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(An Open Letter to the Home Secretary—at that time, May, 1909, the Right Hon. Herbert John Gladstone, M.P.—printed in The Nation.)

Sir,—In addressing you, I desire to say that I do so with a gratitude and respect that must be shared by those who know how much you have already done for the improvement of our prison system.

I head this letter “Solitary Confinement” because, though the expression has long been officially abandoned in favour of the term “Separate Confinement,” it more adequately defines the seclusion undergone by prisoners in closed cells, and distinguishes that system from a practice obtaining in local prisons of setting prisoners to work separately in their cells with open doors (when it is impossible to find them work in association).

Solitary, or closed-cell, confinement—that is to say, complete seclusion every day for nearly twenty-three hours out of twenty-four—is now, sir, as you, but not all men, know, endured by every convict (persons sentenced to penal servitude for three years and over) during the first three, six, or nine months of his sentence, according to class—star, intermediate, or recidivist, and for the first month of their sentence by all prisoners (except juveniles) sentenced to hard labour. Closed-cell confinement for women convicts lasts four months.

It is the object of this letter to urge on you the complete abandonment of this closed-cell confinement, save where it is rendered necessary by the conduct of the convict or prisoner after his arrival in prison.

In order to demonstrate the weakness of the case for its retention, I shall first quote certain paragraphs from the Report of the Departmental Committee, 1895, over which you, sir, presided. (The italics are my own.)

52. “We do not agree with the view that separate confinement is desirable, on the ground that it enables the prisoner to meditate on his misdeeds. We are, however, disposed to agree that the separate system as a general principle is the right policy. The separate system rests on two considerations only. It is a deterrent, and it is a necessary safeguard against contamination. But we are not of the opinion that association for industrial labour under proper conditions is productive of harm. On the contrary, we believe that the advantages largely outweigh the disadvantages. . . . Subject to this condition” (careful supervision) “and to a proper system of classification, Colonel Garsia, a prison official of great experience, stated in his evidence that there was no danger whatever in associated work. . . .”

53. “. . . We think that this limited form of association is desirable for several reasons. (1) It is a welcome relief to most prisoners from the dull and wearying monotony of the constant isolation which forces men back on themselves, and in many cases leads to moral and physical deterioration. (2) It can be made in the nature of a privilege liable to suspension, and would be, therefore, a satisfactory addition to the best kind of available punishment. (3) It materially lessens the difficulty of providing and organising industrial labour in prisons. Prisoners can be taught trades in classes, and they can then work in association under proper and economical supervision in regular workshops or halls provided for the purpose. (4) It is more healthy. It is desirable that cells should be untenanted for some hours in the day, and in any case it is better that work which produces dust should not be carried on in the cells.”

55. “In recommending a wider adoption of associated work, we must admit that several competent witnesses expressed disapproval of the principle. . . . But upon cross-examination, it did not appear that they could sustain their objection to associated labour properly supervised, and they seemed to us to have formed their opinion rather because separation has been the accepted rule of the prison system than on any experience of failure of the associated system. . . .”

76. “In the consideration of several matters contained in the reference we had to touch upon the practice of confining convicts for nine months’ ” (now, 1909, three, six or nine) “solitary imprisonment either in local or convict prisons. . . . The history of it is interesting and suggestive. It was originated in 1842 by Sir James Graham, then Home Secretary. . . . We shall show how complete a change in the apparent object of the practice has since occurred.”

77. “. . . The convict was to undergo eighteen months’ solitary imprisonment, but he was to be freely visited by chaplain and prison officials . . . he was to be kept in a state of cheerfulness; hope, energy, resolution, and virtue were to be imparted to him, and he was to be trained to be fully competent to make his own way and become a respectable member in the penal settlements. . . .”

78. “In 1848 it was determined that, eighteen months being too long a period for isolated confinement, a system should be introduced based on a period of separate confinement, followed by a term of associated labour, with a maximum of twelve months. This was reduced by Lord Palmerston in 1853 to nine months. The original intention of Sir J. Graham, which was that this period should be primarily of a reformatory character, appears fifteen years later to have been lost sight of. . . .”

79. “It would appear from Sir J. Jebb’s evidence in 1853 that the main object of the separate (solitary) confinement had come to be deterrence. . . .”

80. “In effect, this is the purpose which it must be regarded as now designed to serve. . . . It is certainly a practical convenience in the sense that the expense of sending convicts immediately after sentence to convict prisons, either singly or in small detachments, is curtailed by the system of gathering prisons. This consideration alone is not sufficient to justify the practice. The argument that it is a necessary discipline for penal servitude, if true, is no argument for sending the convicts to local prisons. We do not regard the system with favour. We see no objection to short periods of detention in local prisons for the purpose of collecting parties for transfer to the convict prisons; but if the system is a good one at all, we think it ought, as far as possible, to be worked out in the convict prisons from first to last. We think it cannot be denied that cases occur in which a nervous condition, agitated by remorse and by a long continuance of the separate system, may be injuriously affected by it. From the evidence before us, we have no reason to believe that such cases are of other than exceptional occurrence. We think it is worth considering whether the severity of the system might not be mitigated by a substantial reduction in the period of separation. . . .”

These, sir, were the conclusions of your Committee as far back as 1895. I submit that, as a whole, they point to the existence of very grave doubts in the minds of its members as to the wisdom of retaining this system of closed-cell confinement at all. Since then great strides have been made in the direction of the classification of prisoners, and of associated labour, and the whole slow trend of thought and effort in regard to prisons has been in the direction of reformation of the prisoner.

The late Sir Edmund Du Cane, though one of its chief supporters, has called solitary confinement “. . . an artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health . . .” (“The Punishment and Prevention of Crime,” p. 138.) Its effect on a highly-strung temperament is thus described by a young woman who had served a long term of penal servitude.

“. . . It is like nothing else in the world—it is impossible to describe it; no words can paint its miseries, nothing that I can say would give any idea of the horrors of solitary confinement—it maddens one even to think of it. No one who has not been through it can conceive the awful anguish one endures when shut up in a living tomb, thrown back upon yourself . . . The overpowering sensation is one of suffocation. You feel you must and can smash the walls, burst open the doors, kill yourself! . . .”

Add to this Sir Robert Anderson’s description of his sensations (Nineteenth Century, March, 1902), after he had caused himself to be locked up for only a few hours with a political prisoner. “I seemed to be in a pit. There was no want of air, and yet I felt smothered. My nerves would not have long stood the strain of it.”

This is the conclusion, from personal experience, of H. B. Montgomery:

“The whole of this procedure” (solitary confinement) “is cruel and barbarous, unworthy of a humane or civilized nation. To my knowledge it drives many men mad, and even when it does not induce lunacy, mentally affects a large proportion of those subjected to it . . .” And: “The less a prisoner is thrown in on himself and the more he is encouraged to foster his home ties, the less likely is he to descend into that condition of despair and demoralization which are such potent factors in driving men to perdition.”

These are the words of Colonel Baker, of the Salvation Army, before your Departmental Committee of 1895:

“As to convicts on discharge, I should like to say that we find a great number of them incapable of pursuing any ordinary occupation. They are mentally weak and wasted, requiring careful treatment for months after they have been received by us. In several cases they are men who are only fit to be sent off home or to a hospital.”

These, after personal experience, are the comments of W. B. N. in his moderate, and stoical, book “Penal Servitude”:

“. . . but, at the best, the system of ‘separate confinement’ is a very bad one. It is only solitary confinement slightly improved, and it has some of the worst effects of that terrible punishment. The intention of it, doubtless, is to impress the prisoner with the gravity of his offence against society, and to bring him to a better state of mind. But in some cases, I am convinced, it has quite the opposite result. The solitude and the hopeless monotony, with nothing to think of but the long years of suffering and disgrace ahead, produces nervous irritation approaching, in some cases, to frenzy, and instead of softening the man brings out all the evil there is in him. Under such conditions, the worst companions he could have are his own thoughts. In men of a different temperament, again, it deadens all sensibility, so that they do not care a straw what happens afterwards, but would just as soon become habitual criminals as not. It is this sullen hatred of themselves and of everybody else engendered and fostered during the long dismal months of separate confinement that makes the most dangerous and troublesome prisoners at a later stage. There are a third class, who, having no criminal instincts, nor any strong instincts at all, merely give way mentally, without any acute distress, and become little better than half-witted by the time their separate confinement is at an end. . . .”

These are the remarks of Professor Prins, Inspector-General of Belgian prisons:

“Solitude produces in him (the vacuous-minded, erratic, and animal person who is usually the criminal) no intellectual activity and no searching of conscience; it serves to deepen his mental vacuity and to deliver him over to unnatural indulgence in the one animal appetite of which he cannot be deprived.” (“The Criminal,” Havelock Ellis, p. 328.)

Beltrani-Scalia, formerly Inspector-General of Prisons in Italy, is of the same opinion, and remarks that “the cellular system looks upon man as a brother of La Trappe.” (“The Criminal,” p. 329.)

The following passage, taken from Prince Kropotkin’s “Memoirs of a Revolutionist,” refers to a peasant confined solitarily in a cell beneath him in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and with whom he and his neighbour could communicate by knocking.

“Soon I began to notice, to my terror, that from time to time his mind wandered. Gradually his thoughts became more and more confused and we two perceived, step by step, day by day, evidences that his reason was failing, until his talk became at last that of a lunatic. Frightful noises and wild cries came next from the lower storey; our neighbour was mad. . . . To witness the destruction of a man’s mind under such conditions was terrible.”

Finally, this is the judgment of the rector of St. Marylebone, Dr. W. D. Morrison (after more than ten years’ experience as Prison Chaplain): “It tends to have a demoralising effect upon many classes of prisoners.”

Such evidence might be multiplied indefinitely.

Now, sir, in regard to the object of solitary confinement we have surely no need to go behind the finding of your committee:

“It would appear that the main object of the separate” (closed-cell) “confinement had come to be deterrence . . . In effect this is the purpose which it must be regarded as now designed to serve.”

In regard to its nature, we have, as surely, no need of other description than its supporter’s, the late Sir Edmund Du Cane’s “An artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health.”

The questions arising, then, are two:—

(a) Is this practice of solitary confinement, in fact, deterrent?

(b) Has a civilized nation the right to retain offenders for months in a state of existence absolutely opposed to mental, moral, and physical health, even for the purpose of deterrence?

As to question (a). No support can be gathered for the plea of deterrence from the statistics of penal servitude; mere severity of punishment has never been proved to be a factor of deterrence. When men were hung for horse or sheep stealing those offences were far more prevalent than they are now. Moreover, the nature of their coming punishment is too vaguely known to those who have never been in prison for the thought of solitary confinement to have any deterrent effect on ninety-nine out of a hundred first offenders. Indeed, that it is not sufficiently present to any man’s mind is shown by the fact that so humane a public as ours knows and thinks so little about the suffering of solitary confinement as to have allowed it to remain part of their prison system.

The effect of a period of solitary confinement which comes at the beginning of long years of imprisonment is inevitably wiped out by the monotony of the prison life which follows. Mechanical adjustment to environment is always going on in the human being. Solitary confinement is a smothering process to which the mind must adapt itself, or perish. The mental demoralization remains after the confinement comes to an end, but the consciousness of that mental ruin, the consciousness of the suffering, has become dulled; from his closed cell the convict passes on to the ordinary prison life, actually unable to appreciate the extent of the misery he has undergone. Obviously, moreover, deterrence (if there be deterrence) paid for by mental and moral weakening is not true deterrence; for the acquired power of resistance to crime, if any, is nullified through deterioration of the prisoner’s fibre.

The true deterrence of imprisonment lies in the general fear of loss of liberty; in that nightmare of a thought all details of impending punishment (even if known) mechanically merge.

This solitary confinement, however, is sometimes justified on the ground that it is necessary to buoy the convict up with hope. It is thought that by placing him at the outset in the seventh hell of pain we lessen his sufferings in the minor hells which await him at the expiration of those first dire months. That, sir, is humanity with a vengeance. Imagine this principle logically applied to social life. The husband would beat the wife that she might not so greatly feel the inevitable wear and tear of matrimony; the mother would starve the child that it might experience with more equanimity the ordinary pangs of hunger; the master would withhold wages that the servant might more duly appreciate the receipt of what was due to him. It appears, indeed, to be almost what is called a vicious principle.

To question (b)—Whether a civilized country has the right to retain its offenders in a state of existence absolutely opposed to mental, moral, and physical health, even for the sake of a supposed deterrence—I conceive, sir, but this one answer: Only so long as we do not realize what this solitary confinement means.

Six months (to take the mean sentence) is a short time to a free man; it is an eternity to a prisoner confined in solitude. One hundred and eighty days—four thousand hours, of utter solitude and silence in a cell, which—in the words of Sir Robert Anderson (Nineteenth Century, March, 1902)—“differs from every other sort of apartment designed for human habitation in that all view of external nature, such as might soothe, and possibly alleviate, the mind, is, with elaborate care, excluded”—solitude broken only by one hour a day, of chapel, and walking up and down a yard, by the sight of a warder, three times or so a day, bringing in food; by a ten minutes’ visit perhaps from chaplain or governor.

Four thousand hours of utter solitude in a closed space thirteen feet by seven—with the prospect of anything from two to twenty years of monotonous routine and loss of liberty to follow! Can a Public Opinion, which succeeds in bringing these facts home to its imagination, justly say that two and a half to twenty years of loss of liberty, with all that this means in prison, is not sufficient punishment for any crime that man can commit, without the preliminary agony of four thousand hours of solitude in a closed space thirteen feet by seven?

Sir, Public Opinion has never yet succeeded in realizing what this so-called separate confinement means. In the year ending March, 1907, we set 1,035 persons, of whom 691 had never been sentenced to penal servitude before, to endure these hours of agony and demoralization. In the year ending March, 1908, we set another 1,179 to endure the same, 749 of them for the first time. At the present moment another thousand, more or less, are undergoing it.

In thus subjecting year by year a thousand persons to nine, six, or three months of an “artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health,” we are annually committing an offence against our reason, of which we reap the full reward in the mental, moral, and physical deterioration of persons already demoralized enough; and an offence against our humanity in reality as great as if we had placed them on the rack.

I by no means lose sight of the fact that this closed-cell confinement falls with different effect on different temperaments; it falls, no doubt, far less heavily on the sluggish and the brutalized than on the nervous types, of which, however, we are now breeding great numbers. But, sir, even the habitual criminal—popularly supposed to dread flogging more than anything—has been known while enduring solitary confinement to beg for the lash in place of it. Sir J. Jebb, giving evidence before the Penal Servitude Acts Commission in 1863, uses these words: “With burglars and reckless characters I think that separate confinement is dreaded more than any other kind of discipline.” And in regard to other effects on the habitual criminal, the words of Professor Prins, above quoted, are significant. The sluggish brutality of many recidivists is produced in the first place by this very process of closed-cell confinement. Man, even the lowest type of man, is a social and gregarious animal—all that is best in him depends on, and is brought out by, contact with his fellow-creatures; if that be not so, our religion and whole social scheme are falsely conceived. Deprive man of all contact with his fellow-man, shut him in upon himself, hopelessly, utterly, month by month, and he will come out of that artificial existence lower and more brutal than when he entered it. Prolonged starvation and agony of the mind is worse than starvation and agony of the body, carrying, as it does, the wreck of the body with it.

We have the right to restrain offenders and to safeguard society; in doing this we unavoidably punish with that already terrible punishment “loss of liberty.” But, sir, we have—surely—not the right to inflict unnecessary and harmful suffering. I recognise to the full that there is no lack of humanity among those who work our prison system; recognise to the full that they would not willingly inflict any suffering that they acknowledged to be unnecessary; but in every department of life those who administer a system are, in the nature of things, with rare exceptions, too habituated to that system, too close to it, to be able to see it in due perspective.

I ask you, sir, and I ask the common sense of the public, whether harmful and unnecessary suffering must not inevitably be endured by the mind, and through the mind by the body, of a human being during these thousands of hours of closed-cell confinement. To answer that question fairly each member of the public has but to ask what would be the effect on himself or herself of nine or six or even three months’ utter seclusion (except for one hour each day) from all sight and sound not only of human beings, but of animals, trees, flowers, and from the sight even of the sky, all but a patch no bigger than a tea-tray. We are on the whole a humane people; and it is not so much a question of our humanity as of our imaginations. The position is plainly this: Those who have to work our prison system perhaps could not do so at all if they allowed their imaginations fair play. The community are too aloof to realize what that prison system means. And so the unnecessary demoralization and suffering caused by this closed-cell confinement goes on at the rate of (for convicts alone) more than four million hours a year!

I do not base the appeal of this letter so much on humanity as on common sense. Why, when we are faced with appalling statistics of criminality, with appalling difficulties in dealing with and reforming criminals, do we deliberately continue a practice which both evidence and reason tell us contributes to the more complete demoralization of such as are already demoralized?

In the Report of your Departmental Committee of 1895 occur these words:

“It should be the object of the prison authorities, through the prison staff and any suitable auxiliary effort that can be employed, to humanize the prisoners, to prevent them from feeling that the State merely chains them for a certain period and cares nothing about them beyond keeping them in safe custody and under iron discipline.”

And again: “. . . it strengthens our belief that the main fault of our prison system is that it treats prisoners too much as irreclaimable criminals instead of reclaimable men and women.”

I submit that no unprejudiced man can regard this closed-cell confinement as a humanizing influence, except in the rarest cases, or maintain that it helps to reclaim men and women.

I refer again to this paragraph in the Report of your Committee:

“It” (the detention of convicts in closed-cell confinement at local prisons) “is certainly a practical convenience in the sense that the expense of sending convicts immediately after sentence to convict prisons, either singly or in detachments, is curtailed by the system of gathering prisons. This consideration alone is not sufficient to justify the practice.”

I am credibly informed that the whole matter is one of administration, and can be modified without Act of Parliament. I appeal, then, to you, sir, who have already done so much towards reforming our prison system, to work for the abandonment of this custom of confining convicts in closed cells for nine, six or three months, or any less period, either in local or in convict prisons; to substitute therefore work in association from the commencement of sentence; or, where such is not immediately possible, work in separate cells with open doors. And I would further appeal to you to advocate the reduction of the twenty-eight days, closed-cell confinement endured by prisoners serving sentences of hard labour.

Than this great and necessary reform I can conceive none that will, at a single stroke, remove so much harmful and unnecessary suffering, or do more to reconcile our Penal Laws with Justice and Common Sense.