During the recrudescence of persecution at this period, the number of condemnations to imprisonment was large; in the Granada auto of December 21, 1720, there were twenty-seven and, in sixty-four autos between 1721 and 1727, there were seven hundred and forty.[438] How these numerous prisoners were accommodated it would be difficult to guess, for the neglect of the penitential prisons was progressive and, in the census of all the tribunals, about 1750, but three reported to have alcaides--Córdova, Granada and Murcia.[439] It does not follow that others had not prisons, but only that they had no prisoners and cared to have none. For instance, in 1794, when the Suprema inquired of Valencia whether its prison would suit for the priest Juan Fernández Sotelo, whose health required a change from the convent where he was recluded, the tribunal craftily replied that its prison was constructed with cells and dungeons and that, in the eyes of the people, confinement in it produced infamy, so that quarters for Sotelo had better be found in some convent in the suburbs. Apparently it forgot all this when, in 1802, it complained that the salaries of its secretaries had not been raised in 1795, while that of the alcaide of the penitential prison had been increased from a hundred and twenty to twenty-two hundred reales, although he had nothing to do, and enjoyed the use of a house in the prison as good as those of the inquisitors.[440]
In fact, by this time penitential imprisonment was virtually obsolete. After the subsidence of the active persecution of Judaism, the Toledo tribunal which, in 1738, pronounced twelve sentences of prison, did not utter another until 1756. Then a long interval occurs, of thirty-eight years, before the next one, which was for heretical propositions.[441] It would not, perhaps, be safe to say that, in the concluding years of the Inquisition, this form of punishment was wholly unknown, but no cases of it have come under my observation.
There was the same reduction in the duration of imprisonment as in its severity, owing presumably to the same economical motive. As we have seen, the medieval Church recognized only lifelong imprisonment as the fitting penalty for the heretic who saved his forfeited life by recantation and, in recognition of this, the penitential prison in Spain was officially known as the perpetual prison, the sentences being always for perpetual imprisonment. At a very early period, however, it was clearly recognized that the literal enforcement of this was a physical impossibility. Bernaldez tells us that in Seville, up to 1488, there had been five thousand reconciled and condemned to perpetual imprisonment, but they were released after four or five years with sanbenitos and these were subsequently removed to prevent the spread of infamy throughout the land.[442] At Barcelona the tribunal had scarce been established, when we find it drawing a distinction in its sentences to perpetual imprisonment, some being _cum misericordia_ and others _absque misericordia_--thus anticipating the so-called "irremissible" perpetual prison--and from the sentences it would appear that "without mercy" was exceptional.[443]