LIFE IN JAIL

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 124, 19 February 1938, Page 7 (Supplement)

LIFE IN JAIL

“Chokey,” by Red-Collar Man, with an introduction by Compton Mackenzie (London: Gollancz).

For seven years the author of this book on life in Parkhurst Prison was the Separate Ceils Orderly, or redcollar man, the “trusty” whose job it is to assist the jailers with the difficult prisoners on special punishment. Mr. Compton Mackenzie, who sponsored “Walls Have Mouths” recently, is the author of the introductory section of this work, and again he makes a forceful plea for an improvement of social conditions, among them penal conditions. He claims that the only way to fight crime is to improve social conditions, and that savage punishments tend to increase crime rather than deter it. Books such as this, exposing Hie prison system in England as an almost barbaric institution, even in these days of supposed reform, are bound to provoke a prolific defence of the prison system as it now is, and the layreader is likely to be confused by the diversity of opinion from apparently authentic sources. “Red-Collar Man” states that he entered Parkhurst a year or so after Macartney, the author of “Walls Have Mouths,” and left it a few months before, so that much of his experience was similar. For four years the writer of ’’Chokey” was orderly in the separate punishment cells, “the black heart of a strong jail,” and his notes, from which the book is written, were made over a period of years. They are not a true diary in the sense of a bald diurnal record of the punishment cebs, but this is due to the dread of the consequences of discovery. He wrote more to relieve his own feelings than to provide the outside world with a few pages of the dark and secret history of man’s inhumanity to man. The horror of this narrative is probably less horrible than the actual truth for this reason, but “Chokey” is still a work that repels. The notebooks of Hie "Red-Collar Man” were smuggled out of Parkhurst in a risky fashion, stained with damp and almost illegible, but not mutilated badly enough to prevent their being read. The author did not publish his work as soon as lie wa,s released, but when he read “Walls Have Mouths.” the vivid memories it provoked made him “determined that I also should do something to lessen that horror behind the walls.”