Transcriber's Note:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully aspossible. Some changes of spelling have been made. They are listedat the end of the text.
CHILDREN IN PRISON
AND
OTHER CRUELTIES
OF
PRISON LIFE.
MURDOCH & CO.,
26, Paternoster Square,
London.
PUBLISHERS' NOTE.
The circumstance which called forth this letter is a woeful one forChristian England. Martin, the Reading warder, is found guilty offeeding the hungry, nursing the sick, of being kindly and humane. Theseare his offences in plain unofficial language.
This pamphlet is tendered to earnest persons as evidence that the prisonsystem is opposed to all that is kind and helpful. Herein is shown aprocess that is dehumanizing, not only to the prisoners, but to everyone connected with it.
Martin was dismissed. It happened in May last year. He is still out ofemployment and in poor circumstances. Can anyone help him?
February, 1898.
SOME CRUELTIES OF PRISON LIFE.
THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.
Sir,—I learn with great regret, through an extract from the columns ofyour paper, that the warder Martin, of Reading Prison, has beendismissed by the Prison Commissioners for having given some sweetbiscuits to a little hungry child. I saw the three children myself onthe Monday preceding my release. They had just been convicted, and werestanding in a row in the central hall in their prison dress, carryingtheir sheets under the arms previous to their being sent to the cellsallotted to them. I happened to be passing along one of the galleries onmy way to the reception room, where I was to have an interview with afriend. They were quite small children, the youngest—the one to whomthe warder gave the biscuits—being a tiny little chap, for whom theyhad evidently been unable to find clothes small enough to fit. I had, ofcourse, seen many children in prison during the two years during which Iwas myself confined. Wandsworth Prison, especially, contained always alarge number of children. But the little child I saw on the afternoon ofMonday, the 17th, at Reading, was tinier than any one of them. I neednot say how utterly distressed I was to see these children at Reading,for I knew the treatment in store for them. The cruelty that ispractised by day and night on children in English prisons is incredible,except to those who have witnessed it and are aware of the brutality ofthe system.
People nowadays do not understand what cruelty is. They regard it as asort of terrible mediæval passion, and connect it with the race of menlike Eccelin da Romano, and others, to whom the deliberate infliction ofpain gave a real madness of pleasure. But men of the stamp of Eccelinare merely abnormal types of perverted individualism. Ordinary crueltyis simply stupidity. It comes from the entire want of imagination. It isthe result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard-and-fast rules,of centralisation, of officialism, and of irresponsible authority.Wherever there is cen