S LR ROBERT ANDERSON, formerly head of the Criminal Investigation Department
at Scotland Yard, has had a remarkable measure of success in educating opinion, both official and public, towards agree- ment with the conclusions he himself adopted as the result of his administrative experience. He began. his campaign in the Nineteenth. Century early in 1901, very shortly after his retirement, and at the end of the Parliamentary Session of 1903 a Bill was introduced by the Home Secretary which was based upon a recognition of the necessity of altering our existing practice in regard to the treatment of "professional criminals." That phrase had been on the lips of very many people for a long time, but its true import was not realised, except by a very limited number of the more thoughtful students of social questions, until Sir Robert Anderson gave his authority for the belief that it represented an actual and very definite state of facts. There is, he has very positively assured the public, a profession of criminals as clearly recognised by those who have the best means of knowing—e.g., the " fence " on the one hand, and the detective on the other—as is the profession of doctors, or of lawyers, or of engineers by actual or possible patients or clients. It is a profession which—once the negation of morality is assumed—is by no means without its attractions. It frequently leads to con- siderable, sometimes to large, gains, attained without any exhausting physical or mental exertion; and it offers elements of constant risk and excitement which in this country, and at this stage of civilisation, are attainable in connection with very few other forms of " bread-work," and not many forms of sport. It gives scope in some of its branches for a very high degree of skill, coolness, courage, and resource, and any considerable measure of success, to say nothing of real eminence, in it, can hardly be reached without the possession of some or all of those qualities. The draw- backs to the occupation are no doubt serious; but in the case of persons of coarse fibre they are by no means intolerable. The practical certainty of being caught from time to time, and of being sent to penal servitude for terms of increasing length, does not weigh against the sporting interest and comparative luxury of those portions of life which are lived out of gaol. And even the trials of gaol life may be much overrated. As Si Robert Anderson has pointed out in one of his articles, the professional criminal learns to adjust himself to the conditions of penal servitude very much as an officer in the Army adjusts himself to the conditions of disagreeable foreign stations. And in any case the unpleasantnesses of imprisonment are not serious enough.to induce the professional criminal to accept the, to him, inexpressible ennui of a life of honest labour. In some cases he condescends to wage-work for four or five days a week ; but the week-ends or the nights are still spent in the pursuit of his old occupation. To the man who has graduated in crime and tasted its wild joys the question of settling down to a career of dull respectability does not present itself as one deserving of consideration. To such men penal servitude is a disagree- able interruption of a series of enjoyable adventures—an interruption regarded by some of them as so annoying as to be avoided, if necessary, even at the risk of the gallows —but to call it deterrent or reformatory would in such cases be pure and open cant.
What Sir Robert Anderson has done is to convince a sufficiently large body of his countrymen both that these things are so, and that it is worse than ridiculous to continue acting as if they were not so. For there is no necessity to go on as we are doing, catching these dangerous creatures when we can, shutting them up for limited terms, and then turning them loose with the certainty that they will resume their depredations. The late head of the Criminal Investigation Department tells us that these professional criminals are all known to that Department, and all that he has asked is that that knowledge should be used in a rational fashion by the Courts, under the authority of Parliament, for the permanent disablement of the enemies of society. In other words, he has proposed that wherever, not only by the repeated commission of crimes for which they have been prosecuted and convicted, but by the pursuit of a regularly predatory course of life, the character of which is perfectly familiar to the police, men have established their intention to live on society, they should on the next conviction be shut up for an indefinite time, and never let out again unless a respon- sible authority is satisfied that they are morally cured. A large amount of this proposed indefinite or permanent detention should be passed, in Sir Robert Anderson's view, not in penal servitude, but under much less rigorous conditions, in what he would call an asylum- prison. For the detention would not be society's revenge taken on the criminal for his persistent attempts to live at its expense, but a measure of self-preservation taken by society against what otherwise would be a constant danger. We believe that Sir Robert Anderson's conclusion as to the policy to be adopted in dealing with professional criminals has rightly commended itself to sober public opinion, so long as it is clearly understood that the authorities to whose charge such prisoners would be committed should have discretion to release any as to whose " cure " they were entirely satisfied. They would be fallible, no doubt, and here and there a mistaken release might take place with deplorable results, as happens from time to time in the case of patients dis- charged from lunatic asylums ; but it would revolt the public conscience to contemplate the absolute shutting of the door of earthly hope upon men who might con- ceivably, under specially judicious disciplinary influences, develop genuine aspirations after an honest and law- abiding life. We understand Sir Robert Anderson to recognise the necessity of security against the danger just referred to, and with that proviso we are prepared to give him our cordial support.
It is to be regretted that the Bill which the Home Secretary introduced at the end of last Session, though it is based upon apractical acknowledgment of the soundness of Sir Robert Anderson's case, involves no more than a halting compromise in the direction of the reform which he advocates. It would prescribe that, when a man who has been more than twice convicted on indictment is again convicted of an offence punishable with penal servitude, if it should appear to the Court that he has been " leading a persistently dishonest or criminal life," and that the public security requires his prolonged detention, that detention may take two forms. The first part must be under the ordinary rules of penal servitude, but the second may be in the Habitual Offender division. That prison department is governed by regulations drawn up by the Home Secretary under an Act passed in 1898, and it is clear that the conditions prevailing in it are less severe than those to be found in ordinary penal servi- tude. So far the Bill of last Session is all to the good ; but its phraseology appears to show that " life " or " indeterminate " sentences are not contemplated ; for it prescribes that in all cases a quarter, and in some a half, of the whole sentence, which is not to be less than seven years, shall be passed in penal servitude. This is a very lame and impotent—if for an English Government Depart- ment a characteristic—method of dealing with a question in which the existing practice is recognised as futile. No doubt, if a particular hardened criminal would only be shut up for three or five years in view of the particular crime of which he may be convicted, but is shut up, under a new law, for seven or fourteen years, because he is recognised as incorrigible, society gains in protection during the added years. But if such protective additions may rightly be made at all to a sentence passed for an individual offence, then surely the one reasonable course is to make the sentence a " life " one, subject always to the discretion of the responsible administrative authori- ties, who alone can judge as to the wisdom of remission. Sir Robert Anderson is perfectly right in pleading, as he does in the current number of the Nineteenth. Century, for such amendments of the Home Office draft Bill as will make it a really logical and effective treatment of the grave problem which it touches. The idea of any limitation, either by suggestion or inference, or by definite prescription, of sentences designed for the protection of society, and not for the vindictive punishment of crime, should be abandoned. If any qualifications are needed to satisfy the public conscience, they must be found in the reasonable mitigation of the conditions under which pro- tracted sentences are to be endured, and the provision of security for full and open inquiry into prisoners' careers before they are passed. So guarded, Parliament, in authorising the " life " or indeterminate detention of pro- fessional criminals, will be enacting an important social reform.
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