§ "Page 2, leave out sub-sections (a) and (b)."—(Captain Norton.)
§ *CAPTAIN NORTONThe Amendment which I propose is one which is very plain. It has for its object the total abolition of flogging of prisoners. I think it will be admitted that the object of rules in prisons is to keep up discipline. I have always been led to believe that in order to maintain discipline it is the certainty, and not the severity, of the punishment which acts as a deterrent to crime. When you have a prisoner under lock and key, when it is absolutely impossible for him to escape, there is no question of his being deterred. The question of its being a deterrent arises when the individual is at large. The whole object of placing an individual in prison is that he may be kept from contaminating the community on the one hand, and from interfering with the material welfare of society at large on the other. Now, Sir, it is well known that in dealing with criminal classes one of the many incentives to crime is that there are many chances of escape. The criminal will invariably attempt to commit burglary and other crimes owing to the very small, in many instances very limited, chance of capture. This does not apply in the smallest degree in prison. There is no excitement. The man knows that he will be punished; and you have at your disposal a punishment, which, without 502 brutalising the man, punishes him as severely as any form of corporal punishment, namely, by means of a system of diet. I suppose it will be admitted by the House at large that the soldier, on the whole, does not lack a certain amount of courage and pluck, and even a certain amount of endurance. Well, I have seen men come out of military prisons, after something less than two years' imprisonment, so beaten and so abject, not only physically but mentally, that it was not within their power to commit any crime of any kind. Now, Sir, there is the question of the limited application of flogging. It was pointed out by both sides of the House how immense is the difficulty that arises before you can have an inquiry both judicial and public. In that I think the Committee concurred. If you attempt to institute a judicial inquiry, and to have that inquiry public, the result will be, as everybody knows, that the entire sympathy of the outdoor public will be with the prisoner, and the flogging will practically never take place. Flogging as a punishment will practically become a farce. I therefore say it is to the advantage of prison discipline that you should abolish flogging completely. Take all other prisons, in almost all the other civilised countries of the world, and you will find flogging is not resorted to. I know it will be said that something very must worse takes place, that where you have a personal assault upon a warder the prisoner is invariably shot. I say that it would be infinitely more desirable that that should take place, that the prisoner should know that in the event of a violent assault on a warder he would be shot down. I say that then assaults would become very few indeed in number as compared with assaults which would take place if the prisoner knew he could have personal revenge on the warder at the price of a flogging. We have seen it over and over again take place in the Navy and in the Army. I am old enough to remember when flogging took place in the Army. I daresay some honourable Members have witnessed that disgusting sight; and one thing I make bold to say, that it did not act as a deterrent to crime in the case of soldiers. We were told when it was abolished, 503 by officers of considerable experience, that discipline could not possibly be maintained—in other words, that the Service would "go to the dogs." I venture to ask whether there is a single Member of this House who would advocate the re-introduction of flogging into the Army, and whether discipline is not far higher and far better both on active service and under ordinary conditions at the present moment in the British Army and Navy than it was some 30 years ago? I shall be told that we are dealing with quite a different class of men. Well, Sir, what is one of the other objects of prisons? At any rate, I believe it will be admitted that one of the most important objects of our prison system is reformation. We desire not only to keep the prisoners out of harm's way, but we also desire to make a man a better citizen when he comes out of prison. Now, if that is the object which we have in view, certainly, if there is one thing whereby we shall defeat ourselves, it is by brutalising a man. By making a man liable to be flogged you certainly make him less liable to reformation. It has been stated during the Debate that the number of those who have been flogged of recent years is very small indeed, and that these numbers are constantly diminishing. What does that go to prove? It goes to prove that the necessity for flogging does not exist to the same extent as formerly; and we are even told by the Home Secretary that he hopes and believes that before long the necessity for it will vanish. I say if the necessity for it is likely to vanish before long, surely this is an admirable opportunity for doing away with it altogether. Then again I notice that "incentive to mutiny" and "gross personal violence" are two causes for which a man is liable to be flogged. As regards gross personal violence, that I have already dealt with; but as to incentive to mutiny, that would be a most difficult thing to define, and whenever a warder thinks fit he can, with the greatest ease bring up a charge of incentive to mutiny against any prisoner against whom he may have a grudge Now, Sir, of course, if we wished to go back to the old idea of the punishment of prisoners, if we wished to look upon it in the light of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," and if we wished to 504 go back to the torture—for that is practically what it amounts to—I could understand this advocacy of flogging. The Home Secretary himself stated not long ago that the old diet was practically starvation. That was a very cruel mode of torture. If, therefore, you have at your disposal by the dietary system a system of torture by which you can bring a man as low as you choose, there is no necessity for retaining this other punishment, which degrades a man at the same time. One argument used by the Home Secretary is altogether in favour of what I advocate. He stated, in dealing with a former Amendment, that he wished not to make a certain change, because it did not exist in Scotland and Ireland. That strengthens my argument, because the flogging system does not exist in either Scotland or Ireland. Then an honourable Gentleman on this side of the House stated that we ought to look on the pathological side of the case. If we look on that side we find that all recent research—more especially in France, where they go into the most minute details upon this question, and employ the best minds in their medical school in endeavouring to arrive at the cause which leads both to crime and insanity—leads to the conclusion, as was in fact admitted in Debate, that insanity and crime are closely allied. I say that if that be so a punishment which serves no good purpose, which is not necessary, and has for its whole object the degradation and brutalisation of the man, cannot by any possibility do any good. I therefore beg to move that these two paragraphs which advocate the continuance of flogging in our prisons should be cut out.
§ *MR. DAVITTI heartily support the Amendment of my honourable and gallant Friend, because I believe that this abominable system of punishment is not at all necessary for the maintenance of prison discipline, and that it has been done away with, I believe, in almost every other civilised country. The Home Secretary in his speech to-night put forward the strongest argument for the retention of this punishment by flogging—the theory that it was necessary for the safety of the warders. Very well; we all desire, Sir, that those men who have to perform very difficult and 505 onerous duties in prisons should be safeguarded in every rational way. But warders are as much open to assault in Ireland and Scotland as in England, and yet they are protected amply in those two countries without the infliction of the "cat" upon prisoners. Now, Sir, the Bill limits the infliction of this abominable and barbarous practice of punishment to offences of mutiny or incitement to mutiny and gross personal violence to officials. Well, these are very vague phrases. What is mutiny? I am not a lawyer, but I believe I am right in saying that mutiny is a term not defined in the English law. It is a term of military law, and is meant to stand for combined insubordination, and this, in its military sense, may mean a refusal on the part of the soldier to obey the orders of his commanding officer. This is surely not applicable to the position of a prisoner in one of the prisons in this country. Now, with reference to violent assault on prison warders, that also is a phrase which is liable to abuse, and might, under the Bill, involve a prisoner in this terrible punishment for striking a warder. I have given instances of this before the Grand Committee upstairs. I recollect a Scotch lawyer who was imprisoned in Dartmoor for some offence—I think forgery—who received two dozen lashes for having knocked off a warder's cap. I maintain that it is a crime, and ought to be made a felony, to apply such terrible punishment as this to a prisoner for a comparatively trifling assault like that. I also recollect a boy, only 18 or 19, in Dartmoor, who received two dozen lashes for having struck a warder with a wooden rake in a hayfield where the prisoners were employed in haymaking. I say, Sir, that these flogging terms in the Bill are liable to be misused, and prisoners are in consequence liable, to be subjected to this punishment for offences which would never entail anything of the kind if committed outside prison walls. Now, I maintain, Sir, that as you do not flog a criminal who half kicks his wife to death, as you spare the "cat" on the back of the monster who violates a little girl, as you do not give 506 the lash to the unnatural beast who seduces his own daughter, as you do not flog a man who violently assaults a policeman in the street, I maintain that you have no right to flog a prisoner inside the prison walls who simply strikes a warder. I hold that if he does commit that assault he ought to be punished, but then the governor and the prison officials have many ways in which they can prevent assaults of this kind by punishment. A man guilty of attacking a warder in this way, if the attack is a serious one, and if it endangers the life or limb of the officer, can be re-tried and re-sentenced, as he ought to be. If it is a minor assault, such as I have referred to, he can be punished in many ways at the discretion of the governor. He can be put in penal cell, his privileges can be taken away, and his remission can be withdrawn. Therefore, I assert that, there is no need whatever for retaining in your prisons this abominable punishment of the "cat." It has been discarded in the Army and the Navy, and anything like it we do not find in the prison system of any other country.
§ MR. DILLONI strongly support this Amendment. I think the time has come when the power of inflicting corporal punishment, or flogging, to use the common term, on prisoners ought to be completely swept out of the law of this country. The Home Secretary made one very extraordinary statement which, in my mind, is ample justification for the passing of this Amendment. He said that during the last year the cases of corporal punishment, or flogging, had fallen in the penal establishments of this country from 46 to 7, and in the ordinary prisons from 465 to 112. Now, Sir, I put this question to the Government, has there been any progressive deterioration in the maintenance of discipline in the prisons at the time marking this extraordinary decrease in the number of floggings that have taken place? We all know perfectly well the reason of the decrease in flogging. The floggings have constantly dropped to about one-third in the prisons since we began to debate the subject in the House of Commons, and if there is 507 any force whatever in the contention of the Home Secretary that the system of flogging is necessary to maintain discipline, there ought to have been, pari passu with the decrease in the number of floggings, a deterioration in the discipline in the convict and ordinary prisons of this country. We have heard nothing to lead us to suppose that such a change has taken place, and I maintain that the discipline so far from being injured by the total abolition of flogging, would be improved by it. I know what the answer of the Government to that proposition will be perfectly well. We shall be told that we know nothing about it; that on the side of the Government is all the expert and experienced opinion of the officials upon whose shoulders the responsibility rests for the maintenance of discipline at these establishments; that they have advised the Home Secretary that he cannot afford to dispense with this method. Those arguments have very little effect upon those of us who have been through the fight against flogging in the Army and Navy. Night after night in this House, when the right honourable the Gentleman the Member for Birmingham took a leading part in the agitation for the abolition of the old system of flogging in the Army and the Navy, and when both Front Benches combined to support that system, and went into the Lobby in Division after Division in order to maintain the flogging system in the British Army, we listened for hour after hour to military authority after military authority, to officer after officer, who rose in their dozens to declare—I remember perfectly well the scenes which took place—that the British Army was doomed, and that it would be utterly impossible, to maintain discipline, or keep the men at all together in the field, if they were deprived of the "cat" as a last resource. We in vain referred to the fact that the French Army, and the armies on the Continent, got on without it. We were told that might be very well for armies composed of Frenchmen or Germans; they were a different class of men, drawn by conscription; but those who spoke with a sense of responsibility 508 and knowledge could assure us that the Army was doomed and done for, and discipline at an end, if the "cat" was abolished. What has been the consequence? All these whinings fell, I cannot say on deaf ears, because the fight against the system of flogging in the Army went on night after night, though we were in a much smaller majority than we are today, and then all the representative men on the two Front Benches were opposed to us. I remember very well the night when the right honourable Gentleman the Member for Birmingham denounced the Duke of Devonshire, as he now is, as a fossil and an armchair politician, because the Duke had denounced him as an insurgent in the ranks of the Radical party, for resisting the decision of his own Front Bench. Although defeated night after night, and although defeated by larger majorities than we shall be on the present occasion, that principle won in a very short time. And so it will be on this question of flogging in prisons. In my opinion, flogging in prisons is a much more cruel and unjustifiable proceeding than flogging in. the Army. You flogged in the Army, at all events, in the light of open day, and after a man had had some kind of public trial. But in prisons you flog these unfortunate, defenceless creatures, who, however bad their previous life may have been, are now shut up and away from their homes, from sympathy and the light of common day, and you flog them for offences for which, had they committed them outside the prison, with all the advantages of a public trial to protect them, you would never dream of inflicting the "cat." The Home Secretary says that in the interests of the safety of our prison warders this system of flogging must be maintained. Why is it essential for the safety of prison warders when it is not held to be necessary for the safety of peaceable citizens walking in the streets of London, or policemen, who, in the fulfilment of their duties, are brought into association with dangerous men? Sometimes men have in their possession deadly weapons, of which no prisoner can be possessed, when they attack policemen, and policemen and ordinary citizens are much more liable to, and more exposed, and more defenceless before the attacks of violent men 509 than are prison warders. Yet, when they are assaulted, no matter how savage or brutal the assault may be, their assailants are placed on trial—on open trial—not flogged after conviction, but punished in a more humane way. I never could understand nor enter into the frame of mind of the man who holds that an assault on a prison warder is a crime of a totally different character to a common assault on, say, an ordinary citizen, or upon a policeman in the discharge of his duties in the streets of London. What is there in the essence of an assault committed by a prisoner on a warder which differentiates it from an assault committed outside the prison walls? Why should the unfortunate prisoner be flogged in this inhuman way, whereas the most savage assaults are committed outside prisons, and nobody thinks that this machinery of oppression is necessary? I must turn for a moment to the Irish prisons. One of the most amazing and interesting passages in the course of our long discussion in the Grand Committee on Law arose when the Home Secretary was asked to account for the fact than in the Irish prisons flogging is practically abolished. According to the law, you cannot flog a man in the ordinary prisons in Ireland. But what is a still more remarkable fact is this, that according to law you can flog a man at Mountjoy Prison, our one great convict prison in Ireland, but for seven years they have never flogged a man in Mountjoy Prison—for seven years the governor has voluntarily laid aside the power of flogging. There you can have to-day the result of experience. I believe I am correct in saying that for seven years no prisoner has been flogged in a convict prison in Ireland. The Home Secretary, in view of these facts, finds himself in a difficult position, and his argument really was of the most extraordinary character, because he took up this position, that the Irish prisoners were more orderly, more easily handled and disciplined than the prisoners in English gaols. I believe he extended that generous construction even to the prisoners in the gaol of Belfast—a most extraordinary proposition for an Englishman to make, that the prisoners taken from a city like Belfast 510 are easier to keep in discipline than the common prisoners in the English gaols.
§ It being Twelve o'clock, the Debate stood adjourned.