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                           CHILDREN IN PRISON
                                  AND
                            OTHER CRUELTIES
                                   OF
                              PRISON LIFE.

                             MURDOCH & CO.,
                        26, PATERNOSTER SQUARE,
                                LONDON.




PUBLISHERS' NOTE.


The circumstance which called forth this letter is a woeful one for
Christian England. Martin, the Reading warder, is found guilty of
feeding the hungry, nursing the sick, of being kindly and humane. These
are his offences in plain unofficial language.

This pamphlet is tendered to earnest persons as evidence that the prison
system is opposed to all that is kind and helpful. Herein is shown a
process that is dehumanizing, not only to the prisoners, but to every
one connected with it.

Martin was dismissed. It happened in May last year. He is still out of
employment and in poor circumstances. Can anyone help him?

                                                       _February, 1898._




SOME CRUELTIES OF PRISON LIFE.


                   THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

SIR,--I learn with great regret, through an extract from the columns of
your paper, that the warder Martin, of Reading Prison, has been
dismissed by the Prison Commissioners for having given some sweet
biscuits to a little hungry child. I saw the three children myself on
the Monday preceding my release. They had just been convicted, and were
standing in a row in the central hall in their prison dress, carrying
their sheets under the arms previous to their being sent to the cells
allotted to them. I happened to be passing along one of the galleries on
my way to the reception room, where I was to have an interview with a
friend. They were quite small children, the youngest--the one to whom
the warder gave the biscuits--being a tiny little chap, for whom they
had evidently been unable to find clothes small enough to fit. I had, of
course, seen many children in prison during the two years during which I
was myself confined. Wandsworth Prison, especially, contained always a
large number of children. But the little child I saw on the afternoon of
Monday, the 17th, at Reading, was tinier than any one of them. I need
not say how utterly distressed I was to see these children at Reading,
for I knew the treatment in store for them. The cruelty that is
practised by day and night on children in English prisons is incredible,
except to those who have witnessed it and are aware of the brutality of
the system.

People nowadays do not understand what cruelty is. They regard it as a
sort of terrible mediaeval passion, and connect it with the race of men
like Eccelin da Romano, and others, to whom the deliberate infliction of
pain gave a real madness of pleasure. But men of the stamp of Eccelin
are merely abnormal types of perverted individualism. Ordinary cruelty
is simply stupidity. It comes from the entire want of imagination. It is
the result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard-and-fast rules,
of centralisation, of officialism, and of irresponsible authority.
Wherever there is centralisation there is stupidity. What is inhuman in
modern life is officialism. Authority is as destructive to those who
exercise it as it is to those on whom it is exercised. It is the Prison
Board, with the system that it carries out, that is the primary source
of the cruelty that is exercised on a child in prison. The people who
uphold the system have excellent intentions. Those who carry it out are
humane in intention also. Responsibility is shifted on to the
disciplinary regulations. It is supposed that because a thing is the
rule it is right.

The present treatment of children is terrible, primarily from people not
understanding the peculiar psychology of a