Imprisoned debtors freed

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32677, 5 August 1971, Page 13

Imprisoned debtors freed

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) LONDON, August 4. The ghost of Charles Dickens was abroad in Britain’s prisons today as cell doors swung open to free prisoners incarcerated for debt.

More than a century after the Victorian novelist began the campaign to stop the wholesale imprisonment of unfortunates who ran foul of their creditors, new legislation has brought out some debtors from behind bars. People who incur commercial debt—not keeping up with instalment-plan purchases, or failing to pay the grocer—will no longer face imprisonment. Instead, the money will be deducted from their wages.

Already more than 100 have been released. It is, however, only a partial victory in the battle Dickens began because of the squalor and despair of the nineteenth century prisons into which debtors owing only a few shillings were thrown, and were placed into cells alongside murderers, drunkards and thieves. The courts will still be allowed to commit to prison anyone failing to pay maintenance, taxes, city rates, social security contributions or fines. ... The new legislation will keep about 700 people a year out of Britain’s heavily-over-crowded gaols, in which prisoners are often lodged three to a cell. But it does not cover about 2500 other debtors imprisoned each year, half of them for owing less than £2O each. What swung the Govern-

ment behind the campaign for reform was an official report that said: “The hardship which is caused to imprisoned debtors and their families is out of all proportion to the debt.” It is also expensive. It costs more than £2O a week to keep a man in prison and the average debtor occupies a cell for between three and six weeks. Prison for debtors is paradise compared with the horror of London’s notorious old Fleet and Newgate Gaols, with their straw-covered stone floors in which the poor languished in Dickens’s day. But imprisonment of any, kind is rarely deserved by, those with money troubles, the reformers say. "The vast majority are nos dishonest —just inadequate, unfortunate, reckless or irresponsible persons,” the official report says*