MikhailT/lj-speech huggingface dataset:
The weekly introduction of food, to which I shall presently refer, formed the basis of luxurious banquets, washed down by liquor
and enlivened by flash songs and thrilling long-winded descriptions of robberies and other "plants."
There was much swearing and bad language, the very worst that could be used, from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night.
New arrivals, especially the innocent and still guileless debutant, were tormented with rude horse-play, and assailed by the most insulting "chaff."
If any man presumed to turn in too early
he was "toed," that is to say, a string was fastened to his big toe while he was asleep, and he was dragged from off his mat,
or his bedclothes were drawn away across the room.
The ragged part of the prisoners were very anxious to destroy the clothes of the better dressed, and often lighted small pieces of cloth,
which they dropped smoldering into their fellow-prisoners' pockets.
Often the victim, goaded to madness, attacked his tormentors; a fight was then certain to follow.
These fights sometimes took place in the daytime, when a ring was regularly formed, and two or three stood by the door to watch for the officer's approach.
More often they occurred at night, and were continued to the bitter end.
The prisoners in this way administered serious punishment on one another. Black eyes and broken noses were always to be seen.
More cruel injuries were common enough, which did not result from honest hand-to-hand fights.
The surgeon's journal produced to the inspectors contained numerous entries of terrible wounds inflicted in a cowardly way.
"A serious accident: one of the prisoners had a hot poker run into his eye."
"A lad named Matthew White has had a wound in his eye by a bone thrown at him, which very nearly destroyed vision."
"There was a disturbance in the transport yard yesterday evening, and the police were called in.
During the tumult a prisoner, who was one of the worst of the rioters, was bruised about the head and body.
Watkins' knee-joint is very severely injured.
A prisoner Baxter is in the infirmary in consequence of a severe injury to his wrist-joint.
Watkins' case, referred to above, is made the subject of another and a special report from the surgeon.
He was in the transport side, when one of his fellows, in endeavoring to strike another prisoner with a large poker, missed his aim, and struck Watkins' knee
Violent inflammation and extensive suppuration ensued, and for a considerable time amputation seemed inevitable.
After severe suffering prolonged for many months, the inflammation was subdued, but the cartilage of the knee-joint was destroyed, and he was crippled for life.
On another occasion a young man, who was being violently teased, seized a knife and stabbed his tormentor in the back.
The prisoner who used the knife was secured, but it was the wardsman, and not the officers, to whom the report was made, and no official inquiry or punishment followed.
Matters were at times still worse, and the rioting went on to such dangerous lengths as to endanger the safety of the building.
On one occasion a disturbance was raised which was not quelled until windows had been broken and forms and tables burnt.
The officers were obliged to go in among the prisoners to restore order with drawn cutlasses,
but the presence and authority of the governor himself became indispensable.
The worst fights occurred on Sunday afternoons; but nearly every night the act of locking up became, from the consequent removal of all supervision,
the signal for the commencement of obscene talk, revelry, and violence.
Other regulations laid down by the Jail Acts were still defied. One of these was that prisoners should be restricted to the jail allowance of food;
but all could still obtain as much extra, and of a luxurious kind, as their friends chose to bring them in.
Visitors were still permitted to come with supplies on given days of the week, about the only limitation being that the food should be cooked, and cold;
hot meat, poultry, and fish were also forbidden.
But the inspectors found in the ward cupboards mince-pies and other pasties, cold joints, hams, and so forth.
Many other articles were introduced by visitors, including money, tobacco, pipes, and snuff.
From the same source came the two or three strong files which the inspectors found in one ward,
together with four bradawls, several large iron spikes, screws, nails, and knives;
all of them instruments calculated to facilitate attempts at breaking out of prison,
and capable of becoming most dangerous weapons in the hands of desperate and determined men.
The nearly indiscriminate admission of visitors, although restricted to certain days, continued to be an unmixed evil.
The untried might see their friends three times a week, the convicted only once.
On these occasions precautions were supposed to be taken to exclude bad characters,
yet many persons of notoriously loose life continually obtained egress.
Women saw men if they merely pretended to be wives; even boys were visited by their sweethearts.
Decency was, however, insured by a line of demarcation, and visitors were kept upon each side of a separated double iron railing.
But no search was made to intercept prohibited articles at the gate, and there was no permanent gate-keeper,
which would have greatly helped to keep out bad characters. Some idea of the difficulty and inconvenience of these lax regulations as regards visiting,
may be gathered from the statement that as many as three hundred were often admitted on the same day
enough to altogether upset what small show of decorum and discipline was still preserved in the prison.
Perhaps the worst feature of the visiting system was the permission accorded to male prisoners "under the name of husbands, brothers, and sons"
to have access to the female side on Sundays and Wednesdays, in order to visit their supposed relations there.
On this female side, where the Ladies' Association still reigned supreme, more system and a greater semblance of decorum was maintained.
But there were evils akin to those on the male side, prominent amongst which was the undue influence accorded to prisoners.
A female prisoner kept the registers.
Wards-women were allowed much the same authority, with the same temptations to excess, and intoxication was not unknown among them and others.
The clothing was still meager and ragged: the washing places insufficient, and wanting in decency;
in some yards
the pump was the only provision, and this in a place within sight of visitors, of the windows of the male turnkeys, and unprotected from the weather.
There was the same crowding in the sleeping arrangements as on the male side; the same scarcity of bedding.
It was a special evil of this part of the prison, that the devotional exercises, originally so profitable, had grown into a kind of edifying spectacle,
which numbers of well-meaning but inquisitive people were anxious to witness.
Thus, when the inspectors visited there were twenty-three strangers, and only twenty-eight prisoners.
The presence of so many strangers, many of them gentlemen, distracted the prisoners' attention, and could not be productive of much good.
The separation of the sexes was not indeed rigidly carried out in Newgate as yet.
We have seen that male prisoners visited their female relations and friends on the female side. Besides this,
the gatesman who prepared the briefs had interviews with female prisoners alone while taking their instructions; a female came alone and unaccompanied by a matron
to clean the governor's office in the male prison;
male prisoners carried coal into the female prison, when they saw and could speak or pass letters to the female prisoners;
and the men could also at any time go for tea, coffee, and sugar to Mrs. Brown's shop, which was inside the female gate.
In the bail-dock, where most improper general association was permitted, the female prisoners were often altogether in the charge of male turnkeys.
The governor was also personally responsible for gross contravention of this rule of separation,
and was in the habit of drawing frequently upon the female prison for prisoners to act as domestic servants in his own private dwelling.
Some member of the Ladies' Association observed and commented upon the fact that a "young rosy-cheeked girl" had been kept by the governor from transportation,
while older women in infirm health were sent across the seas.
His excuse was that he had given the girl his promise that she should not go, an assumption of prerogative which by no means rested with him;
but he afterwards admitted that the girl had been recommended to him by the principal turnkey, who knew something of her friends.
This woman was really his servant, employed to help in cleaning, and taken on whenever there was extra work to be done.
The governor had a great dislike, he said, to seeing strangers in his house.
This girl had been first engaged on account of the extra work entailed by certain prisoners
committed by the House of Commons, who had been lodged in the governor's own house.
The house at this time was full of men and visitors; waiters came in from the taverns with meals.
Some of the prisoners had their valets, and all these were constantly in and out of the kitchen where this female prisoner was employed.
There was reveling and roistering, as usual, with "high life below-stairs.
The governor sent down wine on festive occasions, of which no doubt the prisoner housemaid had her share.
The Chronicles of Newgate, Volume 2. By Arthur Griffiths. Section 10: The first report of the inspector of prisons.
Eighteen years had elapsed since the formation of the "Ladies' Association,"
and Mrs. Fry with her colleagues still labored assiduously in Newgate, devoting themselves mainly to the female prison,
although their ministrations were occasionally extended to the male side.
The inspectors paid tribute to the excellence of the motives of these philanthropic ladies, and recognized the good they did.
They had introduced "much order and cleanliness,"
had provided work for those who had hitherto passed their time in total idleness, and had made the treatment of female transports on the way to New South Wales
their especial care.
They had tried, moreover,
by their presence and their pious, disinterested efforts, to restrain the dissolute manners and vicious language of the unhappy and depraved inmates.
But it was already plain that they constituted an independent authority within the jails; they were frequently in conflict with the chaplain,
who not strangely resented the orders issued by the aldermen
that women should be frequently kept from chapel in order that they might attend the ladies' lectures and exhortations.
The admission of a crowd of visitors to assist in these lay services has already been remarked upon; as the inspectors pointed out,
it had the bad effect of distracting attention,
it tended to "dissipate reflection, diminish the gloom of the prison, and mitigate the punishment which the law has sentenced the prisoner to undergo."
It is to be feared too that although the surface was thus whitewashed and decorous, much that was vicious still festered and rankled beneath,
and that when the restraining influences of the ladies were absent, the female prisoners relapsed into immoral and uncleanly discourse.
Even in the daytime, when supervision was withdrawn, "the language used to be dreadful," says one of the women when under examination;
"swearing and talking of what crimes they had committed, and how they had done it." Another witness declared she had heard the most shocking language in the yard; she said
"she had never witnessed such scenes before, and hopes she never shall again -- it was dreadful!"
After locking-up time, which varied, as on the male side, according to the daylight, the scenes were often riotous and disgraceful.
The poor, who could afford no luxuries, went to bed early, but were kept awake by the revelries of the rich,
who supped royally on the supplies provided from outside, and kept it up till ten or eleven o'clock.
There were frequent quarrels and fights; shoes and other missiles were freely bandied about;
and with all this "the most dreadful oaths, the worst language, too bad to be repeated," were made use of every night.
Bad as were the various parts of the jail already dealt with,
there still remained one where the general callous indifference and mismanagement culminated in cruel culpable neglect.
The condition of the capitally-convicted prisoners after sentence was still very disgraceful. The side they occupied, still known as the press-yard,
consisted of two dozen rooms and fifteen cells. In these various chambers, until just before the inspectors made their report,
all classes of the condemned, those certain to suffer, and the larger number who were nearly certain of a reprieve,
were jumbled up together, higgledy-piggledy, the old and the young, the murderer and the child who had broken into a dwelling.
All privacy was impossible under the circumstances.
At times the numbers congregated together were very great; as many as fifty and sixty, even more, were crowded indiscriminately into the press-yard.
The better-disposed complained bitterly of what they had to endure;
one man declared that the language of the condemned rooms was disgusting, that he was dying a death every day in being compelled to associate with such characters.
In the midst of the noisy and blasphemous talk no one could pursue his meditations; any who tried to pray became the sport and ridicule of his brutal fellows.
Owing to the repeated entreaties of the criminals who could hardly hope to escape the gallows, some show of classification was carried out,
and when the inspectors visited Newgate they found the three certain to die in a day-room by themselves;
in a second room were fourteen more who had every hope of a reprieve.
The whole of these seventeen had, however, a common airing-yard, and took their exercise there at the same time,
so that men in the most awful situation, daily expecting to be hanged,
were associated continually with a number of those who could look with certainty on a mitigation of punishment.
The latter, light-hearted and reckless, conducted themselves in the most unseemly fashion, and "with as much indifference as the inmates of the other parts of the prison."
They amused themselves after their own fashion; played all day long at blind-man's-buff and leap-frog, or beat each other with a knotted handkerchief,
laughing and uproarious, utterly unmindful of the companionship of men upon whom lay the shadow of an impending shameful death.
"Men whose cases were dangerous, and those most seriously inclined, complained of these annoyances,"
so subversive of meditation, so disturbing to the thoughts;
they suffered sickening anxiety, and wished to be locked up alone. This indiscriminate association lasted for months,
during the whole of which time the unhappy convicts who had but little hope of commutation were exposed to the mockery of their reckless associates.
The brutal callousness of the bulk of the inmates of the press-yard may be gathered from the prison punishment-book, which frequently recorded such entries as the following:
Benjamin Vines and Daniel Ward put in irons for two days for breaking the windows of the day room in the condemned cells.
"Joseph Coleman put in irons for three days for striking one of the prisoners," in the same place.
There were disputes and quarrels constantly among these doomed men; it was a word and blow, an argument clenched always with a fight.
The more peaceably disposed found some occupation in making Newgate tokens,
leaden hearts, and "grinding the impressions off penny-pieces, then pricking figures or words on them to give to their friends as memorials.
Turnkeys occasionally visited the press-yard, but its occupants were under little or no control.
The chaplain, who might have been expected to make these men his peculiar care, and who at one time had visited them frequently, often several times a week,
had relaxed his efforts, because, according to his own account, he was so frequently stopped in the performance of his duties.
In his evidence before the inspectors he declared that "for years he gave his whole time to his duties, from an early hour in the morning till late in the afternoon.
He left off because he was so much interfered with and laughed at, and from seeing that no success attended his efforts, owing to the evils arising from association.
Latterly his ministrations to the condemned had been restricted to a visit on Sunday afternoons, and occasionally about once a fortnight on a week-day.
It is only fair to Mr. Cotton to add that, according to his own journal, he was unremitting in his attentions to convicts who were actually cast for death,
and the day of whose execution was fixed. He had no doubt a difficult mission to discharge;
on the one hand, the Ladies' Association, supported and encouraged by public approval, trenched upon his peculiar province;
on the other, the governor of the jail sneered at his zeal
stigmatized his often most just strictures on abuses as "a bundle of nonsense," and the aldermen, when he appealed to them for protection and countenance,
generally sided with his opponents. Nevertheless the inspectors summed up against him.
While admitting that he had had many difficulties to contend with,
and that he had again and again protested against the obstacles thrown in his way, the inspectors "cannot forbear expressing their opinion that he might have shown greater perseverance,
in the face of impediments confessedly discouraging
as regards the private teaching of prisoners; and they went on to say that "a resolved adherence, in spite of discouragements the most disheartening,
to that line of conduct which his duty imposed on him
would, it is probable, have eventually overcome the reluctance of some of the prisoners at least, and would have possessed so much moral dignity
as effectually to rebuke and abash the profane spirit of the more insolent and daring of the criminals.
The lax discipline maintained in Newgate was still further deteriorated by the presence of two other classes of prisoners who ought never to have been inmates of such a jail.
One of these were the criminal lunatics, who were at this time and for long previous continuously imprisoned there.
As the law stood since the passing of the 9th George IV. c. 40, any two justices might remove a prisoner found to be insane, either on commitment
or arraignment, to an asylum, and the Secretary of State had the same power as regards any who became insane while undergoing sentence.
These powers were not invariably put in force, and there were in consequence many unhappy lunatics in Newgate and other jails,
whose proper place was the asylum.
At the time the Lords' Committee sat there were eight thus retained in Newgate, and a return in the appendix of the Lords' report
gives a total of thirty-nine lunatics confined in various jails, many of them guilty of murder and other serious crimes.
The inspectors in the following year, on examining the facts, found that some of these poor creatures had been in confinement for long periods:
at Newgate and York Castle as long as five years; "at Ilchester and Morpeth for seven years; at Warwick for eight years,
at Buckingham and Hereford for eleven years
at Appleby for thirteen years, at Anglesea for fifteen years, at Exeter for sixteen years, and at Pembroke
for not less a period than twenty-four years.
It was manifestly wrong that such persons, "visited by the most awful of calamities," should be detained in a common prison.
Not only did their presence tend greatly to interfere with the discipline of the prison, but their condition was deplorable in the extreme.
The lunatic became the sport of the idle and the depraved. His cure was out of the question;
he was placed in a situation "beyond all others calculated to confirm his malady and prolong his sufferings."
The matter was still further complicated at Newgate by the presence within the walls of sham lunatics. Some of those included in the category
had actually been returned as sane from the asylum to which they had been sent, and there was always some uncertainty as to who was mad and who not.
Prisoners indeed were known to boast that they had saved their necks by feigning insanity.
It was high time that the unsatisfactory state of the law as regards the treatment of criminal lunatics should be remedied
and not the least of the good services rendered by the new inspectors was their inquiry into the status of these unfortunate people, and their recommendation to improve it.
The other inmates of the prison of an exceptional character, and exempted from the regular discipline, such as it was,
were the ten persons committed to Newgate by the House of Commons in 1835.
These were the gentlemen concerned in the bribery case at Ipswich in 1835,
when a petition was presented against the return of Messrs. Adam Dundas and Fitzroy Kelly. Various witnesses, including Messrs. J. B. Dasent,
Pilgrim, Bond, and Clamp, had refused to give evidence before the House of Commons' Committee; a Speaker's warrant was issued for their arrest when they absconded.
Mr. J. E. Sparrow and Mr. Clipperton
the parliamentary agents of the members whose election was impugned, were implicated in aiding and abetting the others to abscond, and a Mr. O'Mally,
counsel for the two M.P.'s, was also concerned.
Pilgrim and Dasent were caught and given into the custody of the sergeant-at-arms, and the rest were either arrested or they surrendered.
A resolution at once passed the House without division to commit the whole to Newgate, where they remained for various terms.
Dasent and Pilgrim were released in ten days, on making due submission.
O'Mally sent in a medical certificate, declaring that the imprisonment was endangering his life, and after some question he was also released.
The rest were detained for more than a month, it being considered that they were the most guilty, as being either professional agents, who advised the others to abscond,
or witnesses who did not voluntarily come forward when the chance was given them.
Many of the old customs once prevalent in the State Side, so properly condemned and abolished,
were revived for the convenience of these gentlemen, whose incarceration was thus rendered as little like imprisonment as possible.
A certain number, who could afford the high rate of a guinea per diem, fixed by the under sheriff, were lodged in the governor's house,
slept there, and had their meals provided for them from the Sessions House or London Coffee-House.
A few others, who could not afford a payment of more than half a guinea, were permitted to monopolize a part of the prison infirmary,
where the upper ward was exclusively appropriated to their use. They also had their meals sent in, and, with the food, wine almost ad libitum.
A prisoner, one of the wardsmen, waited on those in the infirmary; the occupants of the governor's house had their own servants, or the governor's.
As a rule, visitors, many of them persons of good position, came and went all day long, and as late as nine at night;
some to the infirmary, many more to the governor's house.
There were no restraints, cards and backgammon were played, and the time passed in feasting and revelry.
Even Mr. Cope admitted that the committal of this class of prisoners to Newgate was most inconvenient,
and the inspectors expressed themselves still more strongly in reprehension of the practice.
The infirmary at this particular period epitomized the condition of the jail at large.
It was diverted from its proper uses, and, as the "place of the greatest comfort," was allotted to persons who should not have been sent to Newgate at all.
All the evils of indiscriminate association were strongly accentuated by the crowd collected within its narrow limits.
"It may easily be imagined," say the inspectors, in speaking of the prison generally,
"what must be the state of discipline in a place filled with characters so various as were assembled there, where the tried and the untried, the sick and the healthy,
the sane and the insane, the young and the old, the trivial offender and the man about to suffer the extreme penalty of the law,
are all huddled together without discrimination, oversight, or control."