in Coldbath whose cards show upwards of seventy previous
convictions, varying from a year to seven days; nor is it to be wondered
at, considering the starvation that confronts them outside and the
comfort that is accorded them in prison. One of these habitual vagrants
on his periodical appearance was usually accosted with an official joke,
“Same address, I suppose?” “Yes, please,” was the invariable reply; “no
change since last time.”
One old man in the convalescent ward, suffering from rheumatism and
asthma, who was supplied with dainties he could never have heard of
before, confessed to me that he should have preferred six to the three
months’ imprisonment he was undergoing. Another old vagrant (a City man)
told me that he always made it a rule to sleep on a doorstep a day or so
before Christmas Day to insure the Christmas meal of a loaf of bread,
beef, pudding, and a pint of ale, stood by the Lord Mayor to every
prisoner in Newgate. He was bewailing the loss of that charming
residence, and telling me how, having foolishly omitted to make himself
acquainted with the change of system, had subsisted last Christmas Day in
“Coldbath” on dry bread and stirabout.
Foreigners of every description find their way into Coldbath, though the
majority consists of Germans, mostly Jews. There is an advantage in
belonging to this faith, as I was led to understand by a gourmand. It
consists in receiving meat on Mondays in lieu of the usual bacon and
beans. Circumstances, however, render the temporary embracing of this
faith more difficult than they do that of Romanism, which is much in
vogue; and as certain punishment would follow the certain detection,
Judaism has not as many followers as the Australian meat would otherwise
command.
Flogging is usually administered for insubordination and malingering.
For less serious offences the punishment cells and short commons usually
have the desired effect. There are two descriptions of corporal
punishment—the cat and the birch, usually reserved for youths. In the
former case the culprit is lashed to a triangle; in the latter he is
hoisted on what is euphoniously called a donkey. As a punishment, the
cat, as applied in prisons, is not to be compared to its defunct namesake
in the army or navy. It is sufficiently severe, however, to necessitate
certain after-treatment—an item in the programme regulated rather by the
“system” than humanity. A soldier was invariably admitted into hospital
after undergoing corporal punishment; a prisoner is, however, flogged and
then conducted to his cell.
These floggings are usually administered in the forenoon in presence of a
surgeon, and before evening a zinc plaster—perhaps two—is applied to the
recipient’s back. The performance takes place in a room off the main
passage, and is not unattended with a certain amount of ceremony. The
traffic is stopped, and no particulars transpire but the howls of the
victim, which can be heard all over the building. Since the abolition of
Newgate, Coldbath has risen in retributive importance, and garrotters
sentenced to the lash here receive their punishment.
A one-legged garrotter was lately flogged; his leg, which had been
amputated at the thigh, prevented his being securely tied, and his
abortive struggles procured him a flogging infinitely severer than
ordinarily experienced. Every blow fell on a different place, and the
twenty lashes left twenty wheals, breaking the skin in a dozen different
places. Sympathy with a garrotter would be out of place, and no one can
doubt that he richly deserved his punishment; yet one’s bowels of
compassion are instinctively moved by the description given to me by an
eye-witness, of a lump of bleeding humanity alone and sobbing in a cell,
and receiving at five in the afternoon a zinc plaster to apply to the
back that had been torn and lacerated in the morning.
This treatment in no way reflects on the prison officials, who simply
carry out the regulations; it is the system that is to blame, and is
capable, like the dispensation of justice before described, of
considerable improvement on the score of humanity.
Floggings and birchings appear to have no effect on these hardened
criminals, and though they shriek and bellow during the infliction, they
invariably revert to the same offence, and qualify for a second edition.
Shamming madness is a favourite form of malingering indulged in by
prisoners. The uneducated mind, however, invariably resorts to the same
tactics—a combination between the symptoms of idiocy and hydrophobia that
generally fails in its objects, and invariably yields to treatment by the
cat.
The boys that find their way into Coldbath are the most hardened young
scamps I ever saw. They are supposed to be isolated, as required by
recent agitation on the subject of juvenile offenders. That the
isolation is a farce need hardly be said. At chapel they certainly
occupy benches to themselves, but so do the various wards and trades; the
tasks they are put to are similar to those done by adults; and the pains
and penalties they undergo are identical in time and circumstance to
those of the full-blown criminal. I have seen these urchins on arrival,
with their knuckles in their eyes, blubbering in chapel, and a week later
winking and making signs as if determined to assert their qualification
to be clothed and treated like their adult fellow-prisoners.
Tearing up their clothes is the favourite pastime of these promising
youths. I have frequently seen these children marched along a passage,
handcuffed behind, and preceded by a warder carrying a bundle of rags
three inches square, that formerly represented their linen and clothes.
The treatment they receive puts this crime at a premium. Boys are
admittedly vain, and desirous of appearing as men to their older
associates, what more natural then, that a child (one of the instances I
refer to could not have been fourteen) should aspire to the honour of
appearing as a hero; marching through a crowded passage with his manly
work conspicuously displayed, treated, moreover, like a real man,
manacled, and eventually birched, and receiving the approbation
invariably accorded by the criminal classes to the perpetrators of wanton
mischief. One would suppose that in a huge building like Coldbath Fields
these urchins might be absolutely isolated, and if their offences were
punished without the publicity that at present attends them, they would
soon be given up as not worth the consequence. That the treatment of
this hardened class of boys is a difficult problem, cannot be denied, and
the cunning and ingenuity they display is almost incredible. Fully aware
that the visiting Justices only visit the prison once a fortnight, and
that without their order a birching is impossible, it frequently happens
that on the day of their discharge every article of their clothing is
made into mincemeat. For this mischief they are absolutely free from any
consequence, it being an offence against the prison, and not against the
law. If a remedy was applied to this crime, similar to the Article of
War that provides against the destruction of Government property, the
delinquent might be handed over to a policeman, and this would
effectually stop the practice.