We have the right to restrain offenders and to safeguard society; in doing this we unavoidably punish with that already terrible punishment “loss of liberty.” But, sir, we have—surely—not the right to inflict _unnecessary and harmful suffering_. I recognise to the full that there is no lack of humanity among those who work our prison system; recognise to the full that they would not willingly inflict any suffering that they acknowledged to be unnecessary; but in every department of life those who administer a system are, in the nature of things, with rare exceptions, too habituated to that system, too close to it, to be able to see it in due perspective. I ask you, sir, and I ask the common sense of the public, whether harmful and unnecessary suffering must not inevitably be endured by the mind, and through the mind by the body, of a human being during these thousands of hours of closed-cell confinement. To answer that question fairly each member of the public has but to ask what would be the effect on himself or herself of nine or six or even three months’ utter seclusion (except for one hour each day) from all sight and sound not only of human beings, but of animals, trees, flowers, and from the sight even of the sky, all but a patch no bigger than a tea-tray. We are on the whole a humane people; and it is not so much a question of our humanity as of our imaginations. The position is plainly this: Those who have to work our prison system perhaps could not do so at all if they allowed their imaginations fair play. The community are too aloof to realize what that prison system means. And so the unnecessary demoralization and suffering caused by this closed-cell confinement goes on at the rate of (for convicts alone) more than four million hours a year! I do not base the appeal of this letter so much on humanity as on common sense. Why, when we are faced with appalling statistics of criminality, with appalling difficulties in dealing with and reforming criminals, do we deliberately continue a practice which both evidence and reason tell us contributes to the more complete demoralization of such as are already demoralized? In the Report of your Departmental Committee of 1895 occur these words: “It should be the object of the prison authorities, through the prison staff and any suitable auxiliary effort that can be employed, to humanize the prisoners, to prevent them from feeling that the State merely chains them for a certain period and cares nothing about them beyond keeping them in safe custody and under iron discipline.” And again: “. . . it strengthens our belief that the main fault of our prison system is that it treats prisoners too much as irreclaimable criminals instead of reclaimable men and women.” I submit that no unprejudiced man can regard this closed-cell confinement as a humanizing influence, except in the rarest cases, or maintain that it helps to reclaim men and women.