THE PUNISHMENT OF PENAL SERVITUDE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1223, 7 August 1885, Page 3

THE PUNISHMENT OF PENAL SERVITUDE.

The first two years of penal servitude are the hardest to bear, and test mental endurance more than the whole of the remainder of an ordinary sentence. Liberty has only just been parted with.. The picture of the outside world is still imprinted upon the memory, and home and friends, and perhaps with a dearer object still, are made to haunt the recollection whenever the association of ideas recalls some incidents of happier days. Of these two years the heaviest portion is comprised within the nine or ten mon hs which, must bo spent in what is called “probation”—solitary confinement in Millbank 6r Pentonville ; and while “ solitary ” is not much drea tcd by ordinary prisoners at a later stage of penal existence, it is truly a terrible ordeal to undergo a* the commencement, In Millbank this is specially so. The prison is but a few hundred yards west of Westminster Palace, from whence comes every quarter of an hour the Big Ben, telling the listening inmates of the penitentiary that another 15 minutes of their sentences have gone by. What horrible punishment has thai c’Ook added to many an unfortunate wretch’s fate,"by counting for him the minutes during which atone walls and iron bars will a prison make.

Then, again, there aro the thousand and ono noises that penetrate the lonely cells and silent corridors of that cheerless abode. Now it is the strains of a band from St. James’ Park, “ bring ng back to the memory merry days long gone by ; ” next it is tho whistle of tho railway engine, with its suggestiveness of a journey “home,” and no on, during the long weary days and nights, until tho terrible idea of suicide is forced across the mind as the only mode of release from the horrible mockery of the noisy, joyful world beyond the boundary walls.

It is not surprising that many men have gone mad in Millbank. 1 was but a few weeks an inmate when I had to witness a sad incident of the kind. We were at prayers one morning in the Catholic Chapel, and the choir, made up of prisoners, were singing one of Father Faber’s beautiful supplications to the Virgin Mother. The air to which tho words wore sang Jwas one of joyousness and hope, such as would easily cause a listener to travel back to the schoolboy period of life, and dwell again on a time ere prisons or suffering were much thought of. Suddenly a wild, heartbursting cry rang out, above the voices of the singers, from a convict of soma 45 years of age, a few seats removed from where 1 was seated. He rushed towards the altar with piercing shrieks, while his eyes and face proclaimed the sudden loss of reason and tho presence of madness. I thought at the time that the hymn, or the air to which it was sung, might have brought up to the wretched man’s memory the voices of his children and the thought of the years that must elapse—years of penal servitude, too—before ho could again see or hear of them, and that under the frightful strain of the mind and heart he suddenly became a raving maniac.—Leaves from a Prison Diary by Michael Davitt.