Memorandum on Prison Reform 447 



It was only on my removal to Kilmainham that I was subjected to the full 

 rigours of prison discipline and came to understand the extent of its 

 demoralizing influence and the hatred it excites against society and what 

 is called the " law and order " which maintains it. 



Kilmainham was a gaol of the scientific modern type, with cells all of 

 one pattern set in a circle round an enclosed central hall in such a way as 

 to enable the chief warder to have his eye on each one of them and so to 

 prevent any irregularity on the part of his subordinates. The discipline 

 was thus perfectly preserved and to the prisoners a cause of constant 

 irritation as to spying. Here, no kind of familiarity was permitted nor 

 the least show of kindness between warder and the men under his charge. 

 All was gloom and severity. At Galway there had been a pleasant feeling, 

 or what was near it, between them, at least when the Governor and Chief 

 Warder were out of sight, the warders and prisoners being much of the 

 same class, peasants born, with the same natural ideas, virtues, vices, and 

 weaknesses. The Galway prisoners were none of them in gaol for serious 

 crime, the most criminal among them being a man who had got drunk 

 and stabbed a sheep at a fair. The most of them were very pious Cath- 

 olics, as their demeanour in the prison chapel testified, and I suspect that 

 their moral lives were at least as good as the warders' and better than 

 my own. 



At Kilmainham, on the contrary, our inmates were thieves and pick- 

 pockets, the rif-raf of the Dublin streets, and a stricter rule was doubtless 

 excusable. But, excusable or not, the effect was of the most deadening 

 kind, deadening and at the same time exasperating. It is not good for any 

 man to be treated for weeks and months only with contempt, and prisoners 

 shut off in separate cells from their fellow creatures and subjected to 

 ignominious treatment from callous masters (for such their warders were) 

 lose all their self-respect as men, and acquire the ways of slaves. Silence 

 and solitude when prolonged beyond a certain point of time have a 

 physical effect upon the nerves and brain allied to mental disease and play 

 havoc with the imagination. The sense of proportion in things is destroyed 

 and the mind revolves upon the axis of its own imaginings to its spiritual 

 hurt. I myself, though I had nothing really to reproach myself with, for 

 all my crime had been to call a meeting in a proclaimed district at which I 

 had not been given time to finish so much as a single sentence, felt myself 

 drawn into sympathy with the Dublin criminals, my fellow sufferers, and 

 into a revolt with them against the barbarities of civilization. How much 

 more must it have been with these poor wretches condemned to long terms 

 of an iron system of repression for deeds of which they were really in 

 their hearts ashamed. Everything was done in Kilmainham to shut us out 

 of the poor natural pleasures of light, air and sunshine, which the least 

 beast, bird or insect can enjoy. The windows of our cells, high up and 

 out of reach, were glazed with ground glass to prevent us from seeing the 

 smallest patch of sky. All our actions were regulated as by machinery, 

 and no word was spoken to us but of command. The prison chaplain was 

 a man with a smug, false face, chosen for his subservience to the Castle, 

 a weigher of his words and an economizer of his sympathies. The doctor 



