PRISON, Ecclesiastical. A bishop was required to have one or more prisons for criminous clerks in 1261. That of the bishop of Chichester remains over his pal- ace gate ; and the bishop of London's gate-house stood at the west side of Westminster Abbey. The south- western tower of Clugny was used as a prison. There were various names for prisons : 1, Little Ease, in which the prisoner could neither sit, lie, nor stand ; 2, Bocardo, as over the gate near St. Michael's at Oxford ; 3, Hell, as at Ely ; and. 4. the Lying House at Durham. At Dur- ham, Berne, and Norwich the conventual cells adjoined the Chapter-house ; at Durham the term of imprisonment lasted sometimes during a year, and was often attended with chains, food being let down by a rope through a trap-door. In all cases solitary confinement was prac- ticed, and in some cases the guilty were immured after the pronunciation of the sentence Fade in pace, " Go in peace." At Thornton the skeleton of abbot De Multon (cir. 1445), with a candlestick, chair, and table, was found built up within a recess in the wall; and a cell, with a loop-hole looking towards the high-altar, re- mains at the Temple, in which William le Bachelor, grand preceptor of Ireland, died. At Clugny the prison had no stair, no door, and no window. At Hirschau the prisoner could barely lie clown; at St. Martin-des- Champs the cell was subterranean ; at St. Gabriel, Cal- vados, under a tower. The prisons remain at St. Ga- briel, Calvados, Rebais, St. Peter - sur - Dives, and St. Benet-sur- Loire; at Caen, near the great gate; and over it at Tewkesbury, Binham, Hexham, Bridlington, and Mailing. The prison was under the charge of the master of the infirmary. " Criminous priests" were imprisoned in 740 in England, and in 1351 their meagre fare was prescribed. — Walcott, Sacred A rchceologg, s. v.
PRISON REFORM
COO
PRISON REFORM
Prison Reform. Prison discipline has in recent times become a matter of so much moment that its con- sideration is forced upon every philanthropist, especially the believer of the new dispensation — the law of love. Under the silent influences of < Ihristianity, torture, ex- posure in the pillory, and other like dedications of the of- fender to public vengeance have long been abandoned as barbarous practices. Death-punishment has been much narrowed in its application; and transportation, apart from any question of effectiveness, has been rendered impracticable, except within a very narrow compass.
I be movement for the alleviation of the horrors of imprisonment by physical and moral improvement of the conditions of prisoners may be said to be not only Christian, but modern. We gel nothing from the practice of the times anterior to Christianity, nor yet from the Middle Ages, that accounts tor much in the modem systems of prison discipline. In Greece and Rome punishments were inflicted in other ways. It must I"- borne in mind that among the ancients the in- stitution of slavery rendered the prison system unnec- essary. Ii kept the functions of punishing ordinary criminals from the public administration of the affairs of a state, and placed it in private hands. Hence there was no criminal law, properly Bpeaking. The corpus juris, so full of minute regulations in all matters of civic right [see Justinian], has very little criminal law, lie- cause the criminals became slaves, and ceased to be ob- jects of the attention of the law. In the Roman empire there were houses, called < rgastula, for the incarceration of criminal and refractory slaves. The feudal barons had towers in their castles, called donjons (whence our
word dungeon), for the confinement of their captive toes
or refractory retainers. Sometimes the prison vaults wen- cut iii the solid rock belowthe surface of the earth. When imprisonment became a function of the State in the administration of justice, it was often carelessly, and hence tyrannically, exercised, because the practice of awarding it as a punishment arose more rapidly than the organization for controlling its use. In the loth and 16th centuries the Society of the Brothers of Mercy in Italy paid much attention to the incarcerated unfortu- nate trespassers of society, and so greatly alleviated their forlorn condition that many of the Brothers of Mercy are reverently spoken of to this day. St. Carlo Borro- meo and St. Vincent de Paul are to be especially men-
ti d. lint the earliest instance of a prison managed
on any principles of policy and humanity seems to be thai of the Penitentiary at Amsterdam in 1595, an ex- ample which was soon followed by some of the German towns, especially Hamburg and Bremen. In England, on several occasions, grave abuses have been expose. 1 by parliamentary inquiries and otherwise in the practice of prison discipline. It is well known that the real im- pulse to prison impro\ ement was firsl communicated by the celebrated Howard (q. v.), whose sufferings, when taken by a privateer and imprisoned at Brest, during the Seven Fears' War are said to have first directed his attention to this subject. The fruits of his observations in his repeated visits to most of the prisons of Europe were given to the world partly in his publications and partly on examination before Parliament Howard's exertions, and those of .Mrs. Fry and other investigators, ! in the public mind the question whether any practice in which the public interest was bo much in- volved should be left to something like mere chance