Page:Hubert W. Peet - 112 Days' Hard Labour, Being Some Reflections On the First of My Sentences as a Conscientious Objector - 1917.pdf/15

 present social order is I do not believe it would be plagued one whit more with crime and criminals were our present penal system abolished to-morrow. The total crime I am certain would not be increased; indeed, I believe it would be definitely diminished, for fear of punishment does little or nothing to deter the hardened criminal, while the stigma of having been to prison (which now almost inevitably turns the weak man who has fallen once into a permanent gaolbird) would be absent. It is pitiful to see the old, bent, grey-haired men who have evidently become habituated to prison as their home, and still more tragic to watch the “juvenile adults” branded as criminals almost before they have left school, whose defiant eyes contrast strikingly with the dull look of older prisoners.

What a generation of prison reformers we should make—and must make.

Think of what Elizabeth Fry and John Howard effected, and how much greater will be our advantages when we can back our proposals not merely as the result of investigation but of personal experience, back them by the unescapable authentic warrant of those who can say,

“We have been in prison and we know.”

The allowing of books, letters, visits, these of course are all steps in the right direction. In the visits, to be sure, one’s friends are seen, or not seen, through two thicknesses of wire gauze. It is really an interview in semi-darkness. Four photos are allowed after a month—another right step. Yet another was the practice of the prison chaplain to announce from the front of the altar after service a few items of war news. They were presented in what seemed to be “Daily Mail” headlines, and looking back on them one reflects that, however well and candidly intended, they usually gave a very misleading impression of what was happening. But, however that may be, let me acknowledge that all these are welcome moves in the right line; it remains to add when that acknowledgment is made that they do but touch the merest surface of the problem.

Wanted—A Prison Newspaper

I thought often with amusement, but with more than amusement, of a “Sub Rosa” suggestion made in the “Daily News.” A year or two ago, when I was editing Sell’s publication, “The World’s Press,” Mr. S. Leigh Hughes, M.P., contributed to that work an article on Australian and American prison papers. He declared that we should soon want a “Cells’ World’s Press.” The recollection of “Sub Rosa’s” wheeze had its very serious side for me. The regular provision of a prison journal of some sort, even of one that was heavily censored, would be of the utmost value as a relief to the deadening, debilitating, soul-destroying influence of prison monotony. It would greatly increase the