After a long and careful investigation, the committee wound up their report with the following pregnant words: “Your committee having now passed in review the different modes of secondary punishment known to the practice of this country, wish once more to direct the attention of the House to their obvious tendency. If it is a principle of our criminal jurisprudence, that the guilty should escape rather than the innocent suffer, it appears equally a principle, in the infliction of punishment, that every regulation connected with it, from the first committal of a prisoner to gaol to the termination of his sentence of transportation, should be characterized rather by an anxious care for the health and convenience of the criminal than for anything which might even by implication appear to bear on him with undue severity.”
The authorities at Millbank now wished to set their house in order. With the publication of this parliamentary report, the managers of Millbank awoke all at once to the true condition of the prison. On account of the repeated “irregularities” laid before them, they now considered it necessary to ascertain whether any, and what abuses existed; and whether there were any and what defects in the system upon which the prison was conducted. The whole subject was therefore entrusted to a sub-committee, which, after some months of patient investigation, was of opinion that all the irregularities arose from “the too great intercourse which the present system permits prisoners to hold with one another. The comparatively ignorant are thus instructed in schemes and modes of vice by the hardened and the depraved; and those upon whom good impressions have been made are ridiculed and shamed out of their resolutions by associating with the profligate.” We have here an admission that one of the old evils of prison life—indiscriminate association—which was to have been abolished by the Penitentiary system, was still in full vigour, and that in fact it had never been interfered with.
The committee arrived therefore at the conviction “that the prosperity and well-being of the establishment must depend upon effecting a more strict seclusion of the prisoners, one from another.” At the same time a new chaplain, Mr. Whitworth Russell, who became largely identified with prisons and penal discipline, urgently recommended a greater development of religious instruction. He proposed that in future the open part of the Millbank chapel should be provided with benches, so that he might assemble daily, large classes for religious instruction. To these classes he was to devote three hours every morning, the schoolmaster performing the same duty in the afternoon. During the morning instruction by the chaplain this schoolmaster had to visit the prisoners, cell by cell, either collecting information, as to the previous habits and connections of the prisoners, or carrying on the instruction commenced at school or the lectures in chapel. In this we find the key-note of the new system that was from now on to prevail with increasing strength, till by and by, as we shall see, it grew to be altogether supreme.