Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of Prison LifeWilde, Oscar
General
Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of Prison Life
Wilde, Oscar
Juvenile delinquency; Prisons
The child consequently, being taken away from its parents by people whom
it has never seen, and of whom it knows nothing, and finding itself in
a lonely and unfamiliar cell, waited on by strange faces, and ordered
about and punished by the representatives of a system that it cannot
understand, becomes an immediate prey to the first and most prominent
emotion produced by modern prison life--the emotion of terror. The
terror of a child in prison is quite limitless. I remember once in
Reading, as I was going out to exercise, seeing in the dimly-lit cell,
right opposite my own, a small boy. Two warders, not unkindly men, were
talking to him, with some sternness apparently, or perhaps giving him
some useful advice about his conduct. One was in the cell with him, the
other was standing outside. The child's face was like a white wedge of
sheer terror. There was in his eyes the mute appeal of a hunted animal.
The next morning I heard him at breakfast-time crying, and calling to be
let out. His cry was for his parents. From time to time I could hear the
deep voice of the warder on duty warning him to keep quiet. Yet he was
not even convicted of whatever little offence he had been charged with.
He was simply on remand. That I knew by his wearing his own clothes,
which seemed neat enough. He was, however, wearing prison socks and
shoes. This showed that he was a very poor boy, whose own shoes, if he
had any, were in a bad state. Justices and magistrates, an entirely
ignorant class as a rule, often remand children for a week, and then
perhaps remit whatever sentence they are entitled to pass. They call
this "not sending a child to prison." It is, of course, a stupid view on
their part. To a little child, whether he is in prison on remand or
after conviction, is a subtlety of social position he cannot comprehend.
To him the horrible thing is to be there at all. In the eyes of humanity
it should be a horrible thing for him to be there at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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