One warder said, ‘It is impossible to describe the darkness. It is pitch black, no dungeon was ever so dark.’
In a single year, 1836, there were 5,138 punishments for talking and swearing in that one prison alone. Even for prisoners confined in the normal cells, the psychological damage inflicted by months of sensory deprivation through darkness and silence was so severe that prisoners being released showed no excitement, ‘staring stupidly around them’. They were also often suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases that made them unemployable and, if they survived long enough, were prone to commit further crimes.
Dickens saw similar results during a visit to a US penitentiary, Cherry Hill, which also used the silent system.
Every prisoner who comes into the jail comes at night, is put into a bath and dressed in the prison garb, and then a black hood is drawn over his face and head, and he is led to the cell from which he never stirs again until his whole period of confinement has expired. I looked at some of them with the same awe as I should have looked at men who have been buried alive and dug up again.
Chesterton’s silent system did not become universal until 1863, when a wave of crime in London, particularly robbery with violence, led to the setting up of a Select Committee under Lord Carnarvon.
The committee’s conclusion was that, ‘A separate system must now be accepted as the foundation of prison discipline. Its rigid maintenance is a vital principal to the efficiency of county and borough jails. Other means employed for the reformation of offenders should always be accompanied by due and effective punishment.’
The committee made a statutory definition of hard labour. It was to be an endless, painful cycle of meaningless repetitions of a gruelling task. The aim was exhaustion and humiliation, not rehabilitation.
First-class hard labour was the treadwheel, the crank, the shot-drill, the capstan and stone-breaking. Of these, ‘The treadwheel and the crank performed the principal elements of prison discipline.’
The treadmill at Holloway at least had a function: driving the pumps that supplied the prison’s water. It was fifty-four feet long and twenty-four feet in diameter and had places for twenty-four prisoners — sixteen men and eight boys. They stood in numbered compartments, gripped a horizontal bar for support and pushed the treads down with their feet.
Although relatively safe compared to the ancient treadmills in use at other prisons — three separate incidents of prisoners being crushed to death inside the treadmill were recorded at Aylesbury prison in a single year — careless or exhausted prisoners at Holloway could become caught by the foot or leg and it was impossible to stop the wheel in time to prevent the mutilation or even death of a trapped person.
The crank was, A narrow drum placed on legs with a long handle on one side which, on being turned, causes a series of cups or scoops in the interior to revolve. At the lower part of the interior of the machine is a thick layer of sand which the cups as they come round scoop up and carry to the top of the wheel, where they throw it out and empty themselves after the principal of a dredging machine. A dial plate fixed in front of the iron drum shows how many revolutions the machine has made.
Cranks were set up in each prisoner’s cell and they were forced to work them in silence and isolation. Failure to do the prescribed number of turns led to confinement in a dark cell or a flogging.
The shot-drill drew from Mayhew and Binny the comment that, ‘It is impossible to imagine anything more ingeniously useless than this form of hard labour.’
Prisoners were lined up in a row in the exercise yard next to a pyramid of shot — iron cannon balls. The first prisoner in the row would pick up a cannon ball, place it at his feet, then pick it up again and pass it to the next man. This was repeated all the way down the line to the last man who built the cannon balls into another pyramid. Then they were passed back down the line again.
Second-class hard labour, such as oakum-picking, was less onerous, but prisoners only graduated to that after at least three months of first-class hard labour. It required old ship’s rope to be unpicked by hand, first into its individual strands, and then into their constituent threads. Each day three pounds of it had to be reduced to ‘a fine soft tow by the bare fingers of each man, before he lays down to rest’. If not enough had been produced a punishment would result.
The Holloway regime alternated twenty minutes on the treadmill with twenty picking oakum. The oakum was made into mats by prisoners on secondary hard labour and the prison even made a profit on their sale to railways and other institutions. The clothing workshops also sold prison uniforms to other gaols and to the convict colony in Gibraltar.
The penalty for offences committed in prison was ‘degradation from a higher to a lower and more penal class, combined with harder labour and a more sparing diet, but where the offender is hardened and the offence deliberately repeated, corporal punishment is the most effective, and sometimes the only remedy’.
The committee’s proposals were embodied in the Prison Act of 1865. Under its provisions, the distinction between ‘Houses of Correction’ like Holloway and Pentonville, which had housed male and female convicts serving sentences from seven days up to two years, and the ancient and decrepit gaols and prison hulks where long-term prisoners were held, was abolished.
All prisoners were now to be,
prevented from holding any communication with each other, either by every prisoner being kept in a separate cell by day and night, except when he is in chapel or taking exercise, or by every prisoner being confined by night in his cell and being subjected to such superintendence during the day as will prevent his communicating with any other prisoner.
Prison food was kept deliberately meagre and plain. The prison inspectors required that ‘The quality of food should be given in all cases which is sufficient, and not more than sufficient, to maintain health and strength at the least possible cost.’ That was normally interpreted as gruel and half a pound of bread twice a day — thin rations for men condemned to back-breaking hard labour.
Hammocks were replaced by bare wooden beds, and chains and irons were reintroduced for troublesome prisoners. The governor’s office included an arsenal of muskets, pistols, bayonets and cutlasses in case of a riot.
Governors were also given powers to punish other breaches of the rules with up to three days and three nights of solitary confinement in a dark cell on bread and water, and visiting justices could extend that to as much as a month or order a flogging at the gaol whipping-post.
As the Illustrated London News reported,
The flogging box is a combination of the principal of the pillory with that of the stocks. The hands are held fast in an erect frame before the patient’s face and his legs are secured in two holes in the wooden box where he stands during the process of manual expostulation applied by means of a nine-lashed scourge, or a birchen rod for boys.
An additional punishment was deprivation of work, for even hard labour was preferable to the monotony of being forced to stay silent and motionless in a dark cell all day and all night.
Prisoners wore snuff-brown convict suits or grey jackets, trousers, caps and grey stockings, all marked with red stripes, and when transferred between gaols, lines of prisoners were chained to each other by the wrist.
Mayhew and Binny described the system as ‘penal purgatory, where men are submitted to the chastisement of separate confinement so as to fit them for the after state’ — hard labour or transportation.
Like public executions and imprisonment for debt — abolished in 1869 — transportation to the colonies was one of the leftovers from an earlier age, abolished soon after the Prison Act became law. The last women convicts had been transported in 1852 and the last convict ship with male prisoners aboard sailed in 1867.