Letters to the Daily Chronicle: Summary

Wilde has learnt that the warder Martin of Reading Prison has been dismissed for giving sweet biscuits to a hungry child. He saw the three children himself on the Monday before his release, newly convicted, standing in the central hall in prison dress, the smallest too tiny for any clothes to fit. He knows what lies ahead of them. Cruelty, he argues, is not a medieval passion like that of Eccelin da Romano but 'simply stupidity', born of hard-and-fast rules, centralisation and officialism; the people who run the system mean well, and 'It is supposed that because a thing is the rule it is right.'

A child, he explains, can accept punishment from a parent but cannot understand punishment by Society, and so falls prey to terror. He remembers a small boy on remand in the cell opposite his own, his face 'like a white wedge of sheer terror', crying for his parents at breakfast. Magistrates who remand children for a week call this not sending a child to prison, but to the child the horror is to be there at all. Every child is kept in its cell twenty-three hours in twenty-four, something a parent would be punished for doing. Most warders are fond of children, but any who help them, as Martin did, are dismissed.

The second suffering is hunger. The prison diet of badly baked bread, water and Indian meal stirabout makes grown men ill, and a crying, frightened child cannot eat it at all. Martin bought the biscuits because the child was crying with hunger on the Tuesday morning; the child innocently told a senior warder how kind he had been, and a report and dismissal followed. Wilde knew Martin well from his last seven weeks in Gallery C, and tells of another kindness: Martin emptied the slops of a sick man whom a senior warder had refused to help.

The contamination of children, Wilde says, comes not from the prisoners but from the whole system: governor, chaplain, warders, the lonely cell and the rules. The prisoners themselves are the one humanising influence, kind to each other and full of pity for the three children as they pass. 'It is not the prisoners who need reformation. It is the prisons.' No child under fourteen should be sent to prison at all; if they must be, they should work in a schoolroom, sleep in a dormitory, exercise three hours a day and eat bread-and-butter and soup.

Wilde then turns to the prisoners who go insane under silence and solitary confinement. He describes a young man, A. 2. 11, whose grinning, weeping and twitching hands drew every eye at exercise and chapel. One Saturday Wilde heard howls from the basement and guessed that someone was being flogged; the next day he saw the young man at exercise, his face bloated by tears, gesturing as if playing an invisible instrument. He learnt that the man, a soldier named Prince serving six months by court-martial, had received twenty-four lashes on the doctor's report. Prison doctors, Wilde says, know nothing of mental disease and treat madness as shamming.

He asks the editor to have the case examined by experts in brain disease and people of humane feeling, not by sentimentalists. The case shows that cruelty is inseparable from a stupid system, for the new Governor of Reading is gentle and humane and has changed the spirit of the prison, but cannot change its rules.

The second letter, written as the Home Secretary's Prison Reform Bill comes before Parliament, dismisses the proposal for more inspectors: visitors come only to see the rules enforced, and officials are more brutal on inspection days. Wilde names the three permanent punishments the law allows: hunger, insomnia and disease. Hunger comes from food weighed out to sustain existence, not life. Disease follows from the diet, bringing incessant diarrhoea, which in cells with no latrine, and no leaving them after five o'clock, is made worse by foul air that makes warders sick. Insomnia is produced by the plank bed. He asks for wholesome food, access to lavatories and proper ventilation.

The needs of the mind are as pressing, since the system's result is insanity. Prisoners should have good books of their own choosing, not third-rate religious tracts; see their friends once a month in a room, not through the wire of a cage, 'like an ape in a cage'; and write and receive a letter once a month, since prison 'turns a man's heart to stone.' Letters should not be cut with scissors. Chaplains are useless, and doctors should be barred from private practice. The reforms are only a beginning: the harder task is to humanise the governors, civilise the warders and Christianise the chaplains.