xists to which a sentence might be referred for review, so that
the most unjust and unequal sentences are constantly passed from which
there is no appeal but in the forlorn hope--rather, entire
hopelessness--of a petition to the Home Secretary. I have often seen a
man who had been sentenced to five years for murder working by the side
of another whose sentence was twenty years for some crime against
property. Such contrasts, of course, excite great discontent, and in
some cases are the reason why men set up a hopeless resistance to what
they feel to be persecution and injustice.

It always seemed to me that the standpoint of the Board of Directors,
established in 1864, and which continued without change until very
recently, was altogether wrong. They appeared to think that in their
dealings with other men the only course was to be the application of
"force, iron force," as one of the governors expressed it. The very
great majority require no such application, and the few difficult ones
could easily be managed in another way. Certainly it is necessary that
all prison discipline be penal, but it is not necessary that it be
ferocious and inhuman, as certainly is the English. Starvation, the
crank, the plank bed, the fearful cold of the cells are not measures
necessary in dealing with any man.

Whatever they could think of to harden, to degrade, to insult, to
inflict every form of suffering, both physical and mental, which a man
could undergo and live, was embodied in the rules they made. Their
prisons were to be places of suffering and of nothing but suffering.

So far as the directors were concerned the regulations were carried out
to the letter, but each prison is under the control of a resident
governor, with a deputy governor to assist him. These gentlemen are
always men of good social position, retired officers of the army, who
have seen the world and have experience in controlling men. They are
rarely inclined to unnecessary severity, but are generally willing to
apply the rules with as much consideration as such rules admit. The
governor's discretion, however, is limited, but daily contact more or
less with men whom he sees to differ very little from free men, and whom
he sometimes finds to be even better than many he knows who are not, but
who perhaps ought to be, on the wrong side of the bars, makes him
unwilling to throw too many sharp points on the path which has to be
trodden by men for whom he often cannot h