Charges of harshness and cruelty—Parliamentary enquiry—Charges entirely disproved—Increased efforts at reform by segregating prisoners—Their improved demeanour—Prison very quiet—Cases of weakened intellect and insanity—Rules relaxed and contemplated change in the penitentiary system—Millbank a failure—New uses devised for the prison—Becomes part of the new scheme for transportation.
WHILE the criminals of the period were passing in and out of Millbank, and Mr. Nihil, backed up by his committee, was working indefatigably and with the best intentions, the credit of the establishment was suddenly impugned in no measured terms. It was doubtful indeed whether the ship could weather the storm of invective that broke upon it. Had the managers of Millbank been ogres instead of painstaking philanthropists working for the public good, they could not have been more rancorously assailed. But here was a case where the people suffered because their rulers squabbled. It was a period when party warfare ran high and the Opposition hailed eagerly any opportunity of bringing discredit upon the Ministry. The attack made upon the Penitentiary was really directed against the Government.
On the 26th February, 1838, a noble lord rose in his place to call the attention of the House of Lords to a grave failure in the administration of criminal justice. “All London, the whole country, was ringing with it,” said another noble lord. “It has been a topic of universal reprobation co-extensive with the hourly increasing sphere in which it has been known. All Westminster has talked of it, all Middlesex has turned its eyes to the quarter in which the abuse occurred. I will venture to say,” continued his lordship, “that it has been more talked of, more discussed, more indignantly commented upon in every corner of this great town and of this populous country, than any one subject either in or out of Parliament, or in any one of the courts of justice, civil or criminal.” It appeared that in Millbank, a prison exempt from the general jurisdiction of the county magistrates, and governed only by the Home Secretary, there had occurred five cases of unwarranted harshness and cruelty. Three little girls and two fine young men had been completely broken down by the system of solitary confinement therein practised. The children were mere infants: one, as it was alleged, was little more than seven years old; the other two were eight and ten respectively. Yet at this tender age they had been cut off entirely from the consoling influences of home and the kindly intercourse of relatives and companions, to be immured in solitary wretchedness for nearly thirteen consecutive months. So bitterly did these little ones lament the loneliness of their lengthened seclusion, that one asked piteously for a doll to keep her company, and all three were found at different times sleeping with their bedclothes twisted to simulate a baby, so earnestly did they yearn for something like ideal society in their dreary confinement. More than this: the punishment of continued solitude had produced in them a marked infirmity of mind, manifested by great impediment of speech, and general difficulty in the expression of ideas. A gentleman, one of the Middlesex magistrates, who had visited the Penitentiary, described the effect upon their speech such as to render their voices “feeble, low, and inarticulate—to produce a kind of inward speaking, visible to and palpable to every one who heard them.” So much for the children. As for the young men, one of them, who had previously been remarkable for great activity and intelligence, came out in a state of idiocy, and was afterwards retained as an idiot in St. Marylebone workhouse, reduced to such a state of utter and helpless imbecility as to be incapable of being employed even in breaking stones. The other was similarly affected. And yet all this was contrary to law. Here were prisoners subjected to uninterrupted solitary confinement for twelve and thirteen months, when by a recent Act it was expressly ordered that no such punishment should last for more than one month at a time, and never for more than three months in the year. Circumstances very disgraceful beyond doubt, if the charge were only proved, and entailing a weight of awful responsibility on those who were accountable to the public.