THE WAYS OF CONVICTS.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20254, 24 July 1937, Page 15 (Supplement)

THE WAYS OF CONVICTS.

Mental Occupation :: Urge of Self-Expression.

(Adelaide Chronicle.)

THE OLD PROVERB about idle hands, like so many proverbs, is only a halftruth. It is idle minds, not hands, that keep the devil busy allocating jobs. This simple truth, obvious though it is, has been overlooked by prison authorities all over the world for centuries. Even in this so-called enlightened age it has not been fully comprehended; unless it is that the authorities deliberately disregard the dictates of common sense and persist in treating self-expression and mental occupation as luxuries to be doled out sparingly to erring men, merely from fear lest the public accuse them of pampering criminals. Thus for centuries past the walls of prison cells have resembled the caves of primitive man; they have been covered with graffiti and hieroglyphs. And not only the walls. “Drinking vessels, bed planks, margins of books, and even the unstable sands of the exercise grounds supply him with a surface on which to imprint his thoughts and feelings," wrote Lombroso some 50 years ago. And What Thoughts They Werel Terse, unprintable opinions on the turnkeys and prison life in general; bitter recriminations on an ill-spent life; despairing clamours against the injustice of a sentence. Some of the inscriptions noted by Lombroso ought to be carved in stone over the doors of the Home Office and framed over every magistrate’s desk. “I am 18 years old," writes one prisoner on the walls of his cell. “Misfortune has made me guilty several times, and each time I have been shut up in prison. But how have I been reformed in prison? What have I learned. I have perfected myself in wickedness here." And this:—“We are kept shut up like so many white bears under pretence of reforming us. In prison a man learns to hate society, but not to make an honest man out of a thief." • Despite recent reforms those words scratched by an Italian criminal on a cell wall more than half a century ago are still true to-day. But systematically destroying individuality and deliberately making the prisoner (irrespective of the nature of his offence) into an anti-social creature, and then casting him morally, physically, and financially unprepared into a hostile world, the prison system aggravates the sore it is designed to heal. Penal methods are probably a more potent cause of criminality than drink or bad environment. It is scarcely credible that the use of books is still regarded as a concession to prisoners, and that in the punishment cells a convict is not allowed books at all, being obliged to spend hours and hours in Complete Idleness and Solitude. In the days before the condemned criminal was closely watched night and day, the walls of the condemned cell bore some truly remarkable inscriptions. As on the threshold of life so soon the brink of death, the urge for self-expression becomes intense. Poems of great beauty have been found scratched laboriously on the whitewash of the condemned cell, and some of the most cynical brutes have saluted society with grimly witty verse of no slight merit. Some men, incapable of expressing themselves verbally, have resorted like their primitive ancestors, to pictography. In the Museum of Criminal Anthropology created by Lombroso, there are numerous specimens of criminal art; stones shapes to resemble human figures, pottery covered with designs that recall Egyptian heiroglyphs, and scenes fashioned in breadcrumbs or clay that resemble the grotesque creation of children and savages. A certain Cavaglia, who had robbed and murdered an accomplice, decided when in prison to commit suicide one hundred days after the date of his crime. Unable to unburden himself of this project, he adorned his water jug with a pictorial of his crime, his imprisonment, and his suicide. Owing to the fact that the condemned man in an English prison is never left alone, and that convicts now have many opportunities for surreptitious conversation, inscriptions on

cell walls in Great Britain have become rare the more so because damage (which has a most comprehensive meaning in Standing Orders) to His Majesty’s prisons represents a term on bread and water in the punishment cells. But in many Firench prisons the practice still flourishes, and the type and tone of most of the inscriptions are a Lurid Reflection of Prisoners’ Mentality. “The walls of a prison," wrote a French ex-convict in 1888, “offer a world of information and are marvellous instruments of correspondence. When I found myself at Lholon-on-the-Saone, in the most secret ceils, I learned of arrests made in Lyons, Paris, and Vienna on my account." Writing of the methods by which news Is circulated, he went on:—“There is first the little cord, stretched by the weight of a ball made of breadcrumbs, and so thrown from one window to another. There are books in the library which circulate covered with cryptograms. Then the pipes for water and hot air make excellent speaking tubes. Another dodge is knocking on the wall. It is not necessary that the persons communicating by this method be in contiguous cells. I once got valuable news in this way from a comrade 40 or 50 yards away." The manner in which the news is received and circulated in prisons is still a source of amazement to prison governors. The governor of one of the biggest convict prisons in England relates that he heard from one of his prisoners that he was to be transferred to the governorship of another prison three days before he received official intimation of the fact. Everyone in the prison had known of it before he, the person concerned, was informed. Lombroso recounts an almost identical case. Granted that the convicts now have many opportunities for exchanging information —on the landings and in the workshops —there is no explanation of the manner in which the news enters prison. But it is a fact recognised by all prison officials that the World Holds IMo Secrets From Prisons. Though outside news is strictly censored, convicts know everything of importance occurring outside. The inmates of every prison in England knew, for example, all about the Dartmoor mutiny, though all news of it was suppressed. Hard-headed and least imaginative officials have come to admit that there is some kind of telepathy among convicts that is beyond their power to control. Though it by no means explains fully how prisons speak, or how a diversity of goods, from tobacco to hacksaws, manage to get Into prison, officials know that prison visitors are often an innocent source of contraband news and goods. One visitor was caught smuggling tubes of paint to a prisoner, believing they were for his innocent recreation. He learned afterwards that the prisoner was using the paint to fake documents. It is as true in prison as elsewhere that love laughs at locksmiths. Lombroso describes the passionate correspondence that used to bo carried on between male and female prisoners in adjoining prisons. It might be imagined that such things are impossible in the modern prisons. But Colonel Rich, who has been governor of nearly every prison of importance in England, states that there is a Groat Deal of Clandestine Philandering in prisons where a female section is attached. The women inmates especially show amazing ingenuity in making contact with convicts. In his reminiscences Colonel Rich cites a case that occurred during his governorship of Walton Prison, Liverpool. A woman prisoner who had obtained leave to practise on a piano in a recreation room had caught a glimpse of a convict doing some decorating in the room. From this meeting a violent love affair developed, its uneven course being pursued by means of notes secreted in the piano. Unfortunately for the lovers the secret of their musical pillar box was surprised, and the idyll came to an abrupt end.