Punishment without improvement

Text 1: A Visit to the County Gaol, by Gilbert Ransome

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I was conducted over the new County Gaol on Wednesday by the Governor himself, a courteous gentleman with the air of a man showing off a well-run factory, which in a sense he was. Everything was clean. Everything was silent. The prisoners, he told me with satisfaction, are forbidden to speak to one another at any hour, and in chapel each sits in a wooden box like an upright coffin, from which he can see the chaplain and nothing else, so that no man may be corrupted by the face of his neighbour.

We came to the treadwheel, where twenty-four men climbed for fifteen minutes in every twenty, hour after hour, upon a great revolving cylinder of steps that ground nothing and pumped nothing and turned only for its own sake. I asked the Governor what it produced. ‘Fatigue,’ he said, and smiled, as though he had made a witticism. One of the climbers, a young man with a convict’s cropped head, caught my eye for an instant over the partition, and I have seldom seen a look so utterly without hope.

I came away much impressed by the order of the place and much troubled by its purpose. The Governor is proud that few men attempt to escape. He did not say how many return. I asked a warder at the gate, who told me, when the Governor was out of hearing, that he saw the same faces every winter, ‘regular as swallows, sir, only the other way about.’ I fear we have built a very handsome machine for making men worse, and that we have made it so clean we cannot see the dirt it produces.

Text 2: Eleven Locked Doors, by Fiona Ledger

An original contemporary article.

For two years I taught a creative writing class on Wednesday afternoons in a men’s prison, a squat brick building behind a double fence on the edge of a market town. To reach my classroom I passed through eleven locked doors, and I counted them every week, because counting them was the only way to feel the distance between the car park and the room.

Many weeks, the class did not happen. There was a lockdown, or a shortage of officers to escort the men from the wings, or a search. When it did happen, I would sometimes find that half my students had gone: released, transferred, or moved without warning to another prison two hundred miles away, halfway through a story they had been writing. Most of them spent twenty-two or twenty-three hours a day in their cells. One man told me that prison was ‘like being put in a fridge for three years and then wondering why you come out cold.’

And yet I saw things in that room that I have not seen anywhere else. A man in his fifties who had never written anything longer than a betting slip produced, over six months, a letter to the daughter he had not seen since she was four. He read it aloud to the class, and nobody laughed, and nobody spoke for a long time afterwards. Did prison improve him? I do not think so. I think he improved in spite of it, in one small room, for two hours a week, when the system happened to forget to stop him.

‘Both writers present prison as a place that punishes without improving.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the prisons each writer visits
• explain how far you agree that both writers see prison as punishing without improving
• compare the ways the writers present prison and prisoners.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.