"AMONG THE BROAD-ARROW MEN."
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—In your issue of August 23rd, under the heading "Crime and the Criminal," you publish a short review of a book, entitled Among the Broad-Arrow Men, by B.2.15, in which the following passage occurs :— " The reader gathers that the book does not tell of quite modern experience, or at any rate of the more modern jails, for things are, one gathers, a little better than when ' B.2.15 ' did time. But one definite torture still remains. After the violent excitement, tho dreadful hopes and fears of his trial, every prisoner must for a month spend almost twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four in silence and solitude, practically without books, and with work of so monotonous and elementary a sort as to be no occupation for the mind."
If you will refer to the Prison Commissioners' Report for the year 1922-23, pages 27 and 28, you will see that the period of separate confinement, with which every convict, used to commence his sentence of penal servitude, was suspended as an experiment in the summer of 1922 ; and the experiment proving successful, the provisional suspension was confirmed in 1923. A man sentenced to penal servitude now works in association from the commencement, and is not placed in separate confinement at all, unless in any individual case it proves necessary, in the interests of discipline, to, remove him from the associated party for a time. The results of the change have been good. Discipline is, equally well main- tained, and the physical and mental health of the men have been improved.
In Local Prisons, only men sentenced to hard labour have to pass the first 14 days of their sentences in separate confinement. The original period of 28 days has been halved, and only certain legal difficulties stand in the way of complete abolition in the case of these prisoners also, There is no separate confinement for women prisoners.—I am, Sir, &e.,
M. L. WALLER,
Chairman, Prison Commission for England and Wales.
Prison Commission, Home Office, Whitehall, S.W. 1.
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