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A Minute on Separate Confinement

Forwarded to the Home Secretary and the Prison Commissioners, September, 1909.

(Compiled from visits paid to sixty convicts undergoing separate confinement in X. and Y. Prisons, July and September, 1909.)

By the courtesy of the Prison Commissioners, to whom my thanks are due, I visited these convicts in their cells, and conversed privately with each one of them for from ten minutes to a quarter of an hour. I put certain definite questions to each in regard to the effect of separate confinement on themselves, and, so far as they could tell me, on other prisoners, prefacing each conversation by the information that I was in no way connected with the prison authorities. My object in the course of these conversations was to get behind the formal question and answer to the man’s real feelings. I met with no hostility, defiance, or conscious evasion in any single case. In some cases a word or two was sufficient to bring a rush of emotion. Several men were in tears throughout the interview. In the majority of cases, however, I found it difficult to get the prisoners to express themselves; and in some cases formal answers, stolidly given, were reversed by some sudden revelation of feeling evoked, as it were, in spite of the prisoner’s self. Generally speaking, I judged that feelings were understated rather than overstated.

The summary of these interviews is as follows: (sixty convicts interviewed): —

Of these:

Eight preferred separate confinement to working in association, and were not conscious of harmful	Category A.
Fifteen would prefer work in association, but (1) Having suffered from their separate confinement, had got more or less used to it (three cases). (2) Were suffering, but thought it was good for them (three cases). (3) Were so incapable of expressing their experiences, that no definite answer could be got from them (nine cases).	Category B.
Thirty-seven preferred association; suffered severely from separate confinement; and asserted that they had been harmed; that all prisoners were harmed, and some driven crazy.	Category C.

Of the eight convicts in Category A, who preferred separate:

Four were educated men (three of whom asserted a natural preference for their own society in or out of prison).

One was an old recidivist with five sentences of penal servitude.

Two (of a callous type) preferred separate confinement because they had no temptation to talk and get into trouble.

One was the only prisoner I saw who said he had deliberately committed his offence in order to get into prison.

The following phrases taken from notes made immediately after each interview indicate the general nature of the suffering experienced by prisoners separately confined:

“I used to look up at the window, and something seemed to pull me back.”

“The first month was awful, I didn’t hardly know how to keep myself together. I thought I should go mad.”

“It’s made me very nervous. The least thing upsets me; I was not nervous before.”

“I’ve got a daughter, and I grieve over her all the time; there’s nothing to take your mind off.”

“I’ve never felt right since—it’s got all over me.” (This man cried all the time. He seemed utterly unnerved, and broken up. A Star Class man.)

“I feel it dreadfully. It gets worse as it goes on.”

“It’s no life at all. I’d sooner be dead than here.” (This man was very tearful and quavery.)

“My first spell of ‘separate’ nearly drove me raving.” (This was a recidivist serving his third term.)

“It broke me down on my first sentence. It destroys a man.”

“I had a cold lonely feeling. . . . Nine months of it is killing for most men.”

“It’s punishment to shut up a man for nine months.” (This is a fair specimen of the very general under-statement of evidently acute feelings.)

“It’ll send men ‘up the stick.’ ” (Off their heads.)

“I’m very miserable and down-’earted. You feel it more and more as you get older. I hardly know sometimes what I’m doing.” (This was from an old man of sixty-one who had been twenty years in prison, and said he did not expect to last through this sentence. He had still six months of separate to run, and struck me as very broken up, and suffering.)

“I keep ‘picturing’ things, and walking about. It sends men ‘up the pole!’ ” (Another bad case of a young recidivist of twenty-nine, with five months of his ‘separate’ still to run.)

“Walls seem to close in. . . . I get blankness in the brain; have to stop reading.”

“It’s hell upon earth.” (An educated prisoner.)

“Almost unbearable depression.” (An educated prisoner.)

“Sleep’s the only comfort.”

“I sit there sometimes at work, not knowing what I’m doing.”

“I’ve good nerves. A man with bad nerves would soon snuff out in ‘separate’.”

“If a man had the spy-hole open even, so that he could see out, it would make a vast deal of difference. . . . I’ve seen numbers of men come on the public works from their ‘separate,’ quite silly.”

“I’ve seen many a man driven queer.” (This recidivist had served four terms of penal servitude.)

“I’ve seen men driven off their nuts.”

I could not get an admission from any prisoner that the suffering they underwent in separate confinement deterred them from coming back to prison. The two reasons they assigned for coming back to prison were:

(1) That they had so little chance outside. (2) Drink.

It is obvious, however, that the separate period is almost universally regarded as much the worst part of the sentence.

My reasons for believing that, in spite of this, separate confinement is not, in fact, deterrent were given in my open letter to the Home Secretary (the Nation, May 1st and May 8th, 1909); this belief has been strengthened rather than weakened in the course of this investigation. As a final result of these visits I record my deliberate conviction that no competent observer with any knack of getting at men’s feelings, and the opportunity of conversing in private and as a private person, with the prisoners could come to any other conclusion than that an immense amount of harmful and unnecessary suffering is inflicted by closed-cell confinement extending over the periods (especially the longer periods) now prevailing. It is my belief that if the authorities were able to adopt this method of getting at the real state of the case the system would not remain unaltered for a single day.