PRISON GOVERNOR’S STORIES

Evening Star, Issue 21286, 15 December 1932, Page 15

PRISON GOVERNOR’S STORIES

LOVE IN THE CELLS Maud, ii woman who possessed an extraordinarily indefinable fascination, which she exercised over all sorts of people, is one of the amazing real-life criminals described by Colonel C. E. F. Rich, in ‘ Recollections of a Prison Governor.’ In nearly thirty years of prison service Colonel Rich has been Governor of Borstal and of the prisons at Wakefield, Maidstone (where he quelled a mutiny), Northampton, Liverpool, and Wandsworth. Maud had charming manners, great musical and artistic ability, a continual thirst for admiration, and several convictions for bigamy, false pretences, and theft. With forged references she got a post as governess, but the family lawyer of, the people she was with heard of it, and rang up to tell then! they were harbouring the most dangerous woman in England. They replied that Maud was a delightful girl. So anxious was the lawyer that he travelled 200 miles from London to his clients’ home, to tell them the terrible truth, stayed three days—and on the third day ran away with Maud the Fascinating! Then there is the extraordinary story of the woman convict and man convict who never even saw each other, but carried on a violent love affair through the medium of letters secreted in the prison piano. They were never in the hall where the piano was at the same time, but a search of their cells revealed that many love letters had been exchanged. “ After reading the fervent contents of the letters,” says Colonel Rich, “ I found it well-nigh incredible that these two people were pouring out devotion to each other without either of them knowing anything at all about the other’s age or looks or position in the outside world.” Colonel Rich protests again and again against the lack of discipline and the “ soft, sloppy sentiment ” which is creeping into prison methods. There is much to be said for “putting the fear of God ” into prisoners. “Wo spend far too much time and trouble,” he says, “in singing psalms and providing jam for tea for hopeless blackguards, who only intend to bite you in the back, as they did at Dartmoor, because they were being better treated than any convicts had ever been treated before in any country. “ If the ‘eat’ were applied to cover a wider variety of offences it would have a most salutary effect,” Colonel Rich declares. “ There is a tendency to be squeamish over sentencing a man to the ‘cat.’ and not a few justices spoil the effect by reducing the punishment to a minimum.” Eighteen strokes was about the really effective minimum. It was those that came after the first sixteen or so that finally decided a man never to risk getting the ‘cat’ again. “ In some ways it is a pity that the treadmill was abolished,” Colonel Rich observes, “ for it was one of the things which made prisons unpleasant, and nowadays so many things are do_ue to make prison pleasant, and so few to make it the reverse, that one feels it is altogether far too easy for the scrimshanker,”