HOW CONVICTS KNOW

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 261, 31 July 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

HOW CONVICTS KNOW

Wonderful Ways Of Communication

. The old proverb about idle hands, like so many proverbs, is only a halftruth, says a writer in the "Adelaide Chronicle.” It is idle minds, not hands, that keep the devil busy allocating jobs. This simple truth, obvious though it is, has been overlooked by prison authorities all over the world for centuries. Thus for centuries past the walls of prison cells have resembled the caves of primitive man; they have been covered with graffiti and hieroglyphs. And not only the walls. “Drinking vessels, bed planks, margins of books, and even the unstable sands of the exercise grounds supply him with a surface on which to imprint his thoughts and feelings,” wrote Lombroso some 50 years ago. And what thoughts they were! Terse, unprintable opinions on the turnkeys and prison life in general ; bitter recriminations on an illjspent life; despairing clamours against the injustice of a sentence. “I am 18 years old,” writes one prisoner on the walls of his cell. “Misfortune has made me guilty several times, and 'each time I have been shut ■up in prison. But how have I been reformed in prison? What have I learned? I have perfected myself in wickedness here.” Penal methods are probably a more potent cause of criminality than drink or bad environment. Some men, incapable of expressing themselves verbally, have resorted, like their primitive ancestors, to picto-j graphy. A certain Cavaglia, who had robbed and murdered an accomplice, decided when in prison to commit suicide one hundred days after the date of his crime. Unable to unburden himself of this project, he adorned his water jug with a pictorial of his crime, his imprisonment, and his suicide. Owing to the fact that the condemned man in an English prison is never left alone, and that convicts now have many opportunitries for surreptitious conversation, inscriptions on cell walls in Great Britain have become rare—the more so because damage (which has a most

comprehensive meaning in Standing Orders) to His Majesty's prisons represents a term on bread and water in the punishment cells. But in many French prisons the practice still flourished, and the type and tone o£ most of the inscriptions are a lurid reflection of prisoners’ mentality. “The walls of a prison,” wrote a French ex-convict in 1883. "offer a world of information and are marvellous instruments of correspondence. When I found myself at Cholon-on-the-Saone, in the .most secret cells, I learned of arrests made in Lyons, Paris and Vienna on my account.” Writing of the methods by which news is circulated, he went on: “There is first the little cord,/stretched by the weight of a ball made of breadcrumbs, and so thrown from one window to another. There are books in the library which circulate covered with cryptograms. Then the pipes for water and hot air make excellent speaking tubes. Another dodge is knocking on the wall. It is not necessary that the persons communicating by this method be in contiguous cells. I once got valuable news in this way from a comrade 40 or 50 yards away.”

The manner in which the news is received and circulated in prisons is still a source of amazement to prison governors. The governor of one of the biggest convict prisons in England relates that he heard from one of his prisoners that he was to be transferred to the governorship of another prison three days before he received official intimation of tile fact. Everyone in the prison had known of it before he, the person concerned, was informed. It is a fact recognised bj’ all prison officials that the world holds no secrets from prisons. ■ Though outside news is strictly censored, convicts know everything of importance occurring outside. The inmates of every prison in England knew, for example, all about the Dartmoor mutiny, though all news of it was suppressed. Hard-headed and least imaginative officials have come to admit that there is some kind of telepathy among convicts that is beyond their power to control.