The general arrangement for a term of penal
servitude in convict prisons is as follows: Solitary
imprisonment at Pentonville or Millbank for
twelve months, that may be shortened to ten;
during which time special regard is paid to the
prisoner's intellectual and religious instruction;
afterwards he is transferred to one of the Public
Works prisons, where there are three stages
through which he must pass. The lowest has
no stripes and no gratuities; the second has one
stripe and sixpence a week; the third two stripes
and ninepence a week, with the addition of
V. G. (very good). If he keeps his V. G. a
year, he gets a different dress and certain
additional privileges. When the minimum term of
his punishment has come he is recommended
for remission, all forfeitures of time for misconduct
being deducted; but if he has been well
conducted for a certain period, then the governor
submits his case to the director, and the director
judges whether what time he has lost by
misconduct shall be given back to him, or whether
he shall be kept a little longer in prison before
bursting forth into the world as a ticket-of-leave.
Thus, the maximum term of punishment is a mere
phrase; and every prisoner knows that he will
have a certain term remitted. If he is degraded
back to the third class, it takes him three months
to get to the second, and three more to get to
the first.

The Public Works prisons are at Portland,
Chatham, Woking, Dartmoor, and Broadmoor;
this last is generally appropriated to criminals
of unsound intellect, and Dartmoor is for those
whose health is unequal to the rougher life of
Chatham or Portland. Miss Carpenter gives
Chatham as the type of the rest. There are
one thousand one hundred prisoners, and one
hundred and nineteen officers to either serve
or control them. Their hours of work are
few, their dietary is better than what many
a labouring man, and certainly no pauper,
obtains. A pint of cocoa every day, and a pint
of tea in addition every other day, with twelve
ounces of bread for breakfast; six ounces of
cooked meat without bone (a housekeeper will
tell you that half a pound of uncooked meat,
taking bone and fat together, is the average for
each member of a household), one pound of
potatoes, and six ounces of bread for dinner; a
pint of oatmeal gruel, and six ounces of bread
for supper; these form, their ordinary meals.
Three days in the week the meat is alternated
with a pint of soup, a pound of potatoes, and
six ounces of bread for dinner. In the second
and third stages three ounces of bread, and two
of cheese are given as extras on Sunday; with
the further indulgence of half a pint of beer or
porter in the third class, and a small suet
pudding on Thursday; while four times a week
the meat is roasted instead of boiled, and twice
mutton is substituted for beef. Thus, the
sensual indulgence of the appetite becomes the
grand leverage for making men into good
prisoners. If any prisoner suspects that his
dinner is not of full weight, he has the right to
demand that it be weighed before him; which
is not unfrequently done by the malicious to
spite the officers. But indeed the orderlies,
who are prisoners themselves and who serve out
the dinners of the rest, often filch from the mess
allowed, in spite of the vigilance of the warders
and officers on guard.

In their public work they are mixed up with
the free labourers; and though forbidden to
talk or laugh loudly, have still means of
conversing so long as they will content themselves
with soft-voiced and unobtrusive talk; and we
need not romance very wildly to understand
something of the evil which must result from
the association, both with the less-hardened
among themselves and with the free labourers
outside. The amount of work done, says Miss
Carpenter, alone determines the report given
of the prisoners' conduct. "It has often been
perplexing to the public to hear that men of a
very bad character are marked G., or even
V. G. We learn from the evidence before
us, that these letters are quite irrespective
of the general conduct of the prisoners, and
indicate only a good report of their work. 'It
is not always the worst of characters,' says the
governor, 'who work the worst.' " The V. G.s
are given on the report of the warders, checked
by the superintendent warder; and the warders
have certain gratuities in excess of their salaries,
according to the good conduct of their parties;
and though the gratuity is not manifestly
regulated by the report, and "though the
warder does not diminish his chance of getting
his own gratuity by reporting the bad conduct
of any of the men under him, if a favourable
opinion is entertained of his zeal and judgment
by his superior officers, yet there has not been
a case in which a warder has reported favourably
of his gang in which he has not had a gratuity."
The convict's own gratuity depends on the
warder's report, checked by the superior officer.
Thus, if he has V. G., he gets ninepence a week
or three-halfpence a day credited to him; if G.,
he has sixpence a week or a penny a day; if he
has not G., he gets nothing. He also gets
something for his class—sixpence a week for the
first class, and fourpence for the second, nothing
for the third; hence the anomaly that the
longest sentences, and presumably the worst
offenders, have the largest sum accumulated
to their good when they go out; so that the
greater the crime, the greater the reward.
In the Chatham outbreak the worst men
bad the largest gratuities, and many were
recommended for discharge. Yet even with all
these little temptations to do well—or rather
to work well, for that seems to be about the
sum of the virtue required—the men often sham
sickness, when they go off to separate cells on
full diet; these separate cells being the most
comfortable part of the prison, at least in the
Portland prison. Dr. Houghton, the medical
man of that prison, says, after recommending
half diet for those in the cells, "I feel convinced
that this arrangement will have more effect on
the prisoners than many months of confinement
on the present allowance; it will check all that