Both the silent and solitary systems were condemned by her as being particularly liable to abuse.  She considered the silent system cruel, and especially adapted to harden the heart of a criminal even to moral petrefaction.  But the strongest protest was made against solitary confinement.  Upon every available opportunity she spoke against it to those who were in power.  Unless the offense was of a very aggravated nature, she doubted the right of any man to place a fellow-creature in such misery.  Some intercourse with his fellow-creatures seemed imperatively necessary if the prisoner’s life and reason were to be preserved to him, and his mind to be kept from feeding upon the dark past.  To dark cells she had an unconquerable aversion.  Sometimes she would picture the possibility of the return of days of persecution, and urge one consideration founded upon the self-interest of the authorities themselves.  “They may be building, though they little think it, dungeons for their children and their children’s children if times of religious persecution or political disturbance should return.”  For this reason, if for no other, she urged upon those who were contemplating the erection of new prisons, the prime necessity of constructing those prisons so as to enable them to conform to the requirements of humanity.

Her opinions and reasons for and against the solitary system of confinement are well given in a communication sent to M. de Beranger after a visit to Paris, during which the subject of prison-management had formed a staple theme of discussion in the salons of that city.  With much practical insight and clearness of reasoning, Mrs. Fry marshalled all the stock arguments, adding thereto such as her own experience taught.

In favor of the solitary system were to be urged:—­

1st.  The prevention of all contamination by their fellow-prisoners.

2d.  The impossibility of forming intimacies calculated to be injurious in after life.

3d.  The increased solitude, which afforded larger opportunities for serious reflection and, if so disposed, repentance and prayer by the criminal.

4th.  The prevention of total loss of character on the part of the prisoner, seeing that the privacy of the confinement would operate against the recognition of him by fellow-prisoners upon regaining their liberty.

Against it the following reasons could be urged—­

1st.  The extreme liability to ill-treatment or indulgence, according to the mood and disposition of the officers in charge.

2d.  The extreme difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently large number of honest, high-principled, just men and women, to carry out the solitary system with impartiality, firmness, and, at the same time, kindness.  This reason was strongly corroborated by the governors of Cold Bath Fields Prison, and the great Central Prison at Beaulieu.  Their own large experience had taught them the difficulty of securing officers in all respects fit to be trusted with the administration of such a system.