APPENDIX IV 



MR. BLUNTS MEMORANDUM ON PRISON REFORM, ESPECI- 

 ALLY AS TO THE TREATMENT OF POLITICAL PRISONERS 



Forwarded to the Home Secretary, Mr. Winston Churchill, M.P., 



25th Feb. 1910 



As the question of prison reform has become one of urgency in connec- 

 tion with the suffragette movement and the many women who have recently 

 undergone detention for offences, more or less political, I offer these 

 remarks founded on an experience of some years ago, which I think may 

 be of use. 



In the early months of 1888 I served a sentence under the Crimes Act 

 in Ireland, of two months in Galway and Kilmainham gaols. My treat- 

 ment was that of an ordinary prisoner with hard labour, though hard 

 labour was not named in the sentence - — that is to say, I was made to wear 

 prison dress, sleep on a plank bed, pick oakum and perform the other 

 duties assigned to hard labour prisoners. I was forbidden to receive visits 

 or write letters, or to have any books to read but a Bible and a Prayer 

 Book, except during the last week of my confinement, which was strictly 

 silent and separate during the whole two months. With the exception of 

 the plank bed, which prevented sleep for more than a very short portion of 

 the long winter nights passed in darkness, I found little to complain of in 

 the way of physical hardship. The cells were clean and fairly well aired, 

 the food sufficient, and the exercise, a dull round in the prison yard, more 

 than I needed. The oakum picking was so little a trouble to me that I 

 came to be glad to secrete a piece of the tarred rope on Saturday nights so 

 as to have it to pick on Sundays. It gave an occupation to the hands and 

 slightly to the brain of the kind that knitting gives. It was pleasant to 

 the sense of smell and to the eye. The life under these physical heads 

 was hardly worse than one has to put up with on a sea voyage and may pass 

 without special comment. The suffering inflicted on prisoners under the 

 present system I found to be of a different kind, moral, not physical. But 

 this was severe. 



The silent and separate system in the treatment of prisoners was, I 

 believe, introduced as a humanitarian reform with the idea of preventing 

 the less depraved among these from contamination with companions 

 wholly vicious. Some reform of this sort no doubt was needed. But I 

 doubt if those who devised it either understood its full effects or intended 

 that it should be pushed as far as has been the case. Carried out as we 

 see it under the present regulations it is a punishment in addition to the 



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