ÊIt will hardly be denied after an impartial consideration of all the facts I shall herein set forth, that the British prison system can challenge comparison with any in the world. It may be no more perfect than other human institutions, but its administrators have laboured long and steadfastly to approximate perfection. Many countries have already paid it the compliment of imitation. In most of the British colonies, the prison system so nearly resembles the system of the mother country, that I have not given their institutions any separate and distinct description. No doubt different methods are employed in the great Empire of India; but they also are the outcome of experience, and follow lines most suited to the climate and character of the people for whom they are intended. Cellular imprisonment would be impossible in India. Association is inevitable in the Indian prison system. Again, it is the failure to find suitable European subordinate officers that has brought about the employment of the best-behaved prisoners in the discipline of their comrades: a system, as I have been at some pains to point out, quite abhorrent to modern ideas of prison management. As for the retention of transportation by the Indian government, when so clearly condemned at home, it is defensible on the grounds that the penalty of crossing the sea, the "Black Water," possesses peculiar terrors to the Oriental mind; and the Andaman Islands are, moreover, within such easy distance as to ensure their effective supervision and control. Nearer home, we may see Austria adopting an English method,Ñthe "movable" or temporary prison, by the use of which such works as changing the courses of rivers have been rendered possible and the prison edifices of Lepoglava, Aszod and Kolosvar erected, in imitation of Chattenden, Borstal and Wormwood Scrubs. France has also constructed in the outskirts of Paris a new prison for the department of the Seine, and she may yet find that the British progressive system is more effective for controlling habitual crime than transportation to New Caledonia. In a country where every individual is ticketed and labelled from birth, where police methods are quite despotic, and the law claims the right, in the interests of the larger number, to override the liberty of the subject, the professional criminal might be held at a tremendous disadvantage. It is true that the same result might be expected from the Belgian plan of prolonged cellular confinement; but, as I shall point out, this system is more costly, and can only be enforced with greater or less, but always possible, risks to health and reason.

THE three principal prisons in London in the fourteenth century were the Fleet, the KingÕs Bench and the Marshalsea, but Newgate took precedence in interest because identified with its earliest history. All have their peculiar histories full of interesting associations, replete with memories of famous inmates and striking incidents, and all are worthy of detailed description. All alike received prisoners for debt and on occasion, more heinous offenders, especially in the earlier years of their existence. The old KingÕs Bench was the peculiar prison for the Court of that name, but it also took debtors committed by the Court of Exchequer and the Court of Common Pleas. The Marshalsea Court, so called from having been originally under the control of the Knight Marshal of the Royal Household, was at first intended to settle differences between the lesser servants of the palace, and had its own judge, counsel and attorneys, but none except members of CliffordÕs Inn were permitted to practise in this court. The jurisdiction of this court extended twelve miles round Whitehall, excluding the city of London. It also served the Admiralty Court and received prisoners charged with piracy. The Fleet prison took its name from the little stream long stigmatised as the ÒFleet Ditch,Ó the open sewer or water-way which rose in the eastern ridge of Hampstead Hill, flowed by ÒOldbourneÓ or Holborn under four bridges to discharge into the Thames on the west side of Blackfriars bridge. As time passed this ditch, after being deepened once or twice to allow for water traffic, became more and more pestilential and was at length filled up and arched over, becoming then the site of Fleet Market in what is now known as Farringdon Street, on which the main gates of the prison opened. The building was of great antiquity and is first mentioned in authentic records about A. D. 1197. A deed of that date granted it to the safe keeping of one Nathaniel de Leveland and his son Robert, in conjunction with the KingÕs Houses at Westminster. It is stated that the Fleet prison had been the inheritance of the Levelands since the time of the Norman Conquest. Four years later this same Robert de Leveland petitioned King John for leave to hand over the wardenship of the Fleet to Simon Fitz-Robert, archdeacon of Wells, while he, Leveland, proceeded with the crusaders to the Holy Land. He returned very shortly afterward, as appears from a grant of moneys made him by the City of London in 1205, his salary for guardianship of the prison. His wife Margaret was also granted an allowance as keeper of the Westminster Royal Houses.

The period in French prison practice treated in this volume is one of transition between the end of the Old Régime and the beginning of the New. It presents first a view of the prisons of the period immediately following the Revolution, and concludes with the consideration of a great model penitentiary, which may be said to be the “last word” in the purely physical aspects of the whole question, while its very perfection of structure and equipment gives rise to important moral questions, which must dominate the future of prison conduct. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the combat with the great army of depredators was unceasingly waged by the champions of law and order in France, to whom in the long run victory chiefly inclined. As yet none of the new views held by prison reformers in other countries had made any progress in France. No ideas of combining coercion with persuasion, of going beyond deterrence by attempting reformation by exhortation; of curing the wrong-doer and weaning him from his evil practices, when once more sent out into the world, obtained in French penology. At that earlier date all the old methods, worked by the same machinery, still prevailed and were, as ever, ineffective in checking crime. An active, and for the most part intelligent police was indefatigable in the pursuit of offenders, who, when caught and sentenced travelled the old beaten track, passing from prison to prison, making long halts at the bagnes and concluding their persistent trespasses upon the guillotine, but that was all. French prisons long lagged behind advanced practices abroad, not only in respect of their structural fitness and physical condition, but also in the measure in which the method of conducting them effected the morals of those who passed through them. When the question was at last presented, it was considered with the logical thoroughness and carried out with the administrative efficiency characteristic of the French government, when impressed with the necessity for action in any given line. The question for the French prison authorities—as indeed it is the question of questions for the prison government of all nations—is now: “What can be and shall be done for the reform of the convict rather than for his mere repression and punishment?” The material aspects of the French prison system have attained almost to perfection. These, as well as the moral aspects of the subject, which that very physical perfection inevitably presents, it is the purpose of this volume to consider.

The judicial administration of France had its origin in the Feudal System. The great nobles ruled their estates side by side with, and not under, the King. With him the great barons exercised ÒhighÓ justice, extending to life and limb. The seigneurs and great clerics dispensed ÒmiddleÓ justice and imposed certain corporal penalties, while the power of ÒlowÓ justice, extending only to the amende and imprisonment, was wielded by smaller jurisdictions. The whole history of France is summed up in the persistent effort of the King to establish an absolute monarchy, and three centuries were passed in a struggle between nobles, parliaments and the eventually supreme ruler. Each jurisdiction was supported by various methods of enforcing its authority: All, however, had their prisons, which served many purposes. The prison was first of all a place of detention and durance where people deemed dangerous might be kept out of the way of doing harm and law-breakers could be called to account for their misdeeds. Accused persons were in it held safely until they could be arraigned before the tribunals, and after conviction by legal process were sentenced to the various penalties in force. The prison was de facto the high road to the scaffold on which the condemned suffered the extreme penalty by one or another of the forms of capital punishment, and death was dealt out indifferently by decapitation, the noose, the stake or the wheel. Too often where proof was weak or wanting, torture was called in to assist in extorting confession of guilt, and again, the same hideous practice was applied to the convicted, either to aggravate their pains or to compel the betrayal of suspected confederates and accomplices. The prison reflected every phase of passing criminality and was the constant home of wrong-doers of all categories, heinous and venial. Offenders against the common law met their just retribution. Many thousands were committed for sins political and non-criminal, the victims of an arbitrary monarch and his high-handed, irresponsible ministers. The prison was the KingÕs castle, his stronghold for the coercion and safe-keeping of all who conspired against his person or threatened his peace. It was a social reformatory in which he disciplined the dissolute and the wastrel, the loose-livers of both sexes, who were thus obliged to run straight and kept out of mischief by the stringent curtailment of their liberty. The prison, last of all, played into the hands of the rich against the poor, active champion of the commercial code, taking the side of creditors by holding all debtors fast until they could satisfy the legal, and at times illegal demands made upon them.