SIX YEARS IN THE PRISONS OF ENGLAND.• IF we could

think that this book was a genuine record of the experience of a genuine author, we should treat it as a work of the very greatest importance. We cannot say that even then it would be interesting. But at least it would be a revelation of the interior of our prisons, such a revelation as would make us doubt the efficacy of our present system, and would lead us to look very earnestly for some means of practical improvement. There is great room for discussion as to the objects and effects of punish- ment. Ought we to attempt nothing more than the repression of crime by pain and irksomeness of living, or ought we to make the criminal reform by putting him in a better position than the honest men who need no repentance ? Many similar questions arise whenever we approach the subject of crime. The difficulty of the subject, and the impossibility of finding a simple and ready solution, seem to have deterred many practical minds from dealing with it, and to have consigned it to the social- science philosophers. Had the author of the book now before us impressed us with any belief in his story, we might have espoused his cause. But there are several reasons against our giving him full credence. In the first place, we cannot understand his crime. He tells us that he pleaded guilty to "uttering two bills of ex- change, knowing them to be fictitious." These bills, he has said

• Six

Tears in the Primus of England. By a Merchant.

before, were " what I called accommodation bills. They were in the form of promissory notes, issued in my favour and payable in Loudon by myself." If this means that fictitious names were signed to the bills or promissory notes, it is clear that the offence amounted to forgery. But then we do not call forged instruments either fictitious or accommodation bills. A merchant who signs the name of a non-existing firm with a view of getting credit knows that he is committing an imposture. His fraud on the people who take the bills is as serious as if he signed the name of an existing firm without its authority. If this is the meaning of the offence to which the author pleaded guilty, he has not told us the whole truth. If this is not the meaning, if he merely signed promissory notes, or accommodation bills, without being able to

meet them, he could not have been convicted. This is the first difficulty. Another is, that he tells us of a man who was innocent of a crime, but was convicted of it, and was still suffering his sentence, although "the guilty man has turned up, nom that they cannot punish him, and confessed." The words we have italicized read as if the law claimed one punishment,

and one only, for each specific offence ; so that when once a man is convicted of a crime, both his innocence and the guilt of another become immaterial. The author is pro- bably thinking of the subsequent immunity of a man who has once been acquitted. It is no defence that another has been con- victed in your place. So, too, when we are told of a man who robbed a church, and was acquitted because the clergyman prose- cuted hitn, " when it ought to have been some other official," we see that the author is mixing up civil and criminal procedure.

Perhaps he means that the property of the articles stolen was laid in the clergyman, instead of in the churchwardens. But for the last seventeen years all such variances have been amendable. It may be argued that mistakes of this kind bear witness to the authenticity of the book. We think they show that most of its materials have been picked up by hearsay, and that the author has had criminals for his informants. The truth of many of their

stories need hardly be doubted. But we do not want any more of that kind of literature, under whatever disguise it may be offered.

The parts of the book which are really important, but which

demand some guarantee before they can be accepted, are those which profess to describe the author's personal experience. 1Ve do not allude so much to the treatment he received iu hospital and

to that mismanagement of his leg which was the cause of its ampu- tation. But is it true that the way iu which sentences are carried out is capricious, and that letters of complaint to private friends or to such members of Parliament as Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright are suppressed by the prison authorities? Charges of this kind are made in the book before us, and they ought not to be made vaguely. The book bears the name of a respectable publisher, and iu its appendix there are letters said to be addressed to the author by the French and English Governments thanking him for the part he took in connection with the Commercial Treaty. No doubt if the author has pleaded guilty to an offence punishable by penal servitude he cannot well put his name to such a book as this, and in the absence of his name, the mere insertion of letter.; signed " G. Rouher " and "J. Emerson Tennent" is not conclusive. But there must be some means of substantiating charges of this nature. There must be a way of having an inquiry into anything that is arbitrary or an excess of power. General and querulous com- plaints without foundation in fact must be common enough in prisons, and prisoners will no doubt take the most unfavourable view of their own treatment. We are told by the author of this book that " the official replies to petitions appear to be stereotyped, and the names of the petitioners are merely written on the margin." This is an inference, and we may attach as much weight to it as we like. But when he goes ou to speak of " two cases where answers were received to petitions which were never sent," we have either a fact which reflects seri- ously on the management of prisons, or a proof of the book being founded on hearsay. The account given of the suppressed letters is as follows :-

"Before I sought an interview with the director, I had written a letter to the late Mr. Cobden, in which, after narrating the particulars of my case, I expressed the hope that he might fool it consistent with his public daty to endeavour to procure for me the same treatment with reference to liberation as had been extended to other prisoners who had suffered the loss of a similar limb at the same prison before me. This was considered improper language, and the letter was suppressed. When called before the authorities on this occasion, I asked them to point out all the objectionable passages, in order that I might know what to omit in writing it another time. But this they would not do, and all the satisfaction I could get was that my letter might not only be shown to the Home Secretary, but also be noticed in the House of London : Bentley. Commons, and that they might be blamed for passing it. The idea of

my letter being noticed in the House of Commons was new and not very agreeable to me ; but I also thought it very improbable that such would be the case, and remarked in reply that there was nothing the letter that a prisoner could be justly blamed for writing, and that its publica- tion could not have an injurious effect on the public interest. This was not denied, but the letter was suppressed nevertheless, and, I presume, still lies among many similar documents which have from time to time met with the same fate."

And again, four pages later:— "I now felt rather unhappy under the severity with which I was treated, and wrote a letter to my brother, in which I mentioned having seen the visiting director ; but this letter was also suppressed, and I was warned not to mention the director's name in any letter, or inform my friends of the suppressed letter to Mr. Cobden."

We do not quote the interview with the director which comes between these two passages, because the gruff, bullying tone in which the director is said to have spoken, and the peremptory way in which he cut short the interview, may be more or less matters of fancy. But the suppression of letters is either a fact or an invention of a fact, and it is as such that we have given it this prominence. In like manner, the many instances given us of the caprice of the directors, of the mistakes in classification of crimes, of the general mismanagement of the prisons, and of the failure of discipline, are serious matters, either for the book or the system. Giving the prisoners the same clothes in winter and summer, and herding twenty-four criminals of various orders in one room, are both blunders ; but the one is of a minor degree, the other strikes at the root of all the efficacy of our method of punishment. If the author's story was true, and he was indeed imprisoned for what he thought a commercial indiscretion, he might have come out of gaol an accomplished housebreaker, and might have been hardened for life in that course of crime into which he had been entrapped by adverse circumstances. We cannot think that this is the intention of our law. But if this is the way in which our law is carried out there is something radically wrong about it. If nothing else in the book was true, this account of the comfort offered by gaols to hardened offenders would teach us a similar lesson :—

" Imprisonment with hard labour will never have the slightest effect in deterring such men from committing crime. Labour that would soon kill many other men would not punish them, but they would prefer it even to sitting in school. Rough fare they can do with, as long as it fills the belly. They have no other ambition to gratify. With the stomach distended and a quid of tobacco in their mouths, they are as happy as kings, and very careless about liberty. Many of them when they leave the prison leave home. To such men, and to all the class of vagrant and pauper criminals, a convict prison means a comfortable home, where they are fed and clothed, and bathed and physicked, and have all their wants supplied, without trouble or care, in exchange for their liberty and such labour as they can easily and cheaply perform. To the pro- fessional thieves a convict prison is a Court of Bankruptcy, to be avoided if possible, and to be made the most of when unavoidable: a place of punishment, no doubt, but punishment nearly useless and entirely mis- directed. To the man who has wrought for his living at some honest trade, up to the commission of his first known offence, who has been accounted respectable by his neighbours, and who belongs to a class of society with whom loss of character is utter ruin—a convict prison is a hell. If he happen also to be a man of thought and education, it will in addition appear to be an institution for robbing honest taxpayers, and a nursery of vice and crime, which all good men should endeavour to reform or destroy."

What the author proposes is to make offenders work out a certain sum as a penalty for their offence against the public. In this way he would teach the thief the policy of honesty, and would enable him to earn his bread when he left prison. The objection to teach- ing lucrative trades to criminals on the ground that it interferes with free labour and puts the criminals is a better position than honest men, is passed over without much remark. But unless the general education of the people is reformed at the same time, and un- less the honest poor have as good a means of learning as the criminal poor, there is some force in the objection. While our workhouses remain what they are, it seems almost premature to labour for refinements in our prisons. In any case we must first be certain that the evils exist, and we cannot take them on the unsupported word of an anonymous merchant.