Elizabethfry was the daughter of an English banker. When she was a young bride a-组卷网

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Elizabeth fry was the daughter of an English banker. When she was a young bride and mother, she gave medicine and clothes to the homeless and helped establish the sisters of Devonshire square, a nursing school. In 1813, at age 33, her attention turned to the female prisoners in London’s Newgate prison. She began to visit the prison almost daily, and what she found there horrified her.

In the early 1800s, English prisons were pits of cruelty and violence. At Newgate, women awaiting trial for stealing apples were put into the same prison as women who had been convicted (宣判) of murder. Women ate, defecated, and slept in the same cell. If a prisoner had children, they accompanied her to prison and lived in the same inhumane conditions. For those without help from family, friends, or charities, the options were to beg and to steal food, or to starve to death.

Prison officials warned fry of the risks she was taking in visiting prisons (exposure to violence and disease), but she waved the warnings aside. Besides comforting women, she taught them basic hygiene and to sew and quilt so they might earn a living when they were released. She intervened (介入) for women on death row, and if her pleas were unsuccessful, she comforted them in their last moments. To expand her efforts, in 1816 she founded the association for the improvement of the female prisoners of Newgate “to provide for the clothing, instruction, and employment of the women, and to form in them, as much as possible, those habits of order and industry, which may make them peaceable while in prison, and respectable when they leave it.” Specific reforms she campaigned for included: separation of men and women prisoners, paid work for prisoners, women guards for women prisoners, and the housing of criminals based on their crimes.

【小题1】English prisons in the early 1800s could be described as __________.