While some prison reformers, following Bentham's lead, stressed impersonal, disciplinary techniques of reform, Quakers laid their trust in empathy, example and the power of the gospel. The redemption of sinners lay at the heart of Holy Scripture. For Quakers the seeming incorrigibility of the criminal was the result not of human nature but of a mistaken view of punishment. Not deterrence, not retribution but reformation was the prime purpose of imprisonment: ‘punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal’: and to achieve the former you must do the latter. But to do anything you had to have first-hand knowledge of prison conditions and not just a penal theory. Quakers had long acquaintance with the reality of imprisonment and knew how that reality militated against the attainment of rehabilitation. Howard's reforms had had an effect but too often they were not implemented at all, or their effect soon wore off. Newgate seemed untouched by reform. Overcrowding was a major culprit. James Neild recorded that in 1811 there were 396 felons and 233 debtors in the gaol. Worse, there were hordes of children. When George Ellis MP ‘went all over Newgate’ he found scenes of ‘youthful depravity’. One boy ‘named Leary of thirteen [had] been in Newgate twenty times, and been four times under sentence of death’.