Debtors in Gaol
Br R. C. K. ENSOR.
ONE must welcome the decision of the Home Secretary (announced by Mr. Hacking in Parliament) to appoint a Departmental Committee which will consider the subject of imprisonments ordered by police courts for non-payment of fines or of debts. This does not cover those ordered by County Courts, which in some ways peculiarly invite objection ; but it can hardly fail to open up the whole topic. Many people, perhaps most, suppose that imprisonment for debt no longer exists—that the Debtors' Act of 1869 abolished it. So it did to a very large extent. The Vicar of Wakefield's swift passage to gaol, or the long sojourn of Little. Dorrit's father in the Marshalsea, are not incidents which could occur today in a novel of contemporary life. Miseries like those which B. R. Haydon poured out to Sir.Walter Scott from the King's Bench prison, have long ceased to be within the normal purview of struggling artists and men of letters. Perhaps we do not always sufficiently remind ourselves what an immense contri- bution the change has made towards the humanization of middle-class life. And yet, lower down in society, thousands of people (25,773 in 1930) go to gaol every year for non-payment of money due from them on one ground or another. They are poor people, and the debts or fines in question are small, and few think about the matter, save the courts, which have to order their imprisonment, and the prison officials, who have to carry it out. But nobody pretends that any part of the system is ideal ; though two Commissions, which examined the debt side in 1894 and 1909, approved of it faute de mieux. The grounds of imprisonment which will come within the new Committee's reference covered in 1930 some 21,394 persons, or rather over 82 per cent. of the grand total given above. Of these considerably over half (some 12,497) were sent to prison because they did not or could not avail themselves of the option to pay a fine for a small offence. Another large body (6,778) were men imprisoned for not paying weekly sums due to women—either wives, from whom they had been legally separated, or the mothers of illegitimate children, for whose support they had been adjudged liable. The relatively small remainder (2,119) were committed for non-payment of rates and taxes. Now, unlike the imprisonments for debt which County Courts order, these police-court imprisonments - have one stubborn feature' in- common. You cannot stop them unless you find effective substitutes. The debts dealt with in County Courts are debts incurred by voluntary contract, If you did not enforce their payment by imprisonment, nothing would happen except that such contracts would not in future be made ; in other words, the practice of selling goods to poor people by weekly instalments- would come to an end. Whether that would be a good thing, may be debated. But at all events Sir Edward Parry and the other advocates of abolishing county- court imprisonment for debt have argued quite frankly on the assumption that it would. So far, they say, from prison being here the condition, however much regretted, of something necessary or desirable, it actually serves to keep alive an unnecessary and undesirable tra.ding system. But in the police court it is impossible to argue like that., Take the women whose separated husbands or alienated lovers owe them money under maintenance or bastardy orders. The payment of these pitiful necessi- ties, often wilfully held back by spiteful men, cannot be left 'unenforced. If prison' did not hang over the men's heads, the majority of such women would, as things are,' be left penniless. So, again, rates and taxes must be forthcoming. You cannot merely let the defaulter off. I think the same logic applies quite as strongly to the question of fines. Consider what they are for.. They arc for infractions of one or other of the ever-multiplying rules which safeguard us in daily life. Some people, of course, think we have too many laws and by-laws, and talk of " over-regulation " ; but I suggest that that is not a practical view. The plain truth is, that progress in the public health, the decency, the humanity, and the amenity of our urbanized civilization depends absolutely upon our causing everyone (and not merely the good citizens who respond to educational appeals) to do (or abstain from) a great number of small acts. Experience has proved that this can be achieved by penalties, and in no other way. Today, so far from requiring fewer prosecutions and fines, there are many directions in which every reformer must desire more. And they must be effective. It is puerile to suggest that you can solve the problem by lowering fines to figures which offenders will not mind paying.
Our task, then, if we want to avoid imprisoning, is to find some other way of getting moneys paid. I suggest that there is an obvious one, .which modern developments have rendered feasible ; and that if the coining Committee searches till doomsday, it will never find .another. That way is to deduct weekly payments at the source—i.e., from wages or the dole. The key to carrying it out is the unemployment insurance card. The worker, against whom an order for payment is made in a police court, would have to produce his card, and the court would stamp on it a statement that a named amount must be deducted on each of so many dated weeks. Another card must be supplied, to which stamps for the payments can be affixed by the employer or the exchange. In regard to fines this would work very simply. A man who has been drunk and disorderly or has neglected to light his bicycle lamp, or a youth who has committed some act of petty hooliganism or vandalism. instead of being fined 15s. or 10s. and going to prison if he does not pay it, would during 6 or 4 weeks have 2s. 6d: a week deducted willy-nilly from his wage or dole. . As a deterrent it would be. equally effective, and the great evil of imprisonment would be avoided. Nor need the system prejudice the worker in his employment, since there would be nothing on the card to let the. employer know whether the offence punished carried any stigma., This method could almost as simply be adopted for non-payment of rates. .Payments under affiliation or separation orders present greater complications, . since they run on for many years, and the notice to the employer would have to be repeated on every new insurance card throughout that period. But that is not an insoluble problem. A more serious point is, that not everybody who is -convicted will be entitled to an insurance, card. Presumably, however, the legislation now deferred till next year will bring all employees at wages or modest salaries under insurance. That will leave outside our scope only persons who are self-employed. For them- I see nothing at present but to 'retain their liability to imprisonment, subject -to the same aeemmt being taken- . of their means as hitherto. There- are -few of them who could not well pay if they would.; and for- those not uncommon cases, where spiteful man • has deliberately made 'himself unable to pay -a woman the money due to . her,` incline to think that prison is thoroughly deserved%
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