London's bastilles
PRISON FELON
The writer is at present an inmate of one of HM Prisons. He remains anonymous for his own protection.
Mr Jenkins, in Parliament recently, called our prisons 'bogus bastilles.' A result of the Mountbatten inquiry is that Important Persons other than departmental boobies have snuffed the perpetual stink of urine and human sweat and seen the frightful places themselves. For it is of the nature of jails that if one is inside one can think of little else, outside nobody cares. Brigadier Maunsell, the newly appointed In- spector-General of prisons, arrived at Wands- worth at 6.45 a.m. and saw the Mediaeval ritual of 'slopping-out,' the emptying of over a thousand chamber pots.
The rules state that a man should ring his bell after locking-up time, 7.30 p.m., if he wishes to use the lavatory to defecate. In prac- tice warders never answer the bell and it is often necessary to use the pot. Since many men are three to a cell the vileness can be imagined. Casements have been fitted inside the old barred windows in Wandsworth, but in Wormwood Scrubs and Pentonville there is only a small sliding section for ventilation. The stench at opening-up is intolerable, and not through any fault _of the men. With only one bath a week, one pair of socks, one set of underwear, one towel; it is quite impossible to keep the body sweet.
All this the Brigadier cannot fail to have re- marked. His duties concern security, but the more such outsiders see of the reality of jails (for parties of visitors never come so early nor do they witness these primitive rites), perhaps the greater will be the pressure to act. The Prison Department in the Home Office consists chiefly of civil servants, who have never visited a jail, and former prison governors who are inured to what they think of as a necessary evil. Yet whatever views of penal policy prevail, there can be no excuse for the disgusting lack of hygiene. Even hangers and floggers accept that penal institutions should be clean.
Of the four London prisons Wormwood Scrubs, a first-offender prison, is the cleanest. There is a touchingly metaphysical belief that the untainted souls of these 'star prisoners' merit reasonable hygiene, whereas the recidivists can wallow in Dantesque slime. The reception facili- ties and bath-house have, in the last few years, been tiled and modernised so that they are ade- quate—if one accepts that one bath a week is ample. After Brixton, the remand jail, the Scrubs is paradisal. The Labour party commit- tee on penal policy under Lord Longford, in those gay days before the 1964 election when promises were cheap, recommended the destruc- tion of Brixton and Pentonville with some sort of public frolick. This would be apt; quatorze juillet fireworks commemorate the fall of the Bastille, a prison that in the prevalent conditions of the time was no worse than Brixton.
A man on remand may arrive at Brixton in the early afternoon. He will be shut in an airless cell with a dozen others until late in the evening he passes slowly along a dismal corridor to a table where the usual idiotic details are required. Eventually he has to strip naked, be weighed and bathed. There are half a dozen baths for an average nightly intake, while courts are sitting, of 100 men. These baths are used by all sorts and condi- tions of men, they are never cleaned between occupants, so that it is possible to have a bath soiled by a tramp or a methylated spirits dosser. The men are then locked in a chamber that resembles a hen-battery in tiny cells with wire mesh above.
There are no laundry facilities at Brixton, so that, unless a prisoner has relatives to bring him clean linen, he must go to court in creased, dirty clothes. Often a man has been in police custody and is wearing old working clothes, so that he has to appear before his judge looking and smelling like a tramp.
The whole atmosphere of Brixton is so appalling it could not have been more effectively designed to demoralise. The cells are jammed —in a cell which a mid-Victorian Board of Works thought adequate for one man, three are crammed. In this sense conditions are worse than they were eighty years ago. The chamber pots are never sterilised (boiling water and bicarbonate is cheap). The mattresses are stained and smelly, the walls are dirty and covered with graffiti. Each cell has a knife made of tin, a flange turned back at the top edge. This catches food and breeds germs. It was said in Parliament that these knives were being with- drawn, but still they fester at Wandsworth and at Pentonville. Plates are chipped and the enamel is warped so that more germs frolic in the crevices.
Ventilation in the cells hardly exists; in sum- mer men swelter, in winter they freeze. The food is abominable. Mayhew; the Victorian observer of social mores, would certainly be quite at home in Brixton, so like the worst type
of Victorian slum is it. Yet the jail has a decent and humane governor and the men responsible for it are presumably liberal, educated persons. How can they stomach it?
Pentonville was condemned over twenty years ago. The site was sold, then bought back. Reception baths and hen-coops are similar to those at Brixton. The cells are dirty, ill-ventil- ated cages and the bath-house is grossly in- adequate. Yet efforts have been made under an enlightened and respected governor, Mr Peter Burnett, a man who, unlike so many governors, is sufficiently confident in his own authority to allow a relaxed, even a pleasant, atmosphere. The halls are tiled in bright colours and there are jungle plants around the centre box. The problem of excreta is as bad here as anywhere; but most recidivists would far rather be at the 'Ville than at Wandsworth.
Wandsworth is, by common consent and with the exception only of the punishment block at Durham (whitewashed so effectively by that tricoteuse, Miss Alice Bacon), the worst jail in the kingdom. Dartmoor is a heaven-haven by comparison. Any advance, any improvement, comes last to Wandsworth. Even the gallows remain when all others have been destroyed. This is symbolic of the atmosphere. The warders are encouraged in an easy brutality, beatings- up in the strong cells are frequent and the pun- ishment block (with its stink, its brutal keepers, its wooden bed boards) is notorious. Seventeen hundred men are jammed into about 1,000 cells so that to have a single cell (an elementary right) it is necessary to be homosexual or epileptic. The sumps choke every few days so that urine is trampled into cells and the stench lingers. As in Brixton and Pentonville no disinfectant is ever used on chamber pots or in the lavatories.
The reception facilities are a disgrace. Quite often the one bottle of disinfectant for use in the baths of tramps runs out and is not replaced for weeks. Clothes of these human wrecks are inadequately fumigated and rarely cleaned. They are then stowed with other men's clothes. Rats, mice, cockroaches and cats breed in the cellars and emerge at night through gaping cracks in the paving slabs of the basement land- ing. The food itself is clean but passes from the kitchens through a den crawling with cock- roaches. The bath-house (some fifty baths, full all the time, serve 1,700 men) is dirty with peel- ing walls and scummy baths. There are lice and crabs crawling in dark corners, and it is a con- stant task to avoid infestation. In the mailbag repair shop two hutch lavatories serve 130 men; in the laundry three lavatories serve 160 men. The blame must lie heavily on prison doctors, who could force the use of disinfectant, car- bolic and the installation of proper baths, showers and lavatories, were they concerned more With basic cleanliness than with being civil servants who neither hear, see nor talk evil.
Conditions are similar in all Victorian jails. Then the Home Secretary dares to talk of 're- habilitation,' - that most meaningless of parrot calls. Give us bread, the circuses can wait!
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