The county gaols were in these days still faulty. They made no attempt to reform the morals of their inmates, nor could they be said to diminish crime by the severity of their discipline. Indeed, they held out scarcely any terrors to offenders. Of one of the largest, Coldbath Fields, Mr. Chesterton, who was appointed its governor in 1829, speaks in the plainest terms. “It was a sink of abomination and pollution. The female side was only half fenced off from the male—evidently with an infamous intention; its corrupt functionaries played into each other’s hands to prevent an inquiry or exposure. None of the authorities who ruled the prison had acquired any definite notion of the wide-spread defilement that polluted every hole and corner of that Augean stable. Shameless gains were promoted by the encouragement of all that was lawless and execrable.” The same writer describes Newgate, which he visited, as presenting “a hideous combination of all that was revolting.” The thieves confined therein smoked short pipes, gamed, swore, and fought through half the night: the place was like a pandemonium. Again, when he saw them, “The prisons of Bury St. Edmund’s, Salford, and Kirkdale created in my mind irrepressible disgust. I wondered why such detestable haunts should be tolerated.” Gaolers and criminals were on the best of terms with each other. At Ilchester the governor was in the habit of playing whist with his prisoners, and at Coldbath Fields the turnkeys shook hands with new arrivals and promised to take “all possible care” of them. With all this there was such a deficiency of control that unlimited intercourse could not be prevented, and there followed naturally that corruption of innocent prisoners by the more depraved which was a bugbear even in the time of John Howard.
Indeed, it was a wonder that Howard did not rise from his grave. Half a century had elapsed since his voice first was heard, and yet corrupt practices, idleness, and wide-spread demoralization characterized the greater part of the small prisons in the country. Herein were confined the lesser lights of the great army of crime, and if they escaped thus easily, it could not be said that the more advanced criminals endured a lot that was much more severe. The reader has, perhaps, some notion by this time of the kind of punishment to be met with in the walls of the Penitentiary; the hulks, too, have already been mentioned. The third method of coercion, by transportation, that is to say, beyond the seas, remains to be described; but this I reserve for a later page, recording only here the opinion of the committee of 1831, that as a punishment transportation held out to the dangerous classes absolutely no terrors at all. “Indeed, from accounts sent home, the situation of the convict is so comfortable, his advancement, if he conducts himself with prudence, so sure, as to produce a strong impression that transportation may be considered rather an advantage than a punishment.”