MikhailT/lj-speech huggingface dataset:
Enough has probably been extracted from this most damnatory report to give a complete picture of the disgraceful state in which Newgate still remained in 1835.
The inspectors, however, honestly admitted that although the site of the prison was convenient, its construction was as bad as bad could be.
Valuable space was cumbered with many long and winding passages, numerous staircases, and unnecessarily thick and cumbrous inner walls.
The wards were in some cases spacious, but they were entirely unsuited for separation or the inspection of prisoners.
The yards were narrow and confined, mainly because the ground plan was radically vicious. These were evils inseparable from the place.
But there were others remediable under a better system of management.
More attention to ventilation, which was altogether neglected and inadequate, would have secured a better atmosphere for the unhappy inmates
who constantly breathed an air heavy, and, when the wards were first opened in the morning, particularly offensive.
Again, the discipline commonly deemed inseparable from every place of durance was entirely wanting.
The primary object of committing a prisoner to jail, as the inspectors pointed out, was to deter not only the criminal himself, but others from crime,
and "to dispose him, by meditation and seclusion, to return to an honest life."
But at Newgate the convicted prisoner, instead of privation and hard fare,
"is permitted to purchase whatever his own means or the means of his friends in or out of prison can afford,
and he can almost invariably procure the luxuries of his class of life, beer and tobacco, in abundance.
Instead of seclusion and meditation, his time is passed in the midst of a body of criminals of every class and degree, in riot, debauchery, and gaming,
vaunting his own adventures, or listening to those of others;
communicating his own skill and aptitude in crime, or acquiring the lessons of greater adepts. He has access to newspapers, and of course
prefers that description which are expressly prepared for his own class, and which abound in vulgar adventure in criminal enterprise, and in the histories of the police,
the jail, and the scaffold.
He is allowed intercourse with prostitutes who, in nine cases out of ten, have originally conduced to his ruin;
and his connection with them is confirmed by that devotion and generosity towards their paramours in adversity for which these otherwise degraded women are remarkable.
Having thus passed his time, he returns a greater adept in crime, with a wider acquaintance among criminals, and, what perhaps is even more injurious to him,
is generally known to all the worst men in the country; not only without the inclination, but almost without the ability of returning to an honest life."
These pungent and well-grounded strictures applied with still greater force to the unconvicted prisoner, the man who came to the prison innocent, and still uncontaminated,
to be subjected to the same baneful influences, and to suffer the same moral deterioration, whether ultimately convicted or set free.
The whole system, or more correctly the want of system, was baneful and pernicious to the last degree.
The evils of such association were aggravated by the unbroken idleness; one "evil inflamed the other;" reformation
or any kind of moral improvement was impossible; the prisoner's career was inevitably downward, till he struck the lowest depths.
Forced and constant intercourse with the most depraved individuals of his own class;
the employment of those means and agents by which the lowest passions and the most vulgar propensities of man are perpetually kept in the highest state of excitement
drink, gaming, obscene and blasphemous language; utter idleness, the almost unrestricted admission of money and luxuries;
uncontrolled conversation with visitors of the very worst description -- prostitutes, thieves, receivers of stolen goods
all the tumultuous and diversified passions and emotions which circumstances like these must necessarily generate
forbid the faintest shadow of a hope that in a soil so unfavorable for moral culture
any awakening truth, salutary exhortation, or imperfect resolutions of amendment can take root or grow.
Strong as were the foregoing remarks, the inspectors wound up their report in still more trenchant language
framing a terrible indictment against those responsible for the condition of Newgate. Their words deserve to be quoted in full.
"We cannot close these remarks," say the inspectors, "without an expression of the painful feelings with which we submit to your Lordship
this picture of the existing state of Newgate
That in this vast metropolis, the center of wealth, civilization, and information;
distinguished as the seat of religion, worth, and philanthropy,
where is to be found in operation every expedient by which Ignorance may be superseded by Knowledge, Idleness by Industry, and Suffering by Benevolence;
that in the metropolis of this highly-favored country, to which the eyes of other lands turn for example, a system of prison discipline such as that enforced in Newgate
should be for a number of years in undisturbed operation, not only in contempt of religion and humanity,
but in opposition to the recorded denunciations of authority, and in defiance of the express enactments of the law,
is indeed a subject which cannot but impress every considerate mind with humiliation and sorrow.
We trust, however, that the day is at hand when this stain will be removed from the character of the city of London,
and when the first municipal authority of our land will be no longer subjected to the reproach of fostering an institution which outrages the rights and feelings of humanity,
defeats the ends of justice, and disgraces the profession of a Christian country.
The publication of this report raised a storm in the city, and the corporation was roused to make an immediate protest.
A committee of aldermen was forthwith appointed to report upon the inspectors' report,
and the result was another lengthy blue book, printed in the parliamentary papers, 1836,
traversing where it was possible the statements of the inspectors, and offering explanation and palliation of such evils as could not be denied.
The inspectors retorted without loss of time, reiterating their charges, and pointing out that the committee of aldermen by its own admission
justified the original allegations. It was impossible to deny the indiscriminate association; the gambling, drinking, smoking, quarreling in the jail;
the undue authority given to prisoners, the levying of garnish under another name
the neglect of the condemned convicts, the filthy condition of the wards, the insufficiency of bedding and clothing,
the misemployment of officers and prisoners by the governor.
The corporation evidently had the worst of it, and began to feel the necessity for undertaking the great work of reform.
Next year we find the inspectors expressing their satisfaction that "the full and faithful exposure which we felt it our duty to make of Newgate
has been productive of at least some advantage,
inasmuch as it has aroused the attention of those upon whom parliamentary reports and grand jury presentments had hitherto failed to make the slightest impression.
The measures of improvement introduced were mainly as follows:
the fixing of "inspection holes" in the doors and walls, so as to insure more supervision; of windows opening into the well-holes,
to give better light and ventilation; the construction of bed-places, three tiers high alongside the walls for males, two tiers for females;
the provision of dining-rooms and dining-tables.
The infirmary was enlarged, the admission of visitors limited, and the passing of articles prevented by a wire screen.
The windows were to be glazed and painted to prevent prisoners from looking out;
baths, fumigating places for clothing, wash-house, and the removal of dust-bins, completed the new arrangements in the main prison.
In the press-yard, the press-room and ward above it were parceled out into nine separate sleeping cells;
each was provided with an iron bedstead, and a small desk at which the condemned man might read or write.
But the one great and most crying evil remained unremedied.
"The mischief of jail associations," say the inspectors,
"which has been demonstrably proved to be the fruitful source of all the abuses and irregularities which have so long disgraced Newgate,
is not only permitted still to exist in the prison, but is rendered more powerful than before.
In endeavoring to arrest contamination, prisoners were more closely confined, and associated in smaller numbers;
but this had the effect of throwing them into closer contact, and of making them more intimately acquainted with, more directly influential upon, one another.
In the inspectors' fourth report, dated 1839,
they return to the charge, and again call the corporation to task for their mismanagement of Newgate.
Abuses and irregularities, which had been partially remedied by the reform introduced in 1837, were once more in the ascendant.
"In our late visits," they say, "we have seen manifest indications of a retrograde movement in this respect,
and a tendency to return to much of that laxity and remissness which formerly marked the management of this prison."
Again the following year the inspectors repeat their charge.
"The prominent evils of this prison (Newgate) -- evils which the alterations made within the last four years have failed to remove
are the association of prisoners, and the unusual contamination to which such association gives rise.
For nearly twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four the prisoners are locked up, during which time no officer is stationed in the ward with them.
They go on to say
Newgate is only less extensively injurious than formerly because it is less crowded.
The effects of the imprisonment are to vitiate its inmates, to extend their acquaintanceship with each other,
to corrupt the prisoner charged with an offense of which he may be innocent, and to confirm in guilt the young and inexperienced offender.
The reports as the years flow on reiterate the same complaints.
Much bitterness of feeling is evidently engendered, and the corporation grows more and more angry with the inspectors.
The prison officials appear to be on the side of the inspectors, to the great dissatisfaction of the corporation, who claimed the full allegiance and support of its servants.
In a resolution passed by the Court of Aldermen on 18th March, 1842,
I find it ordered "that the ordinary of Newgate be restricted from making any communications to the Home Office
or the Inspectors of Prisons, and that he be required wholly to confine himself to the performance of his duty as prescribed by Act of Parliament.
The inspectors were not to be deterred, however, by any opposition from the earnest discharge of their functions, and continued to report against Newgate.
In their tenth report
they state that they are compelled by an imperative sense of duty to advert in terms of decided condemnation to the lamentable condition of the prisons of the city of London,
Newgate, Giltspur St. Compter, and the City Bridewell,
in which the master evil of jail association and consequent contamination still continues to operate directly to the encouragement of crime.
The plan adopted for ventilating the dining-room on the 'master's side' and that of the middle yard is very inefficient;
it consists of several circular perforations, about two inches in diameter,
slanting downwards from the top of the walls to the outside adjoining the slaughterhouses of Newgate market; and occasionally, in hot weather,
instead of ventilating the apartments, they only serve to convey the offensive effluvia arising from the decaying animal matter into the dining-rooms.
Sometimes the stench in hot weather is said to be very bad.
Many rats also come through these so-called ventilators, as they open close to the ground at the back of the prison.
At the same time the inspectors animadvert strongly upon the misconduct of prisoners and the frequency of prison punishments,
both offenses and punishments affording a sufficient index to the practices going forward; and they wind up by declaring
that a strict compliance with their duties gave them no choice "but to report matters as we found them,
and again and again to protest against Newgate as it at present exists.
No complete and permanent improvement was indeed possible while Newgate remained unchanged.
It was not till the erection of the new prison at Holloway in 1850, and the entire internal reconstruction of Newgate according to new ideas,
The Chronicles of Newgate, Volume 2. By Arthur Griffiths. Section 11: Executions, part one.
I propose to return now to the subject of Newgate executions,
which we left at the time of the discontinuance of the long-practiced procession to Tyburn.
The reasons for this change were fully set forth in a previous chapter.
The terrible spectacle was as demoralizing to the public, for whose admonition it was intended,
as the exposure was brutal and cruel towards the principal actors.
The decision to remove the scene of action to the immediate front of the jail itself
was in the right direction, as making the performance shorter and diminishing the area of display.
But the Old Bailey was not exclusively used;
at first, and for some few years after 1784, executions took place occasionally at a distance from Newgate.
This was partly due to the survival of the old notion that the scene of the crime ought also to witness the retribution;
partly perhaps because residents in and about the Old Bailey raised a loud protest against the constant erection of the scaffold in their neighborhood.
As regards the first, I find that in 1786
John Hogan, the murderer of a Mr. Odell, an attorney who resided in Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place,
was executed on a gibbet in front of his victim's house.
Lawrence Jones, a burglar, was in 1793 ordered for execution in Hatton Garden, near the house he had robbed;
and when he evaded the sentence by suicide, his body was exhibited in the same neighborhood,
extended upon a plank on the top of an open cart, in his clothes, and fettered.
Again, as late as 1809 and 1812, Execution Dock, on the banks of the Thames, was still retained.
Here John Sutherland, commander of the British armed transport 'The Friends,' suffered on the 29th June, 1809,
for the murder of his cabin-boy, whom he stabbed after much ill-usage on board the ship as it lay in the Tagus.
On the 18th December, 1812,
two sailors, Charles Palm and Sam Tilling, were hanged at the same place for the murder of their captain, James Keith
of the trading vessel 'Adventure,' upon the high seas.
They were taken in a cart to the place of execution, amidst a vast concourse of people.
Palm, as soon as he was seated in the cart,
put a quid of tobacco into his mouth, and offered another to his companion, who refused it with indignation
Some indications of pity were offered for the fate of Tilling; Palm, execration alone.
But the Old Bailey gradually, and in spite of all objections urged, monopolized the dread business of execution.
The first affair of the kind on this spot was on the 3rd December, 1783,
when, in pursuance of an order issued by the Recorder to the sheriffs of Middlesex and the keeper of His Majesty's jail, Newgate,
a scaffold was erected in front of that prison for the execution of several convicts named by the Recorder.
Ten were executed
the scaffold hung with black; and the inhabitants of the neighborhood, having petitioned the sheriffs to remove the scene of execution to the old place,
were told that the plan had been well considered, and would be persevered in.
The following 23rd April, it is stated that the malefactors ordered for execution on the 18th instead
were brought out of Newgate about eight in the morning, and suspended on a gallows of a new construction.
After hanging the usual time they were taken down, and the machine cleared away in half-an-hour.
By practice the art is much improved, and there is no part of the world in which villains are hanged in so neat a manner, and with so little ceremony.
A full description of this new gallows, which was erected in front of the debtors' door, is to be found in contemporary records.
The criminals are not exposed to view till they mount the fatal stage. The last part of the stage, or that next to the jail,
is enclosed by a temporary roof, under which are placed two seats for the reception of the sheriffs, one on each side of the stairs leading to the scaffold.
Round the north, west, and south sides are erected galleries for the reception of officers, attendants, etc.
and at the distance of five feet from the same is fixed a strong railing all round the scaffold to enclose a place for the constables.
In the middle of this machinery is placed a movable platform, in form of a trap-door, ten feet long by eight wide,
on the middle of which is placed the gibbet, extending from the jail across the Old Bailey.
This movable platform is raised six inches higher than the rest of the scaffold, and on it the convicts stand;
it is supported by two beams, which are held in their place by bolts. The movement of the lever withdraws the bolts, the platform falls in;
and this, being much more sudden and regular than that of a cart being drawn away, has the effect of immediate death.
A broadsheet dated April 24th, 1787, describing an execution on the newly-invented scaffold before the debtors' door,
says, "The scaffold on which these miserable people suffered is a temporary machine which was drawn out of the yard of the sessions house by horses;
it is supported by strong posts fixed into grooves made in the street;
the whole is temporary, being all calculated to take to pieces, which are preserved within the prison."
This contrivance appears to have been copied with improvements from that which had been used in Dublin at a still earlier date,
for that city claims the priority in establishing the custom of hanging criminals at the jail itself.
The Dublin "engine of death," as the gallows are styled in the account from which the following description is taken, consisted of an iron bar
parallel to the prison wall, and about four feet from it, but strongly affixed thereto with iron scroll clamps.
From this bar hang several iron loops, in which the halters are tied.
Under this bar at a proper distance is a piece of flooring or platform,
projecting somewhat beyond the range of the iron bar, and swinging upon hinges affixed to the wall.
The entrance upon this floor or leaf is from the middle window over the gate of the prison;
and this floor is supported below,
while the criminals stand upon it, by two pieces of timber, which are made to slide in and out of the prison wall through apertures made for that purpose.
When the criminals are tied up and prepared for their fate, this floor suddenly falls down, upon withdrawing the supporters inwards.
They are both drawn at once by a windlass, and the unhappy culprits remain suspended.
This mode of execution, it is alleged, gave rise to the old vulgar "chaff," "Take care, or you'll die at the fall of the leaf."
The machinery in use in Dublin is much the same as that employed at many jails now-a-days.
But the fall apart and inwards of two leaves is considered superior.
The latter is the method still followed at Newgate.
The sentences inflicted in front of Newgate were not limited to hanging.
In the few years which elapsed between the establishment of the gallows at Newgate
and the abolition of the practice of burning females for petty treason, more than one woman suffered this penalty at the Old Bailey.
One case is preserved by Catnach,
that of Phoebe Harris, who in 1788 was "barbariously" executed and burnt before Newgate for coining.
She is described as a well-made little woman, something more than thirty years of age, of a pale complexion and not disagreeable features.
When she came out of prison she appeared languid and terrified, and trembled greatly as she advanced to the stake,
where the apparatus for the punishment she was about to experience
seemed to strike her mind with horror and consternation, to the exclusion of all power of recollectedness in preparation for the approaching awful moment.
She walked from the debtors' door to a stake fixed in the ground about half-way between the scaffold and Newgate Street.
She was immediately tied by the neck to an iron bolt fixed near the top of the stake,
and after praying fervently for a few minutes, the steps on which she stood were drawn away, and she was left suspended.
A chain fastened by nails to the stake was then put round her body by the executioner with his assistants.
Two cart-loads of faggots were piled about her, and after she had hung for half-an-hour the fire was kindled.
The flames presently burned the halter, the body fell a few inches, and hung then by the iron chain.
The fire had not quite burnt out at twelve, in nearly four hours, that is to say.
A great concourse of people attended on this melancholy occasion.
The change from Tyburn to the Old Bailey had worked no improvement as regards the gathering together of the crowd or its demeanor.
As many spectators as ever thronged to see the dreadful show,
and they were packed into a more limited space, disporting themselves as heretofore by brutal horse-play, coarse jests, and frantic yells.
It was still the custom to offer warm encouragement or bitter disapproval, according to the character and antecedents of the sufferer.
The highwayman, whose exploits many in the crowd admired or emulated, was cheered and bidden to die game;
the man of better birth could hope for no sympathy, whatever his crime.
At the execution of Governor Wall, in 1802, the furious hatred of the mob was plainly apparent in their appalling cries.
His appearance on the scaffold was the signal for three prolonged shouts from an innumerable populace, "the brutal effusion of one common sentiment."
It was said that so large a crowd had never collected since the execution of Mrs. Brownrigg, nor had the public indignation risen so high.
Pieman and ballad-monger did their usual roaring trade amidst the dense throng.
No sooner was the "job" finished than half-a-dozen competitors appeared, each offering the identical rope for sale at a shilling an inch.
One was the "yeoman of the halter," a Newgate official, the executioner's assistant, whom Mr. J. T. Smith, who was present at the execution,
describes as "a most diabolical-looking little wretch -- Jack Ketch's head man.
The yeoman was, however, under-sold by his wife, "Rosy Emma,"
exuberant in talk and hissing hot from Pie Corner, where she had taken her morning dose of gin-and-bitters.
A little further off, says Mr. Smith, was "a lath of a fellow past three-score years and ten,
who had just arrived from the purlieus of Black Boy Alley, woebegone as Romeo's apothecary, exclaiming,
Here's the identical rope at sixpence an inch.
Mr. Smith's account of the condemned convict, whose cell he was permitted to enter, may be inserted here.
He was introduced by the ordinary, Dr. Forde, a name familiar to the reader, who met him at the felons' door
in his canonicals, and with his head as stiffly erect as a sheriff's coachman.
The ordinary "gravely uttered, 'Come this way, Mr. Smith.'
As we crossed the press yard a cock crew, and the solitary clanking of a restless chain was dreadfully horrible.
The prisoners had not risen.
They entered a "stone cold room," and were presently joined by the prisoner.
He was death's counterfeit, tall, shriveled, and pale;
and his soul shot out so piercingly through the port-holes of his head, that the first glance of him nearly petrified me
His hands were clasped, and he was truly penitent.
After the yeoman had requested him to stand up, 'he pinioned him,' as the Newgate phrase is
and tied the cord with so little feeling that the governor (Wall), who had not given the wretch his accustomed fee, observed,
"You have tied me very tight," upon which Dr. Forde ordered him to slacken the cord, which he did, but not without muttering.
"Thank you, sir," said the governor to the doctor, "it is of little moment."
He then made some observations to the attendant about the fire, and turning to the doctor, questioned him.
"Do tell me, sir; I am informed I shall go down with great force; is it so?"