English Quaker Elizabeth Fry d 10/12 1845. From her first visit to Newgate Prison she saw conditions that filled her with shame and indignation—women crowded in fetid cells, in rags, sleeping on the bare floor. She saw a woman strip clothing from a dead infant to clothe her own.
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She devoted the rest of her life to the cause of prison reform—vs. those who said this was no work for a woman, that prisoners were savages, that improving conditions would remove “the dread of punishment in the criminal class.”
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Fry was motivated by the conviction that prisoners, regardless of their crimes, were human beings who bore within them the spark of the divine image. It was sacrilege to treat them with no more than punitive cruelty.
