by Lethargio

Created on: January 03, 2009

Richard checked his pocket-watch. It was five minutes to nine in the morning, and he was stood outside the dreary front gate of Maidstone prison. It looked more like a fortress in which one keeps-judging by the size of the walls-giant mythical monsters and demons rather than human beings. Richard would have found this entrance almost admirable-in engineering terms- if it were not for the thing that had been erected just outside of it.

The gallows were always erected a day before execution, and were placed just outside of the front gate to allow for the event to become a public spectacle-a most palpable demonstration of justice. Richard stared at them blankly as if he were staring at a less than masterful piece of art. Just then however, he heard a loud, brisk, and triumphant clearing of a throat from behind him.

"May I be so bold as to assume that you are Mr Richard Whitehall?" exclaimed the man, much louder than was necessary, in Richards opinion. It was the warden. "Yes, sir, i am Mr Whitehall, may i ask your name?" He tried to sound as polite and alert as possible but most likely failing in regards to the latter. "No, you may not" the warden casually asserted "You like everyone else must call me warden." His tone of voice suggested this was common sense and that Mr Whitehall must obviously lack any education whatsoever, but it was well within Richards frame to infer such paranoid conclusions from so little information. He only had time to get half-way through these fruitless thoughts when the warden started speaking again.

"You are an inspector from the home office, here to have a good nosey around my prison are you? Then you're going to crawl back to your superiors and tell them what you find, eh? I will have to disappoint you from the outset; this is the finest prison in England and I won't hear a single word against it and you won't see anything to contradict my bold assertion. This facility here"-he swept his arm in the direction of the front gate-"is the guardian and defender of justice. It keeps only the most immoral and unsavoury of characters within its jaws and swallows those too diabolical to be allowed to live. The latter part is perhaps the most important; removing the worst of the scum-by means of the gallows, of course-from the face of this earth is the pinnacle of the judicial process. It is the most vivid and perfect way to demonstrate justice to all those who do not know of it and dare to live in ignorance of it! Just this very noon we have

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