Forwarded to the Home Secretary and the Prison Commissioners,
September, 1909.
(Compiled from visits paid to sixty convicts undergoing separate
confinement in X. and Y. Prisons, July and September, 1909.)
By the courtesy of the Prison Commissioners, to whom my thanks are due,
I visited these convicts in their cells, and conversed privately with
each one of them for from ten minutes to a quarter of an hour. I put
certain definite questions to each in regard to the effect of separate
confinement on themselves, and, so far as they could tell me, on other
prisoners, prefacing each conversation by the information that I was in
no way connected with the prison authorities. My object in the course of
these conversations was to get behind the formal question and answer to
the man’s real feelings. I met with no hostility, defiance, or conscious
evasion in any single case. In some cases a word or two was sufficient
to bring a rush of emotion. Several men were in tears throughout the
interview. In the majority of cases, however, I found it difficult to
get the prisoners to express themselves; and in some cases formal
answers, stolidly given, were reversed by some sudden revelation of
feeling evoked, as it were, in spite of the prisoner’s self. Generally
speaking, I judged that feelings were understated rather than
overstated.
The summary of these interviews is as follows: (sixty convicts
interviewed):—
Of these:
_Eight_ preferred separate confinement to working in CATEGORY A.
association, and were not conscious of harmful
_Fifteen_ would prefer work in association, but CATEGORY B.
(1) Having suffered from their separate confinement,
had got more or less used to it (three cases).
(2) Were suffering, but thought it was good for them
(three cases).
(3) Were so incapable of expressing their
experiences, that no definite answer could be got
from them (nine cases).
_Thirty-seven_ preferred association; suffered severely CATEGORY C.
from separate confinement; and asserted that they
had been harmed; that all prisoners were harmed, and
some driven crazy.
Of the eight convicts in Category A, who preferred separate:
_Four_ were educated men (three of whom asserted a natural
preference for their own society in or out of prison).
_One_ was an old recidivist with five sentences of penal
servitude.
_Two_ (of a callous type) preferred separate confinement because
they had no temptation to talk and get into trouble.
_One_ was the only prisoner I saw who said he had deliberately
committed his offence in order to get into prison.
The following phrases taken from notes made immediately after each
interview indicate the general nature of the suffering experienced by
prisoners separately confined:
“I used to look up at the window, and something seemed to pull
me back.”
“The first month was awful, I didn’t hardly know how to keep
myself together. I thought I should go mad.”
“It’s made me very nervous. The least thing upsets me; I was not
nervous before.”
“I’ve got a daughter, and I grieve over her all the time;
there’s nothing to take your mind off.”
“I’ve never felt right since—it’s got all over me.” (This man
cried all the time. He seemed utterly unnerved, and broken up. A
Star Class man.)
“I feel it dreadfully. It gets worse as it goes on.”
“It’s no life at all. I’d sooner be dead than here.” (This man
was very tearful and quavery.)
“My first spell of ‘separate’ nearly drove me raving.” (This was
a recidivist serving his third term.)
“It broke me down on my first sentence. It destroys a man.”
“I had a cold lonely feeling. . . . Nine months of it is killing
for most men.”
“It’s _punishment_ to shut up a man for nine months.” (This is a
fair specimen of the very general under-statement of evidently
acute feelings.)
“It’ll send men ‘up the stick.’” (Off their heads.)
“I’m very miserable and down-’earted. You feel it more and more
as you get older. I hardly know sometimes what I’m doing.” (This
was from an old man of sixty-one who had been twenty years in
prison, and said he did not expect to last through this
sentence. _He had still six months of separate to run_, and
struck me as very broken up, and suffering.)
“I keep ‘picturing’ things, and walking about. It sends men ‘up
the pole!’” (Another bad case of a young recidivist of
twenty-nine, with five months of his ‘separate’ still to run.)
“Walls seem to close in. . . . I get blankness in the brain;
have to stop reading.”
“It’s hell upon earth.” (An educated prisoner.)
“Almost unbearable depression.” (An educated prisoner.)
“Sleep’s the only comfort.”
“I sit there sometimes at work, not knowing what I’m doing.”
“I’ve good nerves. A man with bad nerves would soon snuff out in
‘separate’.”
“If a man had the spy-hole open even, so that he could see out,
it would make a vast deal of difference. . . . I’ve seen numbers
of men come on the public works from their ‘separate,’ quite
silly.”
“I’ve seen many a man driven queer.” (This recidivist had served
four terms of penal servitude.)
“I’ve seen men driven off their nuts.”
I could not get an admission from any prisoner that the suffering they
underwent in separate confinement deterred them from coming back to
prison. The two reasons they assigned for coming back to prison were:
(1) That they had so little chance outside. (2) Drink.
It is obvious, however, that the separate period is almost universally
regarded as much the worst part of the sentence.
My reasons for believing that, in spite of this, separate confinement is
not, in fact, deterrent were given in my open letter to the Home
Secretary (the _Nation_, May 1st and May 8th, 1909); this belief has
been strengthened rather than weakened in the course of this
investigation. As a final result of these visits I record my deliberate
conviction that no competent observer with any knack of getting at men’s
feelings, and the opportunity of conversing in private and _as a private
person_, with the prisoners could come to any other conclusion than that
an immense amount of harmful and unnecessary suffering is inflicted by
closed-cell confinement extending over the periods (especially the
longer periods) now prevailing. It is my belief that if the authorities
were able to adopt this method of getting at the real state of the case
the system would not remain unaltered for a single day.
(4)
(From a Letter to the Home Secretary, the Right Hon. Herbert
John Gladstone, M.P., October, 1909.)
“. . . Every day that passes with this question undealt with means so
many thousand hours of solid, tangible, harmful, removable misery. There
is a distinction between this particular kind of misery and any other
experienced by man in a state of society such as we now have in England.
There is no other form of acute, _prolonged misery enforced_ on people
in such a way as that they can by no possibility avoid it. The old
saying, ‘He deserves all he’ll get and more,’ stultifies itself the
moment it is looked into; the plea of deterrence does not hold water;
and this misery stands out stark—a survival from the philosophy (!) of
the dark ages. . . .”
NOTE.—Solitary (or separate) confinement for convicts has been
reduced from nine, six, and three months to three months for
“old hands,” and one month for the other two classes of
convicts. But the writer feels as strongly as ever that, except
in special cases, it should be done away with altogether.—J. G.