Prison labour, &c. : correspondence and communications addressed to His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, concerning the introduction of tread-mills into prisons, with other matters connected with the subject of prison discipline / by Sir John Cox Hippisley.

  • Hippisley, John Cox, 1748-1825.
Date:
1823
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Prison labour, &c. : correspondence and communications addressed to His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, concerning the introduction of tread-mills into prisons, with other matters connected with the subject of prison discipline / by Sir John Cox Hippisley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    prison Habour, fc. I. INTRODUCTION. There are few subjects which have of late more occu pied the attention of the Public than the mode of disci¬ pline which is now gradually introducing into our Houses of Correction and other Prisons through the means of the Tread-Wheel ; a machine of gigantic and most complicated structure, which in the opinion of most who have not thoroughly studied its nature and actual effects, is admirably adapted as the means of punishment in all cases and descriptions of misdemeanors ; and gives a fair promise of enabling us, in a short time, to shut up our Houses of Correction for want of fresh supplies of delinquents, and to discharge, from their several posts, the vast host of Gaolers and subordinate Officers who at present superintend them. The tide of popular opinion has its ebbs and flows like that of the ocean, and is well known never to continue at one stay. There was a time when almost all the Prisons of this Country were dungeons of the grossest misery and wretchedness ; hot-beds or rather dunghills of moral and physical contamination, in which it was difficult to say whether the mind or the body was most corrupt with disease, or scattered the worse pestilence throughout the Country. The immured victims, for the most part, sunk beneath their fate or their criminality, unpitied and little B