The Sun.
London, England, 1844-01-16 00:00:00

or executive officers of its own jurisdictions) with
power to aggravate the term or the nature of
the punishmen t decreed, excepting only as to such
alterations thereof as may have been subse-
quently incurred, through personal misconduct
or delinquency on the part of the prisoner, ac-
cording to the directions of the Acts for the
better enforcement of prison discipline. But
there is a large class of pseudo-philanthropists
and legislators, who are never satisfied with such
securities as these. They are for enforcing on all
prisoners—aye, even upon prisoners for debt—a
course of penitentiary and cumulative suffering,
ingeniously protracted and aggravated beyond
the amount of expiation demanded by the law.
The law in the eyes of these men does not un-
derstand its own objects. It cannot accomplish
its own purposes. They step in, professedly to
work in the heart of the prisoner that moral
expiation which human law never can accom-
plish. They seek to touch and soften the heart,
by afflicting the senses and breaking down the
native energies, mental and bodily, of those
whom the law would restore to their free agency
after inflicting on them a certain amount of bodily
suffering, or personal restraint, with or witbou t pe-
cuniary fine. In thisattempt the very firs tabsurdity
they commit, because it is an inevitable result of
an impracticable system, is to confound different
classes of criminals and different degrees of
crime under one and the same category of
searching, spirit-breaking, unrelaxing, uncom-
promising, unremitted "discipline." This height-
ened discipline, like Sir JAMES GRAHAM'S low-
ered "dietary," is to be applied to all alike, and
without distinction. The deeper and more des-
perate criminal, if he be liberated at all, leaves
the " model prison," not moved and melted into
kindlier feelings for his fellow-men, by a con-
scious sense of having received kindlier treat-
ment and more charitable usage than he had at
all merited; but breathing inextinguishable
hatred against, and devising schemes of future
vengeance upon, that society, under the ordi-
nances of which he has been made to endure
such excesses of abject humiliation and mental
torture beyond that penalty of the law which the
sentence solemnly pronounced in open court had
apprised him that he had incurred. The minor
offender, of feelings less seared and delinquencies
far less criminal, quits the walls that have wit-
nessed his aggravated punishment, and shame,
and misery, with the dangerous impression that
had he sinned more gravely against " Heaven
and man," lie must have realised a larger plun-
der, and could not have incurred a higher
amount of penal suffering.
Entertaining these views upon this important
subject, we regard with no overweening favour
or prepossession suggestions for any extension
of experiments, the tendencies of si hich appear
to be thus cruel upon individuals in their imme-
diate operation, and thus mischievous in their
ultimate results on society. In The Sun of
Saturday last we published a statement relative
to Sir JAMES GRAHAM'S inordinate passion for
" model prisons for the country." From this
it would appear that the Home Secretary is
modestly pressing upon the justices of counties
to take into immediate consideration the expe-
diency of superseding all the existing prisons of
their districts, and erecting one or more in their
stead, at an expense of some 157,0001. (no more 1)
on his last and newest " model" patter's ! on a
system, as the " statement" in question well
remarks, " which is yet upon trial—which has
not yet received the sanction of Parliament—and
never, it is to be hoped, will." 'We certainly
concur in the " sitonishment" manifested "at
the temerity of Sir,' AMES GRAHAM,, of which no
parallel in the conduct of any Minister in this
country can be recollected in presuming to re-
quire, or even to recommend to the justices" the
adoption of such a course. But the request has
been, already, not to say " scouted" merely,
but " kicked out" of the Quarter Sessions of
Lancashire and Gloucestershire. As for the
latter, GRAY'S " Bard" seems to have been
revivified by Sir JAMES'S indiscretion.
" Stout Gloucester stood aghast in speechless trance I"
Yet not quite speechless, by the bye ; for
the Chairman of the Gloucester Quarter Ses-
sions, in reference to this subject, said, " The
Government could not enforce the plan upon
them, and the only way in which the county
could be compelled to build a model prison was
by Act of Parliament, which, if the county Mem-
bers did their duty, no Government could ever
obtain." Of course every body who knows the
of so consistent a
m
a politician, as Sir
peculiarlystates a statesman,
sensitiveso d is int
edr ee lsiteeadcy
JAMES GRAHAM, will pause
ere he attributes
on the county juris-
and
much
idt
nhi
ce
try
iro3R,ni
nisgght
to
fo Hon.force
e this
ulterior e
B iro,l
s planet ' s remarkable ardour
of
official patronage in
his own department, or of accessions of county
influence to the
eal Ministerial
party. But there
is a less equivocal
more serious reason
for the unqualified and indignant rejection of
o
Sir JAMES'S proposals by every Quarter Sessions
in the kingdom in the appalling announcement
in Sir PETER LAURIE'S letter to the Lei-
cestershire Magistrates. He tells them, as
President of Bethlehem Hospital, that "although
the Model Prison (Pentonville) has been
opened so short . a time, and although every
prisoner is carefully examined, and indeed
selected with reference to his health, two pri-
soners have become INSANE, and have been
transmitted from the Model Prison to Bethle-
hem." Would to Gon ! we add, that some
of the prime speculators in these " model
prisons"—that is to say, on the utmost limits of
human endurance and moral energy, under the
application of studied mental torture, and a scale
of graduated agony, commencing with remorse
and terminating with despair—were themselves
committed to, and permanently confined in, the
incurable ward of the same hospital. They would
then learn the amount of the distress they pre-
sume to inflict beyond the demands of the law,
and up to the mind-and-body-destroying point
of practical retribution in the Model Bastille of
Pentonville.
Sir JAMES GRAHAM evidently assumes that
the law does not go far enough. He would
strike, by punishments beyond the law, at those
deficiencies—(still loft in the moral nature of'
men whose crimes have been legally visited)—
which no human law can ever strike. He would
penetrate but to punish the guilty secrets of
that consciousness which is patent only to the
individual delinquent and his MASER; for the
guilt, of which human institutions could take
cognisance, human laws have already exacted
their vengeance for. To what end, if not for
this inhuman and presumptuous purpose, does
the Home Secretary of State thus attach him-
self to his " model" system, with its dreary cells
—its compulsory silence—its monotonous misery
—its leisure for maddening remorse—its prompt-
ings to self-destruction its solicitations to
hopeless despondency or desperate despair?
Does he reflect that the certain failure,
for which this terrible machinery is set
in motion, must be worked out, not by mere bo-
dily privation, captivity, and disgrace, but by the
wreck of MlND—that Godlike, original endow-
ment which tyrants have not hitherto presumed
to tamper with ; which, even the torment of the
rack was not directed against, which the axe of
the headsman and the cord of the hangman may
be said to respect amidst the pangs of corporeal
death. The fbrcible restraints in these " model"
cells on the expression of all emotion, the ex-
tinction of all curiosity, the prohibition of all
communication, the horror of unbroken silence,
the withdrawal of all signs of human sym-
pathy, may abase the spirits, brutify the mind,
destroy life, but the object of punishing what
the law cannot—of reclaiming whom the ordinary
course of imprisonment cannot—will never be
achieved to such an extent as to justify the
means resorted to in the attempt. Let us put
the case to Sir J. GRAHAM of some grave
offences, not cognisable at law—yet of everyday
occurrence—and ask how he would proceed with
them? How would he deal with a man (let us
suppose) notorious for his faithlessness to parties,
his forgetfulness of principles, his abandonment
of early connexions, his violation of often-re-