is a solid or body, somewhat resembling a prism, but that its ends are any dissimilar parallel plane figures of the same number of sides; the upright sides being trapezoids.—If the ends of the prismoid be bounded by dissimilar curves, it is sometimes called a cylindroid.
PRISON is said, in the Encyclopaedia, to be only a place of safe custody, not a place of punishment. Such was, no doubt, the original intention of English prisons; but now temporary confinement is, in England as well as elsewhere, inflicted as a punishment for certain crimes. Perhaps it would be expedient to substitute this punishment more frequently than is yet done in Great Britain, for transportation and death; proportioning the length of the confinement, as well as its closeness, to the heinousness of the crime. In no country, we believe, is this more accurately done, or to better purpose, than in Pennsylvania; and surely in no country has imprisonment been more abused than in Venice under the old government.
By the laws of Pennsylvania, punishment by imprisonment is imposed, not only as an expiation of past offenses, and an example to the guilty part of society, but also for another important purpose—the reformation of the criminal's morals. The regulations of the gaol are calculated to promote this effect as soon as possible; so that the building deserves the name of a penitentiary house more than that of a gaol (see Philadelphia, Encyc.). As soon as a criminal is committed to the prison, he is made to wash; his hair is shorn; and, if not decently clothed, he is furnished with clean apparel. He is then thrown into a solitary cell, about nine feet long and four wide, where he remains deprived from the sight of every living being except his gaoler, whose duty is to attend to his bare necessities, but who is forbidden on any account to hold conversation with him. If a prisoner be at all refractory, or if the offence for which he is committed be of a very atrocious nature, he is then confined to a cell secluded even from the light of heaven. The treatment of each prisoner, during his confinement, is varied according to his crime and his subsequent repentance. Solitary confinement in a dark cell is looked upon as the severest usage; next, solitary confinement in a cell with the admission of light; next, solitary confinement in a cell, where the prisoner is allowed to do some sort of work; and, lastly, labour in company with others. The longest period of confinement is for a rape, which is not to be less than ten years, nor more than twenty-one; for high treason, it is not to exceed twelve, nor fall short of six years.
The prisoners are obliged to bathe twice every week, proper conveniences for that purpose being provided within the walls of the prison, and also to change their linen, with which they are regularly supplied. Those in solitary confinement are kept upon bread and water; but those who labour are allowed broth, porridge, puddings, and the like. Meat is dispensed only in small quantities, twice in the week; and on no pretence whatever is any other beverage than water suffered to be brought into the prison. Those who labour are employed in the trade to which they have been accustomed; and for those acquainted with no particular trade, some kind of work is devised which they can perform. One room is set apart for shoemakers, another for tailors, a third for carpenters, and so on. In the yards are stone cutters, smiths, nailers, &c. In a word, this prison has all the advantages of the rasping house of Amsterdam, without any of its enormous defects. See Correction-House in this Suppl.
The prison of Venice is of a very different description, and is worthy of notice here only as a curiosity in the annals of tyranny, which has, we hope, passed away with the government which contrived it. Dr Mosley, in consequence of his being an English physician (a character then highly respected in Venice), was permitted, on the 16th of September 1787, to visit the common prison, but was absolutely refused admittance into the Sotto Pianelli, where the state prisoners were kept. As the Doctor believes that no foreigner besides himself ever witnessed the scene, even in the common prison, which he relates, we shall give his relation in his own words.
"I was conducted (says he) through the prison by one of its inferior dependants. We had a torch with us. We crept along narrow passages as dark as pitch. In some of them two people could scarcely pass each other. The cells are made of maffy marble; the architecture of the celebrated Sanforini.
"The cells are not only dark, and black as ink, but being surrounded and confined with huge walls, the smallest breath of air can scarcely find circulation in them. They are about nine feet square on the floor, arched at the top, and between six and seven feet high in the highest part. There is to each cell a round hole of eight inches diameter, through which the prisoner's daily allowance of twelve ounces of bread and a pot of water is delivered. There is a small iron door to the cell. The furniture of the cell is a little straw and a small tub; nothing else. The straw is renewed and the tub emptied through the iron door occasionally.
"The diet is ingeniously contrived for the perpetration of punishment. Animal food, or a cordial nutritious regimen, in such a situation, would bring on distaste, and defeat the end of this Venetian justice. Neither can the foul, if so inclined, fleal away, wrapt up in flustering delusion, or flink to rett; from the admonition of her sad existence, by the gaoler's daily return.
"I saw one man who had been in a cell thirty years; two who had been twelve years; and several who had been eight and nine years in their respective cells.
"By my taper's light I could discover the prisoners' horrid countenances. They were all naked. The man who had been there thirty years, in face and body was covered with long hair. He had lost the arrangement of words and order of language. When I spoke to him, he made an unintelligible noise, and expressed fear and surprise; and, like some wild animals in deserts, which have suffered by the treachery of the human race, or have an instinctive abhorrence of it, he would have fled like lightning from me if he could.
"One whose faculties were not so obliterated; who still recollected the difference between day and night; whose eyes and ears, though long closed with a silent blank, still languished to perform their natural functions—implored, in the most piercing manner, that I would prevail on the gaoler to murder him, or to give him some instrument to destroy himself. I told him I had no power to serve him in this request. He then entreated I would use my endeavours with the inquisitors to get him hanged, or drowned in the Canal Orfano. But even in this I could not serve him: death was a favour I had not interest enough to procure for him.
"This kindness of death, however, was, during my stay..." stay in Venice, granted to one man, who had been from the cheerful ways of man cut off thirteen years.
Before he left his dungeon I had some conversation with him; this was six days previous to his execution. His transport at the prospect of death was surprising. He longed for the happy moment. No saint ever exhibited more fervour in anticipating the joys of a future state, than this man did at the thoughts of being released from life, during the four days mockery of his trial.
"It is in the Canal Orfano where vessels from Turkey and the Levant perform quarantine. This place is the watery grave of many who have committed political or personal offences against the state or senate, and of many who have committed no offences at all. They are carried out of the city in the middle of the night, tied up in a sack with a large stone fastened to it, and thrown into the water. Fishermen are prohibited, on forfeiture of their lives, against fishing in this district. The pretence is the plague. This is the secret history of people being lost in Venice.
"The government, with age, grew feeble; was afraid of the diffusion of legal proofs and of public executions; and navigated this rotten Bucentaur of the Adriatic by spies, prisons, assassination, and the Canal Orfano."
This is indeed a frightful narrative, and, we doubt not, true as well as frightful; but when, from the state of the Venetian prisons, the author infers, that Howard was not actuated by genuine benevolence, and infers, or wishes his reader to infer, that the proposal of that celebrated philanthropist for substituting solitary confinement, in many cases, for capital punishment, must have resulted from his not taking into consideration the mind of the criminal—the infirmity, to say the least of it, is ungenerous, and the conclusion is at war with the premises. That there was something romantic and superfluous in Howard's wanderings, we readily admit; but it seems impossible to doubt of the reality of his benevolence; and though the horrid prison of Venice, into which, as the Doctor affirms us, Mr Howard never entered, was calculated to injure the body without improving the mind of the criminal, it does not follow, but that solitary confinement, under such regulations as at Philadelphia, is the best means that have yet been thought of for obtaining the object nearest Howard's heart, the reformation of the morals of the criminal.