shamming and scheming so common among
prisoners, who are chiefly to be ruled through the
stomach. I also beg to observe that the separate
cells are the most comfortable part of the prison,
where they have books to read, and prefer to eat
the bread of idleness to working, and will otherwise
be always a dead weight on the establishment."
And Sir Joshua Jebb adds to this
that the adoption of Dr. Houghton's
recommendation had an immediate and marked effect
in stopping the practice of going off to the
separate cells—the qualification therefore being
pretended sickness, or a slight offence. Miss
Carpenter truly remarks on the small amount
of moral influence in a place where its members
can only be governed through their appetites.

Yet, though the G.s and V. G.s are given
liberally enough, still the amount of work got
from the men is not much: one free quarry-
man being equal to two prisoners, according
to the testimony of Mr. Evans, a railway
agent, and consequently a keen judge of a fair
day's work.

Comfortably lodged, fed luxuriously—
relatively to the pauper or the ordinary working man
—by no means over-worked, and coaxed by all
manner of sensual indulgences to be "good
prisoners" (quite another thing to being "good
men"), one would think that the internal working
of these prisons would be smooth as the rolling
of ivory balls; but what can we say when we
hear that "the assaults upon officers in the
convict prisons are a peculiar feature of their
condition?" Chiefly in the invalids prisons,
and sometimes, as at Chatham and Portland,
rising to formidable dimensions in the Works
prisons. Generally, too, individual cases are
going on of almost inconceivable ingenuity in
tormenting the officers, or, it may be, of almost
inconceivable brutality in assaulting them. At
Millbank once, a man picked up a needle
somewhere about the place, and sewed up his mouth
and eyelids, for no better reason (save the real
one of creating alarm and annoyance) than that
"he thought he would not eat any more." Another
man feigned fits of madness, not persistently,
but at various times; he was brutal and
disgusting in speech and conduct, would not
work nor take exercise, assaulted the warders,
and used blasphemous and foul language. Dr.
Guy threatened him with a flogging if he had
another outbreak, which kept him quiet; and
when he refused to exercise took away his
dinner; on which the man said sullenly, if he
could not have his dinner on his own terms
he would starve. The doctor answered him,
that he would bear starvation very well, and so
left him. Whereupon he starved. But he
could not resist the savoury Sunday dinner,
though he went back to starvation on the
Monday. Finding that he could not frighten or
bend the authorities, and that he was left to
his self-martyrdom without crown or fagot, he
turned over a new leaf—picked his coir, took
his exercise, ate his dinner, and became as
decent a prisoner as they had on their books
for a time.

Prisoners will pound glass—if they can get
it, and they can sometimes—and swallow it, to
make themselves mysteriously ill; chewed soap
and self- inflicted bruises are well-known
"dodges" pointing to the infirmary, good
food, and nothing to do; simulated fits are the
very alphabet of the more knowing; and like
unwilling conscripts, they even maim and cripple
and put themselves to undoubted pain, simply
to escape the daily toil of work. All this they
will do, not to speak of every now and then
pulling a warder's life in jeopardy by the sudden
use of some deadly weapon cunningly contrived
and more cunningly concealed. But under the
new régime that has set in of trying only
to make good prisoners, they are seldom
severely punished for these offences, says Miss
Carpenter; scarcely ever sufficiently so; because
punishment makes them sulky and leads
to further confusion. This cannot be said of
the Chatham and Portland Island rioters. The
punishment in both these cases was swift and
severe enough, though not beyond deserving.

Thus, neither high living nor slight work,
neither personal indulgences nor pecuniary
gratuities, render the English system satisfactory
either for ultimate reform or even for peaceable
warding. The main flaw in it, seems to be that,
being based on time sentences, it gives the men
no interest in their own improvement, and
therefore does not get them into good habits; and
that all the gratuities and indulgences which
come to them, come as bribes over and
beyond their deserts legal or moral; not as
honest wages honestly wrought for. And,
from this main flaw, branch out all the other
faults; the want of progressive stages of moral
liberty; the want of exercise of free will, so that
a man may prove his reformation before being let
loose on society again; and the want of all satisfactory
tests of his real condition, so long as he is
a "good prisoner," and gives no trouble to his
keepers. To lock a man up for a given time,
and put him to disagreeable work meanwhile, is
a simply punitive system; to add to this
certain personal indulgences, only to please
and keep him in a good humour, is weakness
not benevolence—destroying the natural effect
of one principle without substituting that of
another; and to call him reformed and fit to
take his place among honest men again, when
he is obliged to be locked up, and guarded with
warders and fire-arms like a wild beast—when
he cannot be trusted for one single moment to
his own devices—and when no one can possibly
judge of his reformation save by the amount of
glib cant that he can talk, and his resignation
to his position as a prisoner, with a determination
in the wiser to make the best of it that
they can for their own comfort—is simply
insulting our common sense, and giving neither
criminal nor society a fair chance.

As for the tickets-of-leave, they have been
sufficiently tried now to prove their utter
worthlessness as signs of a man's well-doing, or
as reasons for public trust. They are given as
matters of course to all who have not so grossly