Chained to a monstrous machine, a man is a second away from passing out as he takes another step up
an endless mountain. If he trips, his feet will be smashed by the machine. If he even
looks like he wants to get off, there’s a whip with nine tails waiting for him at
the new punishment block. He cannot stop, so he continues his endless march “upwards” in agony.
Welcome to the treadmill, the most futile punishment you can imagine and one that was
once hailed as the most progressive thing the correctional system had come up with.
But let’s first imagine a British politician from the Victorian era
somehow visiting a modern prison today. There, the inmates are enjoying their so-called “rec”
time. Maybe he checks out a few cells and finds some men looking almost zombified,
out of their minds on synthetic cannabinoids, aka, Spice. And then he witnesses a fight,
involving a homemade knife and its target: someone’s soft cheek.
If he were a certain kind of man, this politician from the past would likely tell the officials in
this modern penitentiary that where he comes from, this would never happen. In fact, he’s appalled.
“No man should sit idle,” he says, “A convict must always be moving, even if his movements
are entirely futile.” He says this, knowing that exercise as torture has caused healthy men to die.
In fact, the British authorities seemed to be overjoyed about the invention of the treadmill,
once saying it resulted in “a great improvement in prison discipline.”
Back in the Victorian era, British prisons weren’t always full of serious criminals but were largely
populated by folks who’d committed minor crimes such as public drunkenness or vagrancy. That
got them a few months in prison, and while there, they did a lot of sitting around.
A guy named William Cubitt saw this and immediately thought
prison was a total waste of time. Cubitt was an engineer and a good
engineer at that. Importantly, he wasn’t a sadist. We say this because what he saw
in prisons was a lot of healthy, young men with a lot of energy, who could do something
useful. He thought their strength could be harnessed, so he invented a human treadwheel.
He did not have the intention of it being used to tire men out to the point of death while
making absolutely nothing. His idea was to use the treadmill to grind things, or mix things.
Cubitt came up with a design for his first treadmill in 1817,
with the intention of it being used to grind corn.
The machine could fit a total of 24 men on it at one time. Every man rested for
12 minutes every hour. This was a lot of hard work, and as you’ll soon see,
it changed the death rates in British prisons. Nonetheless, prisons all over the UK saw the
machine’s apparent utility and asked for their own treadmills. It was stated that teaching the
inmates the “habits of industry” was better than them sitting around. This way, they could redeem
themselves by becoming objects of productivity. Soon, 44 prisons in the UK had treadmills,
although not all of them were for grinding agricultural produce. As time passed,
men found themselves on the treadmills merely for the sake of them spending
their energy. This was now a kind of torture. It became a sad joke that some of the treadmills
were only for “grinding the wind”, meaning they were all punishment and no industry.
Some of the most brutal of these machines ended up not in Britain but in some of its colonies,
where people were still being whipped, and according to one sketch made back then,
being whipped as they walked on the treadmill. We’ll come back to that soon.
Even the prisoners who weren’t actively grinding or mixing were still being punished in what the
authorities said was a meaningful way. As per the Victorian ethos, prisoners had to atone for their
sins, and what better way than walking on a wheel. According to the British Prison Act of 1865,
anyone 16 or older could end up doing some serious hard time on the wheel. This, the authorities
thought, would make people think twice about committing a crime, but as history has shown us,
more severe punishments don’t necessarily less crime. Still, the deadly treadmill made
many members of the British public happy. According to one historian, “The exertion,
combined with poor diets, often led to injury and illness (as well as rock-hard glutes), but
that didn’t stop penitentiaries all over Britain and the United States from buying the machines.”
In the US, it is said that these machines “spread terror” throughout the prison system when the
idea was first imported from the UK. Back then, a prison guard in New York said the treadmill he saw
really did stop the prisoners from acting up. That guard said it was the “monotonous steadiness, and
not its severity, which constitutes its terror.” By the time the Americans got them,
the treadmills were all the rage in England. Various iterations appeared,
including one which looked like a paddle steamer. Inside the barrel, certain things such as gravel
were mixed. One of them was introduced in Northallerton's jail in the North of England.
A prisoner there remarked that it was “irksome, dull, monotonous, and disgusting.”
The nickname for this one was the “everlasting staircase” although
prisoners usually did their stair climb for just ten minutes before getting a five-minute break.
The trouble was the entire shift could last up to ten hours. The average was six hours, which would
likely mean climbing in the region of 5,000 feet a day. That’s not bad…for a well-fed mountaineer.
It was made worse by the fact that prisoners couldn’t stop once they were on the wheel,
because if they did, they’d find themselves being smacked on the feet by the steps. There
were many injuries in this prison, but what’s interesting in the case of the Northallerton
treadmill is the fact that it was closed down after local people in the area complained.
The millers and farmers there said the treadmill was profoundly affecting their profits.
That’s because the prison had five of them in total and all that unpaid labor was being used
to drive a very productive corn mill. The prison eventually got rid of them,
but guess what, the treadmills were replaced with another favorite punishment in Britain. This was
the hand-mill, one of the most pointless contraptions humanity as ever come up with.
With these things, sometimes called crank machines, a prisoner was told to turn the crank
and turn it fast, sometimes for a period of six hours. There was no industry here,
just punishment. A prisoner turned and turned until they could turn no more,
which was especially hard when the guard changed a setting to make the turning of the crank harder.
In Northallerton, in 1863, if you could turn this thing 2,000 times in a certain
amount of time, you could win yourself some breakfast. 2,000 was a low number,
with some sources saying the prisoners had to do almost 15,000 revolutions in one sitting.
Just out of interest, you will hear British prisoners and prisoners from other places in the
world calling prison officers, “screws”. That’s because back in the day, when a guard wanted to
make turning that crank harder, he tightened a screw. This isn’t only reason for the nickname,
though, with the other being that guards used screws to tighten, lock and unlock shackles.
The strange thing is, when the governor of Gloucester Prison, Thomas Cunningham,
was asked about the work the inmates did in prison, he stated that there was already a
lot of work to do in cleaning, gardening, and washing clothes. So again, you must
remember that the treadmills were more about punishment than they were about productivity.
Back then, a journalist working for the Gloucester Journal got to see them being used,
and what he saw didn’t impress him much since these prisoners were indeed grinding
only air. Part of his article went like this: “Not a word was spoken on the wheel, or off it,
nor was it necessary; for each prisoner knew the moment that his spell ceased, so accurately,
that he whose turn had come, had no opportunity of forgetting it. One could not fail to be struck by
the air of languor, and almost misery, which always marks labor not lightened by reward.”
Then, in November 1894, the prison was in the news again. That’s because a 45-year old inmate named
Henry Johnson got on the treadmill one day and soon dropped down dead. This guy had only received
a sentence of 14 days for the crime of theft. He was described as being a strong man with no
noticeable health issues, although after a stint on the treadmill he complained of chest pains
and embarrassing bouts of farting. The prison doctor could find nothing wrong
with him, and so he was sent back to his cell and told he’d be back on the treadmill the next day.
On November 1, after just five minutes on the machine, he collapsed and died. An inquest seemed
to suggest that Johnson had been in good shape, with a report saying he simply died of “syncope”,
which is a medical term for fainting. As you’ll soon hear, perhaps the prison authorities were
covering up treadmill deaths, or at least they didn't want to face the reality of their dangers.
It was around this time that some parts of the British government started saying that maybe these
machines were a little bit cruel and unusual in terms of punishment. Not only that, at this time,
the vast majority of the treadmills weren’t even being used for grinding and other work, since
improvements in industrial technologies meant that man-power was far less useful than machine-power.
There were even fewer humanitarian concerns in the prisons of colonized Jamaica. Let us explain.
Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which should have ended slavery in the British
colonies, but it didn’t mean slavery stopped. It meant that if a slave was above the age of six,
they were forced into indentured service. How long they had to do this service differed,
with former agricultural slaves having to do six years and domestic slaves four years.
This was still hell, of course. It was virtually slavery even though it went
by the name of the “Apprenticeship System.” These so-called apprentices were all released
in 1938 after slaves and activists made it clear just how bad it was. For instance,
some apprentices in prison were chained to one of the new treadmills during that four-year period
and told to “dance”, which meant climb. This punishment would usually have been
the responsibility of the so-called “masters”, but now the apprentices were in the hands of
the state. Even some abolitionists saw the treadmill as better than former punishments,
such as a master flogging an enslaved person. But it seems the whipping of prisoners on the
treadmill occurred, as is shown in that sketch. This illustration came with some
strong words from Jamaica's Governor at the time, Lionel Smith. He was writing to the
Jamaican House of Assembly about the conditions of imprisonment during the apprenticeship period.
He wrote, “The WHIPPING OF FEMALES, you were informed by me, officially, WAS IN PRACTICE;
and I called upon you to make enactments to put an end to conduct so repugnant to humanity, and
SO CONTRARY TO LAW. So far from passing an Act to prevent the recurrence of such cruelty, you have
in no way expressed your disapprobation of it.” Then, on Sunday, April 8, 1888, the New York
Times published a story about a Jamaican prison treadmill and a “novel whipping
machine” that could be used if the prisoners refused to walk on it.
The article features a journalist visiting a Jamaican prison. He explained,
“We went across the big prison yard, and in the building on the opposite side,
I had my first look at a treadmill.” He said that every inmate in the prison had to spend
his first six months on one of the machines. Making it sound almost positive, the writer
says that six months is enough time to give the prisoner time for “reflection and repentance”
and helps him, or her, to build leg muscles. But he did write that it must be heart-breaking
to have to climb what he called an “ever-revolving wheel.” He said when that wheel started,
the prisoners had no choice but to climb. If they stopped, they would be injured. On this treadmill,
the rule was ten minutes on and twenty minutes off, but the off-time meant standing and watching
others climb. The end product was crushed corn and coffee, arguably a step-up from grinding air.
But matters got worse if prisoners didn’t comply, as the Times explained.
On speaking to the prison governor, the governor lamented that some doctors had
said the traditional flogging of prisoners could kill people, especially when they were
hit around the chest. That was outlawed, so the governor said he built a new contraption.
He told the journalist, “I knew of a part of the human body that could withstand a good flogging
without any danger whatever to the chest.” He then got a prisoner named John to stand over
his new contraption, and John’s feet and hands were put into clasps. His chest was protected,
and although no flogging happened, a cat o’nine tails whip was hanging on a wall nearby.
This was apparently progress in action. The governor concluded that the prisoners rarely
balked at work, given that the consequence was a date with this new non-fatal whipping device.
But despite this positive news coming from the Times about how well such a machine could
keep men, and in some cases women, in line, treadmills just didn’t catch on in the USA.
At one point, slave owners in Charleston could actually rent one out for when they wanted to
punish runaway slaves, but for them, the job of picking cotton and breaking rocks, was where
they wanted slaves investing their energy. In 1822, a 16-man treadmill was installed at
a prison on East 26th Street in New York City. Soon more were installed, all for
grinding purposes. There were four different prisons throughout the US that installed them,
but what had been seen in the UK as a success, didn’t really impress many people over the pond.
This wasn’t because the authorities took a humanitarian view of treadmills but because they
didn’t think human grinding was very productive. Then in 1827, the Prison Discipline Society of
Boston said in an article that “the treadmill teaches the convict nothing that can be useful
to him on his discharge. It is not a profitable employment of human power.”
Much later in 1882, the Scientific American wrote a story about how treadmills could indeed
be useful. That story said, “The convicts hated it, and no useful results came of it” but the
writer suggested “attaching dynamoelectric machines to the cranks” which would “store
electrically the energy developed.” That never happened, and three years
later over in England, the British Medical Journal wrote an article with the title,
“Death on The Treadmill.” It talked about the death of a man on a treadmill at Durham prison,
adding that since its treadmill had been in action, there was around one fatality per week.
Just bear in mind here, that a day on these things would easily burn 2,000 calories,
much less energy than the prisoners got from their food. It was pretty obvious that a lot
of deaths would occur. But the prisons kept saying it wasn’t the treadmills that were killing people,
to which the Journal writer said nonsense, it was. What else could explain all the new deaths?
The writer concluded that the treadmill should be abolished with other “remnants
of barbarism” that had happened through the ages in Britain. This kind of talk was now
making waves throughout Britain and the USA. The British writer Oscar Wilde was one of the
last people to have endured the treadmill. This was a man whose intellect must have been deeply
disturbed by the futility of such a machine. Wilde had been given a two year sentence for
having intimate relations with other men, which was illegal in England back then. His
sentence demanded six hours of hard labor a day. That labor almost killed him, and at one point,
he collapsed from hunger and exhaustion. He was released in 1897 and died in 1900. In 1898,
there was a new Prison Act, and by 1902, the treadmills were a thing of the past.
We’ll finish with some words from Wilde and his poem based on his incarceration,
the “Ballad of Reading Gaol”. “We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill: We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill: But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.” Now you need to see how other
countries do it in “Surviving Thai Prison - Why You Wouldn't Make It.”