THE PRISON SYSTEM IN ENGLAND. [From the Times, Jan. 10.]

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XVI, Issue 7, 22 April 1857, Page 2

THE PRISON SYSTEM IN ENGLAND. [From the Times, Jan. 10.]

While we are boasting of our model prisons, and silent systems, and separate systems, what is the state of Newgate ? This, which is the great metropolitan gaol, should surely be a pattern of good arrangement. If it is not ths most roomy of our prisons, at least it is the most important of them all, inasmuch as a very large proportion of the London prisoners are passed through it at one or other stage of the proceedings which are taken against them. There we find men awaiting their trial ; convicts just condemned and temporarily detained until they can be remitted either to the hulks or to some other place of confinement ; and, finally, the wretched culprits who are looking for the execution of their doom. Newgate prison should emphatically be the best kept prison in the land. If we are to judge from a letter with which an ex-under-sheriff has favoured us, and which we printed in this journal on Saturday last, the arrangements for the prisoners are as bad as they well can be. The most desperate ruffians are shut up together within those gloomy walls to utter Its much blashphemy and obscenity as they choose ; to recount to each other the most stirring incidents of their past careers ; to consolidate old friendships, and to plan fresh crimes. Bad as this is, it is not all. Into the same room or cell with these miscreants are thrust the no?ices of iniquity, and, it may be, men entirely innocent of offence. The result is just what might be anticipated. In a few .exceptional cases the unfortunates who may have been thrown into such foul fellowship endeavour to resist the contagion, and do resist, but at what a cost ! They are put to the bar of their gailty companions. They are jeertd t>t, insuheJ, abused, maltreated. They must take kindly to wickedness, or pay the penalty. • ■,</ It must, however, be a rare case— although . it sometimes occurs, as we shall presently shew -that a really innocent person is immured in ihe walls of Newgate. Cv • police magistrates lo their duty too well, 'ihe instances, however, in which young thieves and pickpockets i the freshmen of crime — are thrust in among the more hardened reprobates, mult le far

more frequent, if the system depicted by Mr. Rose is the usual one within the walls of the metropolitan prison. In remarking upon this gentleman's statements we are compelled to do that which we always endeavour to avoid — namely, mix up two subjects in one comment. In the present case, however, we must submit to the inconvenience, for the two points are so entirely connected that one cannot be discussed without bringing the other prominently forward. ' Mr. Rose's letter, which is written with a feeling which does great honour to the writer, mainly refers to the scandalous anomaly which exists in the administration of the law towards prisoners wrongfully condemned. It is while describing the hardships undergone by an unfortunate of this class that Mr. Rose gives us a glimpse of the interior of Newgate. We will endeavour, as far as possible, to keep the two subjects apart. One day last week the Rev. Mr. Davis, the Ordinary of Newgate, addressed a letter to this journal, which we printed, in which he described the sufferings of a poor man named John Markham, who was wrongfully sentenced to penal servitude for four years, having been convicted on a charge of " aiding in uttering a forged check." The man was entirely innocent, as it turned out — it was a case of mistaken identity. Through the humane exertion of Mr. Rose and Mr. Davis the man's innocence was finally established, and he was pardoned ! Mr. Rose now gives us ample grounds for renewing our assertion, that if there were question of pardon at all the pardon should have been asked from John Markham ; it was not for him to receive the mockery of forgiveness for the alleged perpetration of a crime with which he had never been concerned. This poor man was walking one Saturday in Oxford-street, when a policeman tapped him on the shoulder and took him off to the stationhouse. He was remanded from time to time for six weeks ; for one month of the time he was detained in the house of correction — for a fortnight in Newgate. Well, his trial came on, and John Markham was unjustly condemned. The execution of his sentence began, and this was the manner of it. Did any of our readers imagine that such doings were afoot in the principal metropolitan prison in these palmy days of Ligh philanthropy ? Thus writes Mr. Rose : —*-" John Markhtim was two months in Newgate picking oakum with the convicts there, who in this prison are all in one room together — three murderers at one time, pirates who had deliberately planned wholesale massacres, to be accompanied by indescribable astrocities, 'burglars, garotters, thieves from their birth, receivers, putters-up of robberies, and the perpetrators of unmentionable crimes. The amusement of this den of devilry is to narrate their crimes, and to plan fresh ones." Why this is to take us back at one leap to the days of Jonathan Wild the Great ; this is the Newgate with which Fielding was familiar, surely •not the pet prison of this century of experimental philanthropy ! Poor John Markham, who has just received the Queen's gracious pardon, was but a cheerless guest amid this •fiendish crew. He was not of them, and would not be of them. Rascaldom, of course, rose in its dirty majesty to avenge itself upon the stranger who defied it and shrank back from the pollution of its very breath. "Jolin Markham," writes Mr. Rose, " was persecuted and tormented by his associates in Nawgate ■with the most virulent and relentless malignity." What a position for an innocent man ! But in course of time the torture of infamous society was exchanged for the torture of absolute seclusion. It was to Millbank that Markham was removed, and there the system is that of " separate confinement," — " a dreadful system," as Mr. Rose adds in his own name. lie was locked up in his cell from half-past 5 at night until 6 o'clock in the morning, without hearing the sound of a human voice. Mr. Rose then tells us how John Markham was affected during this period. "He had parted with all his ready money and many of his things for his defence ; he had a wife and a child ; they were utterly destitute ; she parted with every stick of furniture and every rag of clothing during his imprisonment, and many a day was without a -meal of victuals, and now, in agony unutterable, he often thought of her, nnd how ehe was existing." Such was the case of the innocent man to whom society has graciously extended its pardon. This, however, was not all. From Millbank, Markham was Temoved to Pentonville ; for he was to have a taste of every expedient which the ingenuity of modern philanthropists has devised for the reformation of prisoners, as well as of the primitive anarchy which reigns in the walls of old Newgate. For three months he was immured at Pentonville, kept all the time in solitary confinement. The seclusion in this prison is so strictly maintained, that even in the chapel each prisoner is inclosed in a wooden box, where he can neither see others nor be seen himself. By Markham's account, the suffering is very great under the system. "In the chapel, at the sound of a human voice the convicts are often affected, faint away, or shriek out. 'Why?' I asked Markham ;" — it is of course Mr. Rose who writes: — "'Oh! they think of home or something of that,' he replied." It is not, however, our object here to discuss the merits or drawbacks of our various systems of prison discipline. We are speaking first of John Markham's case, and of the cases of all persons wrongfully convicted; and secondly, of the horrors in the interior of Newgate. After six months had elapsed — six months spent in the terrible situation we have described — Markham was pardoned. He is now without work, without means of getting a living, and his character is gone. People won't believe in the innocence of the pardoned man. Nor is his case a singular one. Mr. Rose gives us briefly the heads of another dismal history of the like kind. A man named Martin was found guilty upon a charge of highway robbery, and sentenced to four years of penal servitude. It was all a mistake, and the mistake was discovered, but not in time. "Not long since," writes Mr. Rose, he "stood in my office an emaciated wreck of his former self. Before he went to Millbank he said he did not know his own strength, and could work without fatigue the longest day." It is not matter for charge against our criminal system that such mistakes do occur from tjme to time, for a certain amount of error is

•. inseparable from any system that can be dee vised by man ; but at least society is bound to s give ample compensation to the unfortuuate o ptrons who have been unwittingly sacrificed to - the security of all. More than this, and inde- ;. pendently of this, we trust that immediate t inquiry of the most searching kind will take 0 place with respect to Newgate Prison. Whe1 ther a man be innocent as John Markham, or - foul with guilt as the foulest wretch in the [\ "den of devilry" which Mr. Rose has dese cribed, what can be expected if he is thrown V for weeks and months among such associates v as the members of tlffe Newgate Club ?