THE NEW SOCIAL AGITATION.
THE subject of criminal discipline is receiving earnest attention in various quarters. At the Middlesex Sessions, Mr. Sergeant Adams is periodically deploring the vast numbers of little children whom the law obliges him to doom, for infantile faults, to a criminal life, by sending them to prison. Mr. Recorder Hill has established a practice for the reformation of juvenile offenders convicted at the Birmingham Sessions. The Globe newspaper is writing from time to time in defence of capital punishment as if it were a thing condemned to abolition. Mr. Sheriff Laurie has advanced a plan of "refuge and employment for [destitute) prison- ers." This week, Mr. Charles Pearson, the City Solicitor, has offered to the public a comprehensive scheme for the redemption of young criminals ; and the state of the City gaols has been the subject of stormy discussion in the Court of Alderman. We should look in vain for an extraordinary event to account for this general mooting of the subject : we find no organized agitation suddenly starting into prominence : the fact must be simply due to a real change in public opinion,—a misgiving, the fruit of experience continued under awakened observation, whether our system of punishment is really sound ; whether it is not most unsuccessful for its ends, most mischievous in its practical results ; whether it must not be reformed altogether.
The present system of punishments, capital or secondary, totally fails in its main object as a check on the growth of crime : crime not only goes on, but increases-
" It appears from Parliamentary returns and other authentic documents," says Mr. Pearson, that daring the present century, the number of commitments and convictions for crime has increased in this country greatly beyond the increase of population. Thus, in five years preceding 1810, the average annual number of commitments in England and Wales was 4,792, and the convictions 2,840; while the population of the age often years and upwards amounted to 7,302,600: whereas in the five years preceding 184.5, the average annual number of commitments was 28,477, and the convictions 20,590; and the population ten years old and up- wards had Increased to 12,093,000; so that in a period of forty years population ten years old and upwards has increased 65 per cent, while the proportionate com- mitments for crime have been augmented 494 per cent, and the convictions 525 per cent.
"Until within the last ten years the returns do not specify the ages of the prisoners; but, as appears by these later documents, the number of juvenile criminals annually convicted in England and Wales has increased in agreater degree than even the mass of criminals at large. Thus the number of criminals, under twenty years of age, committed in the year 1835, was 6,803, or one in 449 of the population, between ten and twenty years of age; while in 1844 they amounted to 11,348, or 1 in 304 upon the population of the same age." Mr. Pearson assumes that this increase of crime cannot be owing to poverty and ignorance. National wealth has increased ; and during the whole of the intervening period, most strenuous exertions have been made to afford to the masses of the people in- creased education, intellectual, moral, and religious, and to supply them with the means of gratifying the appetite of knowledge, which elementary instruction was calculated to inspire." This kind of reasoning, however, will not stand the test of examina- tion. If "national" wealth has increased—if individual wealth has reached to enormous heights—intense competition in all trades and the redundancy of labour have not only made the earning a livelihood a perpetual strain on the faculties, but have made it a blessing to obtain permission to consume existence in unintermitting toil for the sake of a bare subsistence. As to edu- cation, we have the authority of the Reverend Mr. Russell, In- spector of Prisons, for the fact, that the kind of education indica- ted by the prison-returns has not increased among the criminal population—in truth, it has plainly not been made to reach that class. And even if it did, the "education" thus indicated is a burlesque upon the term we mean no allusion to moral and reli- • " Refuge and Employment for Prisoners; an Address to the Community., by Mr. Sheriff Laurie." A. little tract of sixteen pages, published by Mr. Weir, of Harley Street.
gious training, but simply assert the dense ignorance in respect of secular, worldly knowledge.
As a general plan, Mr. Pearson's scheme is better than his ar- guments. He proposes to establish throughout the country, on the main railway-trunks, asylums in which young persons con- victed by law, or abandoned to a criminal way of life, may be received for sustenance and education; the parents to be liable for the clothing and food of the children, as they would be liable to the poor-law union ; or in default of responsible parents, the parish to be liable. These young unfortunates would not be treated at all as criminals So far good ; but this relates only to the young.
Mr. Laurie's project relates to adults. He finds "that up- wards of two thousand prisoners, annually, are placed at the bar of the Old Bailey for trial ; about one-third are acquitted: one-third are for first offences ; and the remaining portian have been convicted before." So much for the efficacy of our prison- discipline! But it appears, on the testimony now repeated for the thousandth time, that even the adult prisoners could not if they would reform. "With the exception of the capital cases for felony," says the Sheriff, "the two-thirds are sentenced for short periods of confinement with hard labour ; and at the expiration of that term are tbrawn out again, like those acquitted, on the public, without employment, and with no other resource but to commit further crimes." Thus from one prison alone are annually turned out epon the public some fifteen hundred or two thousand prison- ers who are ?Astable to reform : for the "high tone of our morals" in England prevents " respectable " people from employing con- victed prisoners. All this is unfortunately an old story ; but it is well to bear that miserable fact in mind.
To remedy this state of things, Mr. Laurie proposes, first a "proper classification of prisoners ; separating those for the first offence from the old and hardened offenders ; and a beneficial Shelter and employment for all who are liberated from prison " ; to be furnished at the expense of the State. Mr. Laurie shows that each prisoner at Newgate costs the public about 501.; and for that money, or much less, each might be provided with the requisite shelter and employment. "The beneficial employment suggested for these prisoners is the supply of all Government stores, the clothing for the Army and Navy, and the Police; the necessary public works on harbours of; the cultivation of waste lands, which hold out a wide sphere for all, anirlaendant, labour and.which will re- munerate well for the only outlay made by Government for the material. I find many of the prisoners are agricultural labourers, who might construct their own dwellings, and which might be extended from time to time; and if the work is voluntary, with a trifling reward for increased exertion, there will be no need of expensive protection, but the necessary inspectors or superintendents, which divests the shelter of the character of a prison: many would by this probation be enabled to regain their character, and become useful members of society again."
It will be observed that Mr. Laurie's plan is a remedy merely for such crime as originates in the destitution of prisoners. He "does not seek to disturb our criminal jurisprudence, which he considers perfect"! Those who should prove incorrigible and should return to prison, he would transport. Perhaps if Mr. Laurie went to a penal colony he would display the same praise- worthy zeal in writing against transportation ; for if our prison_ discipline is bad, our convict system is more horrible. The dread- ful results were exposed in Parliament ten or twelve years ago, and the mere force of the-facts obliged Government to give it up. Prisoners were then kept at home, accumulating in the hulks and prisons, and nobody knew what to do with them. That was very inconvenient- the worse but remoter evil had lost some of its ter- xors to the official mind ; and a second experiment in transporta- tion, on a more limited scale, has been tried. Van. Diemen's Land is the unfortunate corpus vile; and the report on the results is be- fore us in the shape of a petition from the inhabitants, praying Queen Victoria to abolish a system which threatens to swamp the colony with gangs of criminals, from whose polluting excesses and violences no age or sex is likely to be protected. What then can 1 e done with this criminal population? . 'Re Globe, though sometimes touching upon the subject in perhaps too light a strain, and advocating a kind of punishment which to us appears bad in every way, seems to be more on the right track to a thorough reform than either the City Solicitor or the City Sheriff. We will not go back to resent an injury lately inflicted upon us by our contemporary, and borne by us in silent resignation,—the insinuation that the Spectator had pronounced it unjust "to punish for acts which ought to have been prevented by educational correction of the physical predisposition indicated by the shape of the skull"; or that we had wholly condemned " the fear of pain" as a fundamental principle of determent. The 51 skull" sentence was a mere flight of imagination ; the other ens counter to the express terms of the paper on which the Globe commented. But let let bygones be bygones. Our censor is in a happier mood now, and makes a judicious suggestion- " We repeat what we have formerly stated, that we have no love for capital pnnishment; and that our doubts of the expediency of its abolition, as applied to the few mimes of violence on which it is still visited, would not impede our dis- piesicrnate reception of any proposed sufficient substitute for impressing minds of that order, whose necessary restraint by the sense of a public force above them whose inflictions will follow crime sternly, speedily, and inevitably, is of course tile sole justification for capital punishment in peace, as analogous motives are for inflicting death in warfare. * * • We consider it a perfwtly open and very important question, whether the security of inoffensive from offensive characters in thacommunity can_, or cannot, be equally well provided for withoat the punish- ment of death. Whether the knowledge of the doom of death being attached to crimes of violence has no deterring power. Whether—if it has—some other pu- nishment may still be substituted which would have as much. It is upon the answer to this question that all rational measures must depend—unless we defence as well military pro- reed on the principles of those who would proscribe all as all capital punishment. We regard it as a perfectly open question; and we are only sorry the onesided ateliers, who have filled the public ear so much with it lately, do so little to close it."
We understand this, and much more to the same effect, to mean that the Globe is not satisfied with partial arguments for and against special methods of punishment, but desires a search- ing inquiry into the principles of criminal jurisprudence in order' to arrive at the truth. We desire nothing better. We believe that our present system of discipline by retribution wholly fails; we believe it to be costly, inefficient, and actually depraving. No thorough change of method has ever been tried, even to a partial extent, nor even a thorough examination of the system's work- ing; but attempts have repeatedly been made to disguise the results, by shifting the mass of prisoners which is the product to the Antipodes, thence home, and back to the Antipodes again. We believe that any inquiry into the principles of criminal error and discipline would show that we have hitherto been on the wrong path, and therefore can never attain the desired end. The criminally-disposed population may be divided into three classes. The first class consists of those who are born to crime— the offspring of vicious parents, orphans, and others who dwell amid depravity .and vice, and have no means of extrication. Most men remain in the sphere of life to which they are born : this one is a lawyer because his father or an uncle was so ; an- other is a grocer, because the " connexion " runs in grocery ; the generation of labourers is immortal. The few who rise in the scale of society" are the exceptions. Just in the usual way, the son of a thief must pursue the vocation of his race, and must depend upon his "connexion." How can he, the most ignorant, resourceless of creatures, not countenanced but disavowed by the decent, master his own lot so as to alter it ? He obeys it, con- tinues a criminal, and is the parent of criminals. The race, in- deed, would die out of its own depravities; but it is perpetually recruited by accessions of the very ignorant among our lower classes," who "fall in the scale of society " to be thieves and prostitutes. The remedy which the State should provide for this class, ignorant of right and wrong as they are defined by the law, and ignorant of the way to an honest livelihood, is obvious : it is education—right training. There is another class, who being convicted of crime bear the brand of the prison upon them, and are actually excluded by the decree of society from honest employment. We lack a purgatory to clear these erring souls of the stain which is upon them, anti to restore them to honest life. Mr. Laurie's plan suggests a remedy. It would be necessary in carrying it out, to see that the prisoners should not provoke the cry that they "competed with the honest labourer"; but proper, precautions would not be difficult. There are unlimited works on which convicts might be employed, to the ultimate advantage of the nation, yet not to such imme- diate profit as would induce the capitalist to employ "honest labourers" upon them. Such works might in many cases be the means of opening new fields for the employment of the free labourer.
The third 'class consists of those criminals who appear to be irreclaimable. That ill-starred creature, the-criminal reputed to be incorrigible, already costs the country a large sum, without mending him or protecting the community. The money should be bestowed in rendering him as harmless as possible. How can that be done ? Nobody can answer. A great deal has been written about the question, about and about it ; ithes been dis- cussed with foregone conclusions; but it has never been searched into, in thorough sincerity and good faith, not to make out a case, but to discover the truth therein lurking and fetch it out
That search is the thing really wanted.
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