Aid for Prisoners on Discharge
| Date | 01 January 1930 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X3000300102 |
| Published date | 01 January 1930 |
| Author | G. D. Turner |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Aid for Prisoners on Discharge
By
COLONEL
G.
D.
TURNER
Governor.
H.M.
Prison. Wakefield. Yorkshire
;\
T all times, in other countriesas well as inEngland,therehave
11..been charitably disposed people who have taken an interest
in prisoners. No age, however brutal, has been without some
rarer spirits who have seen in human suffering occasion for
sympathy and kindness. Benefactions for the assistance of
discharged prisoners are known to have been in existence in
England some
500
years ago.
There
must have been many
individuals like the unnamed lady in the first report of the
inspectors of prisons in Great Britain of whom it is
said:
'This
most estimable person has, for the long period of
seventeen years, almost exclusively given up her time to better-
ing the wretched condition of the prisoners confined in this
gaol. .
..
On the week-days she pursues aregular course of
instruction with the male and female prisoners. .
..
After
their discharge they are frequently provided with work, until
enabled to procure it for themselves.'
An article in
Household
Words
for 1852 tells how a working
man in Manchester, in the scanty leisure afforded by a twelve-
hourworking day and the cares of a family of nineteen children,
found opportunity during fourteen years to secure employ-
ment and assist to settled homes some
300
discharged prisoners.
The
humanitarian work of John Howard and other
reformers at the end of the eighteenth and in the beginning
of the nineteenth century was directed rather to an improve-
ment in the condition of prisons than to the amelioration
of the lot of the ex-prisoner.
Although a fund for the benefit of prisoners discharged
from Newgate was organized in 1807, and in 1840 a society
for the relief of ex-prisoners was started at Worcester, it was
II
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