PRISON OR INSTITUTION
SIR,—In an article on " Women in Prison," the writer states that " old- timers " openly say that they prefer prison to the poor law institution, because they are compelled to wcrk very hard in the poor law places and are summoned if they don't.
As a long-time frequenter of " poor law places," may I say that the real reason for preferring prison is not the work, but the having to work without pay and other things which go with that? Few tramps, of whom I am one, really object to work, and many of us work really hard and for long hours even in " poor law places " ; but what galls us is that no matter what we do we are no better thought of, and it leads to nothing energetic. We may be willing and capable, but we are de- graded from the status of people who work and pay their way. That shows itself in almost every detail of poor law administration, and that is why, although it is now called " Social Welfare," the poor law still causes us to feel our position and does next to nothing to lift us out of it. In every intimate detail of our existence we are in the hands of men who have little knowledge of the vicissitudes of life and very little understanding of human nature. We are simply people who pass through their hands and whom it is their business to subject to a routine which many of them do not even try to understand. It is their livelihood merely. Tramps say that a person who has committed an offence is at least respected by constituted society ; the man whose only offence is his poverty is denigrated and treated with a contempt which is contemptuous in its openness.
When children say: "Look at that funny man! " I know that they mean no harm. But when grown men and women behave as though to see a person in adverse circumstances were the greatest joke imaginable it is another matter. And so long as people who work and pay their way do act so, I, for my part, shall not consider myself less entitled to respect myself than they are because, as it happens, I am not in
that particular category.—Yours obediently, • JACOB J. BERLIN. No Fixed Abode.
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