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.'
'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. 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.'
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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