CRUELTY TO PRISONERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9124, 4 August 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

CRUELTY TO PRISONERS.

A PAIKFFLLY startling communication on this subject appeared recently in The Pall Mall Gazette. We make the following extracts

We boast that we have abolished torture and that we are more humane than outancestors, the fact being that Ave have only substituted one kind of torture for another, and that the modern prison system is tenfold more cruel than that which it superseded. A few days since we happened to meet a respectable young woman who had just suffered several years of penal servitude for an offence which, to most people, renders the criminal the object of the deepest pity. We thought we would ascertain from her the effect left upon her mind by her sad experience. At first, we found her very reticent. " Please, don't speak to me about it—it is too horrible. _ Let. me try to forget it !" After chatting about other things by way of relief, we gradually returned 'to the dreaded subject. She spoke very slowly, as though she were weighing every word. Clasping her hands tightly and with a far-oil in her eyes, as though she were living again those long years of horror, she began - " what is penal servitude like ? How can II fell you? It' is like nothing else. It is impossible to describe it— words can paint its miseries. Nothing that I could sav would give any idea of the horrors of solitary confinement. It maddens one to think of ii. No one who has not been through, it can conceive the awful anguish cue lias to endure when shut up in a living | tomb. You think, think, think, till you ] become by turns hysterical and imbecile. ; Thrown back upon yourself, nothing to do but think, t'tiink, think of all that might have tecen— the poor, little child, the unconscious cause of all this trouble : of iioiv you loved it.—how you suffered for it— bow could you—oh. God ! —of your dear mother ; of "her pitiful, ghastly face, when the big policeman said, "My girl, you iv.list come with me of your sister, and your parting with her : of the once happy iiome. now a home of sorrow through you ; 'of the long, long years to come, to be spent in this torture. No one who has not. experienced it can realise the sensation of being locked up in a cell. You may be fearfully cold, as you often are, yet the overpowering sensation is one of suffocation. You feel that you must and can smash the wall-, burst open the door. You feel that you must kill yourself. Why not ': Why linger on in that cell for years? Why not strangle yourself, dash your head against the wall, starve yourself? Then, jjerhaps. you have a tit of hysterical screaming. and thoughts come into your head and words into your month unknown to you before—. Then the reaction comes, and you relapse into sheer, stupid melancholy, caring for nothinga mental ar,-d moral wreck.

" The cruellest part of the system is its hopelessness. I remember a nice young girl of about twenty at Fulham, who was always getting into trouble. I tried to reason with her once when we happens, to be together, but she said quietly, 'What is the use of trying to be good? I am in lor life—let them kill me. The sooner I riie the better."

"* Oh. Clod, have pity on all prisoners and captives ! My mother came to see me on- only once. My poor, dear mother"' there she broke down). " I shall never forget her face when she saw me through the iron bars. Her little pet shut up like a wild beast .' Year? of suffering- appeared to be concentrated in her face, and she went, away years older. Before the time came for seeing her train she was dead. Oh, my dear, dear mother (breaking down again). Warming with her subject, she said : — 11 It is too cruel—it is too fiendishly cruel >the devil himself could invent nothing go cruel as; to shut up a woman in a cell to prey noon herself till she breaks down in body aad mind, and it's no use the authorities savins it is not done, because it is done. I have heard and seen women raving mad. and no wonder. Day after day, and night after nigh: (oh ! those awful nights, End that toiling Westminster bell), day utter day. and night after night, with my head and heart feeling as if they would burst, I 'nave prayed God to keep me from going our of my mindprayed that I might die. I tell you that if the public knew what penal servitude was the gaols would mobbed. I tell you that no crime that a poor tempted woman could commit deserves such treatment. Shut up a dog in that way, and it would refuse its food and die. Do you think a woman halfstarved and penned in her lonely cell feels contrition ? Broken down she may be in body and mind. I wag a strong, healthy girl when I went into gaol, but I was a chronic invalid before my nine months was over. I ask. Do you think a girl treated as you would not dare to treat a brute beast feels contrition ? Of course mot. She feels aggrieved. She feels that ehe is a victim. She feels that cruel injustice drove her to a crime the commission of which was against her very nature, and which she would have given worlds to undo a.- soon a.- done, and in the madness of her despair she curses her cruel fate. That f-tn-s of injustice has burned into my brain, and now when I see that a poor young creature is sentenced to death or to long years of penal servitude, mv heart goes out to her. and 1 cry, 1 How long, 0 Lord, how long ?" "