Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/771

Rh P R I P E I 747 lating ground, and presents in the distance a pleasant appearance with the minarets erected, according to the legend, by Turkish women whose husbands fell in the battle of Kossovo fought in the neighbourhood. Prishtina is the seat of a Greek bishop. Its population is estimated at from 8000 to 10,000. To the south-east lies the partly ruined monastery of Gratchanitza founded by King Milutin of Servia, who reigned from 1275 to 1321. It is a graceful building with a large central dome surrounded by four smaller domes and a variety of arches, of which the higher are pointed and the lower round. Among the frescos are portraits of the founder and his queen Simonida, daughter of Andronicus II. Paheologus, and a remarkable head of Christ in the dome. See Mackenzie and Irby, The Slavonic Provinces of Turkey. PllISON DISCIPLINE. Authority in every age and in every country has claimed to impose penalties on all who offend against it. Either coercion or protection has been the moving principle : the master extorted submis sion, or society, through its rulers, defended itself against evil doers. The most common punishments in early times were naturally those most easily inflicted. Offenders paid in their persons : they were put to death with every variety of the capital sentence, were branded, mutilated, or sold as slaves. They were fined also, were degraded, or for feited civil rights, or yet again were simply banished from their homes. Enforced detention, incarceration within four walls, was another method of coercion which grew and gained favour under the feudal system. The lord temporal or spiritual or corporate body could thus hold the vassal safe until he yielded fealty or submitted to extortion. A dungeon told no tales, and served conveni ently to bury the victims of mediaeval oppression. The unrestrained and unjustifiable exercise of the power to im prison lingered long in lands where personal liberty was unknown ; nor did arbitrary imprisonment terminate with the destruction of the Bastille. In England, however, free dom from illegal arrest, the dearest of the Briton s pri vileges, was resolutely fought for and early achieved. The Great Charters conceded it ; and, although often in danger, it was confirmed finally and beyond all question by the Habeas Corpus Act passed in the reign of Charles II. But the theory was better than the practice : numbers always languished in jail, the victims of needlessly severe or misinterpreted laws, who nowadays would have been at large. Through long years of trouble and dis quiet, when the country was torn with religious and political dissensions, the prisons were always full. Intoler ance appealed to the strong arm, and the jail was the antechamber of the scaffold or stake. When party warfare ran high, when kings struggled for larger powers or their ministers and myrmidons ruled with a high hand, incar ceration was the easy recompense for all on the losing side. The commercial laws of a nation wedded to trade kept a large contingent always in jail. The debtor was at the mercy of his creditor, who could command the best efforts of the law to assist him in recovering his own again. Irregu larity in the administration of justice contributed largely to fill the prisons. Jail deliveries were frequently de layed indefinitely; while, even when tardy trial ended in an acquittal, release was not always accorded, and innocent men, unable to meet extortionate demands in fees, were carried back to prison. This was one reason why jails were full ; yet another was the laxity or entire absence of discipline which suffered the families of accused persons to share their confinement. Under such conditions, more or less universal, the state of prisons, not in England alone, but throughout the then civilized world, was deplorable in the extreme. Yet the terrors of incarceration were long but vaguely understood. Glimpses of light sometimes pene trated the dark recesses of the prison house, as when the atrocities perpetrated by the keepers of the chief debtors inquiry. This was in 1730, forty- three years before the revelations of Howard. But in the interval voices were occasionally raised in protest, and there was a general sense of uneasiness throughout the country to which the great philanthropist gave point and expression. Howard began his journeys of inspection in 1773 ; in the following year he was examined by the House of Commons, and received the thanks of the House for his arduous and self-sacrificing labours for the mitigation of suffering in jails. What Howard found is sufficiently well known. The prisons of the kingdom were a disgrace to humanity: they were for the most part poisonous pestiferous dens, densely over crowded, dark, foully dirty, not only ill-ventilated, but de prived altogether of fresh air. The wretched inmates were thrown into subterranean dungeons, into wet and noisome caverns and hideous holes to rot and fester, a prey to fell disease bred and propagated in the prison house, and de prived of the commonest necessaries of life. For food they were dependent upon the caprice of their jailers or the charity of the benevolent ; water was denied them- except in the scantiest proportions ; they were half naked or in rags ; their only bedding was putrid straw reeking with exhalations and accumulated filth. Every one in durance, whether tried or untried, was heavily ironed ; women did not escape the infliction. All alike were subject to the rapacity of their jailers and the extortions of their fellows. Jail fees were levied ruthlessly, &quot; garnish&quot; also, the tax or contribution paid by each individual to a common fund to be spent by the whole body, generally in drink. Drunken ness was universal and quite unchecked ; gambling of all kinds was practised ; vice and obscenity were everywhere in the ascendant. Idleness, drunkenness, vicious inter course, sickness, starvation, squalor, cruelty, chains, awful oppression, and everywhere culpable neglect in these words may be summed up the state of the jails at the time of Howard s visitation. It must be borne in mind that all this time the prisons were primarily places of detention, not of punishment. The bulk of those committed to their safe keeping were accused persons awaiting trial in due process of law, or debtors ; and of these again by far the most numerous class were the impecunious and the unfortunate, whom a mistaken system locked up and deprived of all means of paying their liabilities. Now and again an offender was sentenced to be imprisoned in default of payment of fine, or to pass the intervals between certain periods of dis graceful exposure on the pillory. Imprisonment had as yet no regular place in the code of penalties, and the jail was only the temporary lodging of culprits duly tried and sentenced according to law. The punishment most in favour in these ruthless times was death. The statute- book bristled with capital felonies, and the gallows was in perpetual requisition. These were days when the pick pocket was hanged ; so was the sheep-stealer, and the forger of one-pound notes. Well might Sir Samuel Romilly, to whose strenuous exertions the amelioration of the penal code is in a great measure due, declare that the laws of England were written in blood. But even then there was another and a less sanguinary penaltj r. The deportation of criminals beyond seas grew naturally out of the laws which prescribed banishment for certain offences. The Vagrancy Act of Elizabeth s reign contained in it the germ of transportation, by empowering justices in quarter sessions to banish offenders and order them to be conveyed ! into such parts beyond the seas as should be assigned by this statute in the next reign, as is proved by a letter
 * prisons in London were made the subject of parliamentary
 * Her Majesty s privy council. Full effect was given to