The second inspector, the Rev. Whitworth Russell, was the chaplain of Millbank penitentiary, the great architectural experiment which grew out of the strong representations of Jeremy Bentham and others, and was the first national recognition of the principle that punishment must be reformatory as well as deterrent.
Messrs. Crawford and Russell proceeded to carry out their new functions with commendable energy, and without a moment's loss of time. The ink was barely dry upon their letters of appointment before they appeared at Newgate, and commenced a searching investigation. They attended early and late; they mustered the prisoners, examined into their condition, took voluminous evidence from all classes of individuals, from the governor down to the convict in the condemned cells. They visited the wards after locking-up time, and saw with their own eyes what went on. Having started with the proposition that the metropolitan prisons must monopolize their attention, as constituting, to use their own words, "a subject of magnitude and importance sufficient to exclude other gaols," they soon narrowed their inquiry still further, and limited it to Newgate alone. Newgate indeed became the sole theme of their first report. The fact was that the years as they passed, nearly twenty in all, had worked but little permanent improvement in this detestable prison. Changes introduced under pressure had been only skin deep. Relapse was rapid and inevitable, so that the latter state of the prison was worse than the first. The disgraceful overcrowding had been partially ended, but the same evils of indiscriminate association were still present; there was the old neglect of decency, the same callous indifference to the moral well-being of the prisoners, the same want of employment and of all disciplinary control.
All these evils were set forth at length in the inspectors' first report. There was no longer the faintest possible excuse for overcrowding. The numbers now committed to Newgate had sensibly diminished. The prison had become more or less a place of detention only, harbouring mainly those awaiting trial. To these were still added an average of about fifty expecting the last penalty of the law; a certain number of transports awaiting removal to the colonies; an occasional prisoner or two committed by the Houses of Parliament, the Courts of King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer, the Commissioners of bankruptcy and of taxes; smugglers, and a larger number sentenced for very short terms, and for offences of the most varying description, by the Central Criminal Court. The sum total thus produced was inconsiderable compared with the hundreds that had formerly filled the gaol, and the whole by proper management might have been so accommodated as to prevent overcrowding. But incredible as it may appear, the authorities of Newgate declined to avail themselves of the advantages offered them, and when the population fell they shut up one half the gaol and crowded up the other. Some rooms remained quite empty and unoccupied, while others were full to overflowing. Not only were the wards thus needlessly crammed, and for no reason but the niggardliness of the corporation which refused a proper supply of bedding, but the occupants of each were huddled together indiscriminately. The inspectors found in the same wards in the chapel yard the convicted and the untried, the felon and the misdemeanant, the sane and the insane, the old and young offender. The classification prescribed by the Gaol Act, which laid down that certain prisoners should not intermix, was openly neglected, and "the greatest contempt shown for the law." In another part there were men charged with and convicted of unnatural offences shut up with lads of tender years; minor offenders charged with small thefts or non-payment of small sums were cheek by jowl with convicts sentenced to long terms of transportation. In the master's side yard, which had only one washing place, as many as seventy-eight prisoners, frequently more, were associated together, "of every variety of age, habit, and delinquency, without employment, oversight, or control." In the middle yard it was still worse. "Here," say the inspectors, "are herded together the very worst class of prisoners; certainly a more wretched combination of human beings can hardly be imagined. We have reason to fear that poverty, ragged clothes, and an inability to pay the ward dues, elsewhere exacted for better accommodation, consign many of the more petty and unpractised offenders to this place, where they inevitably meet with further contamination from the society of the most abandoned and incorrigible inmates of the gaol."