Prison Life in England.

Auckland Star, Volume XXV, Issue 143, 16 June 1894, Page 1 (Supplement)

Prison Life in England.

Hard Work and Strict Discipline Are

Its Characteristics.

A comparison of the rules of an American prison with those of an English prison shows thab the American prisoner has many more comforts and liberties. A man in an English prison in almost as dead to the outer world as he would be in his tomb. Nothing in the way of food or reading matter can be/senb to him by hie friends. He is never permitted to see a newspaper or a magazine. He can write and receive letters only at long intervals, and from the time he enters tho prison until he leaves ib he is nob permitted to speak unless hois addressed by a prison officer. A prisoner sentenced for a term of threo years or less may see a visitor once in three months in the presence of a prison officer, and he may write one'letter. To men whose terms are longer such privileges are granted less frequently. For the first month the prisoner's bed consists of nothing but a broad board like a table top three or four inches above the floor of the coll. He baa no mattress and the bed clothing consists of a rug, a blanket, a pillow and two coarse sheets. At the end of a month, if ho has earned a sufficient number of good conduct marks, he has a mattress throe nights a week. Later he has a mattress five nights a week, and at a still later stage, if his conduct has been unexceptionable, he may have a mattress every night. He has also in his cell a bucket, a water can, a tin wash bowl, a towel, a soap dish, a salt cellar, a. wooden spoon and a tin plate. He never has 'a knife or fork, as he has'nothing to eat requiring tho use of these implements. He niujfc get up at 6 o'clock, and his breakfasb is brought to him a'b 7.30. He eats every meal in his coll. In the fiist stage of his imprisonment he has only bread and water for breakfasb, and for dinner a pint and a half of ' stiraßoub,' a gruel-like mixture of oatmeal and Indian meal. In the fourth and best atage of his imprisonment he has a pint of porridge with his bread for breakfasb, and a better dinner, bub even the fourth-stage bill of fare is never changed throughout the year. There are no holiday dinners nor an extra dish on Sundays, a8 in some of our American prisons. Not'all the prisons have workshops attached to them, and where there is no workshop a man who has a labour sentence must go to a treadmill for two hours and a half in the morning and for two hours and three-quarters in the afternoon. In some prisons there is a worse kind ot labour than even the treadmill. It consists of turning a heavily-weighted crank, which serves no purpose whatever except to record the number of its own revolutions. A day's labour consists of from 8,000 to 10,000 revolutions. In other prisons the prisoners are set to pumping water. As this serves some purpose it is not so depressing aa the crank movement. The entire system of discipline in English prisons is military in its rigidity and it is never relaxed.