“COMMUNITIES” IN PRISON

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 84, 3 January 1930, Page 16

“COMMUNITIES” IN PRISON

SUCCESS OF EXPERIMENT AT WAKEFIELD ' The Magistrates’ Association of London held its eighth annual conference on October 23 in the Council Chamber, Guildhall, where they were welcomed by the Lord Mayor. The chairman of the council, Sir Robert Wallace, K.C. (chairman of the County of London Sessions), Colonel G. D. Turner, H.M. Inspector of-Prisons (late Governor of Wakefield Prison), spoke on the experiment 1 in prison communities now being made in Wakefield Prison. He said that one of the advantages enjoyed by Wakefield over other prisons in its experiment was that all the men were serving sentences of six months or longer. If Magistrates could only follow the fantastic prison career of a man who had had a seven-days’ sentence he did not believe they would ever pass such a sentence again. At Wakefield the sentences enabled the prison authorities to get to know the men and to do something for them. The prisoners were divided into three communities—“star,” or men imprisoned for the first time; “special,” or recidivists from 21 to 26 years of age; and “ordinary,” or older recidivists. Privileges were given to each community. It was explained to them that those privileges. were not the individual rights of any man; but belonged to the community as a whole; that they must be earned by the community, and were liable to be forfeited if any member of the community abused them. Prisoners were looked upon primarily as social failures. At Wakefield they were taught that a community could only function if each individual was willing to forgo his own desires for the sake of the common good. One of the most humiliating things that a prisoner had to undergo was being searched every time he went from the workshop to the cell. Freedom from re-search was a community privilege, and it was one that was highly appreciated. Football Matches. Another privilege was the playing of football matches on Saturday afternoons. This was a distinct innovation in prison life, though in all prisons Saturday was a sort of half-holiday, and wherever possible arrangements were made for the men to spend some part of it in the open air. The advantages of football were that it provided healthy exercise for a large number of prisoners, and healthy rivalry between the different communities, in playing, first, for the championship of the prison, and, second, for the prison cup. The referee affirmed that the prison team was the only team in the North of England which could boast that none of its players had been ordered off the field. (Laughter.) Only once had the privilege been abused, though not on the field itself. Some of the spectators challenged a dcciison of the referee, and he thought it well, in consequence, to suspend the privilege for a week or two. (Laughter.) There was another result of football matches which was wholly unexpected. It enabled the staff to see their prisoners from an entirely different point of view, and thus afforded them new opportunities of estimating the characters and possibilities of the men.

In reply to questions, Colonel Turner said that he had never met a man who. however easy the conditions of its life, did not want to leave the prison at the earliest possible moment. He deprecated the use of the term “criminal class.” He had never encountered any class that could be called “criminal.” A woman magistrate asked whether Colonel Turner had not promoted “rank Socialism” in Wakefield by making the prisoners work, not for themselves individually but for the whole community? Colonel Turner: I will admit, perhaps, promoting a frank Socialism. (Laughter.)

Sir Alfred Davies (Denbighshire Quarter Sessions) said that the association should have printed and circulated with Colonel Turner’s address an article which appeared recently in the “Times,” giving a terrible but wholly unexaggerated picture of life in American prisons. Nothing could bring out more strongly the contrast between the two prison systems of English and American.