WOMEN POLITICAL PRISONERS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9144, 21 July 1908, Page 4

WOMEN POLITICAL PRISONERS.

A cablegram from London on Saturday last stated that Messrs Robert Pearce and C. tl. Corbett, M.P.'s. were initiating a Bill in the House of Commons tj treat girls and women, sentenced for political offences, as first-class misdemeanants, except in cases where damage to property or grievous bodily harm is involved The difference between the treatment accorded t> prisoners who are placed in the first-class and those placed in the secon.i was- furnished to the House of Lords in a question recently asked by Earl Russell of the Government concerning the treatment of .-o.T,e ladies who were undergoing im prisonment in Holloway Gaol early in the year for persistently ringing th-; door-bells of Cabinet Ministers Hitherto, Lord Kussell said, ladies who had acte 1 in a similar manner had been treated as first-class misdemeanants, but now they were treated net second-class. In the instance under notice the ladies were placed in the second division, in which they had to wear the ordinary prison clothes, and were subject to all the other hardships and degradations to which any ordinary prisoner was exposed In the first division prisoners were enabled to wear their own clothes and have their own food, and couid be supplied with newspapers and books from the outbide world; they were merely confined in prison, without having inflicted upon them any particular hardship or degrada tion.