Remarks on the principles of criminal legislation, and the practice of prison discipline / by George Combe.

  • George Combe
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the principles of criminal legislation, and the practice of prison discipline / by George Combe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    82/116 (page 74)
    Nature to the process of his restoration. The pain felt by the drunken convict when the stimulus of alcohol is withdrawn is severe and crushing: but place him in a moral institution; convince him that the pain is the commencement in his organism of a process of recovery from countless injuries inflicted on it by his evil habits; encourage him to bear the suffering bravely; mitigate its severity by all salutary means; and give him confi- dence that Nature will remove it when the cure is accomplished, and will replace the pain by the positive enjoyment of a healthy action of the now aching organism,—and this discipline Avill cure his drunkenness, and with it his tendency to crime, by improving at once his physical and moral nature. But the EngHsh gaoler addresses his prisoner virtually in this language:—You have broken the law, and my duty is to inflict on you a certain amount of pain, in order to frighten ill-disposed people outside the prison from offending, and to make you feel by suffering that it is a very hazardous thing for you to break the law and come here, so that when you go out of piison, you may recollect this ever aftenvards when disposed to do evil. In order to subdue your stubborn sj)irit, to overcome your resistance to being reformed, and to prepare you to fall in love with religion and virtue, I shall make you thoroughly wretched; the treadmill and the crank-wheel shall exhaust your strength till you ache all over -with fatigue; and to add to the bitterness of your punislunent, your labour shall be wasted, you shall grind only the air; you shall hve in a solitary cell for years, you shall have painful tasks prescribed to you, and if you fail to perfonn them, or if your human nature rebel against tliis treatment, you shall be stinted in food, be deprived of your bed and forced to he on the floor, be flogged, and be strapped to the wall in a strait waistcoat and high stiff coUai'.* By these means we shall, in spite of yourseK, convert your wicked heart into one of Christian love, your idle habits into those of industry, your hatred of the law into dread of its terrors, and your contempt for courts of justice, magistrates and gaolers, into profound reverence for them, excited by your experience of the wisdom chsplayed in effecting your reformation; and you shall leam to love us all for the merciful severity with which we have dealt with you! This is a strong but essentially just representa- tion of the principles of English Prison Discipline as embodied in the work of Mr. Burt, and practically exemplified in the great majority of our prisons. It is, in our oi)inion, fundamentally * See the lle]iorls of the late inquiry inl o Governor Austin's management of the Borough Gaol of Birniiiiffhani, 'in tlic DaUv News of September, 1353. ^