_Four_ were educated men (three of whom asserted a natural preference for their own society in or out of prison). _One_ was an old recidivist with five sentences of penal servitude. _Two_ (of a callous type) preferred separate confinement because they had no temptation to talk and get into trouble. _One_ was the only prisoner I saw who said he had deliberately committed his offence in order to get into prison. The following phrases taken from notes made immediately after each interview indicate the general nature of the suffering experienced by prisoners separately confined: “I used to look up at the window, and something seemed to pull me back.” “The first month was awful, I didn’t hardly know how to keep myself together. I thought I should go mad.” “It’s made me very nervous. The least thing upsets me; I was not nervous before.” “I’ve got a daughter, and I grieve over her all the time; there’s nothing to take your mind off.” “I’ve never felt right since—it’s got all over me.” (This man cried all the time. He seemed utterly unnerved, and broken up. A Star Class man.) “I feel it dreadfully. It gets worse as it goes on.” “It’s no life at all. I’d sooner be dead than here.” (This man was very tearful and quavery.) “My first spell of ‘separate’ nearly drove me raving.” (This was a recidivist serving his third term.) “It broke me down on my first sentence. It destroys a man.” “I had a cold lonely feeling. . . . Nine months of it is killing for most men.” “It’s _punishment_ to shut up a man for nine months.” (This is a fair specimen of the very general under-statement of evidently acute feelings.) “It’ll send men ‘up the stick.’” (Off their heads.) “I’m very miserable and down-’earted. You feel it more and more as you get older. I hardly know sometimes what I’m doing.” (This was from an old man of sixty-one who had been twenty years in prison, and said he did not expect to last through this sentence. _He had still six months of separate to run_, and struck me as very broken up, and suffering.) “I keep ‘picturing’ things, and walking about. It sends men ‘up the pole!’” (Another bad case of a young recidivist of twenty-nine, with five months of his ‘separate’ still to run.) “Walls seem to close in. . . . I get blankness in the brain; have to stop reading.” “It’s hell upon earth.” (An educated prisoner.) “Almost unbearable depression.” (An educated prisoner.) “Sleep’s the only comfort.” “I sit there sometimes at work, not knowing what I’m doing.” “I’ve good nerves. A man with bad nerves would soon snuff out in ‘separate’.” “If a man had the spy-hole open even, so that he could see out, it would make a vast deal of difference. . . . I’ve seen numbers of men come on the public works from their ‘separate,’ quite silly.”