DISCUSSIONS ON CONVICT TREATMENT.
THE best that can be said of the Transportation and Penal Servitude Bill is, that it removes inconvenient distinctions between two classes of sentence substantially alike, and leaves the whole question as to the disposal of convicts and the renewal or final abandonment of transportation an open question, subject to the further tuition of Government on the plain facts of the case. No doubt exists as to the ultimate result, because the facts are so strong, so stubborn, and so notorious to large communities, that there can be neither defiance nor evasion of them. The only doubt is, how long the Government can protract its refusal to accept the facts, and to accommodate both its legislation and its ad minitstration to the peremptory necessity. We do not think that can be very long; but if anything could aid in prolonging that probationary state of the question, it would be such discussions as Mr. Charles Pearson has initiated in the City under the patronage of the Lord Mayor. We object to that style of discussion with the greatest respect for the persons who invited it, strong sympathy for the objects which they have in view, and sincere desire for their success. But we think they entirely mistake the arena, when they carry the discussion to miscellaneous public, meetings ; they mistake the appeal when they refer, even from the House of Commons, to an assemblage of persons convened by placard. It is impossible that the mob collected out of the streets could understand the subject upon which it has been systematically misled by the constituted authorities and by "the usual channels of information." The public has not only been unprepared, it has been misprepared ; and how can it suddenly, shuffle off its supposed experience of fads with which it has been furnished on authority, and its dogmatic conclusions, on the summary invitation of Mr. Charles Pearson and his little circle ? It might have been foreseen that enthusiasts of various kinds would intrude themselves with their well-meaning impertinence ; but when the subject of convictism and the proper custody of prisoners is mixed with Mr. Ernest Jones's expedient for cultivating the waste lands of England, or Mr. George uthshank s caricatures of "the Bottle, it descends from legislative debate to melodrama and farce ; and instead of being furthered by this kind of "freedom of discussion," it is kept back. Such discussion is the very thing to justify the respectable waiting policy of Sir George Grey. With regard to the ultimate result, the Executive Government cannot depart from the path in which it is reluctantly driven direct to the useful employment of convicts at home. Its own more intelligent subordinates are working the proper system, where they are permitted to do so ; and if men like Mr. Charles Pearson, Mr. M. D. Hill, and others, persevere in presenting the facts as they are presented in Mr. Hill's large and interesting volume on the Repression of Crime, which we notice in our review of new books, it is impossible that the official team should bolt out of the straight path. The faults which it wishes to commit are principally three : first, to continue the lazy system of keeping the prisoners in custody until they can be sent somewhere,— an idle substitute for setting them to work, employing them and improving them if possible ; secondly, the keeping up an ambiguity of sentence, by favour of which the penalty sometimes operates as a terror and sometimes as a reward, to the total confusion of moral influence on the prisoner's mind ; and thirdly, the founding of a new penal settlement, in some anti-Utopiawhen found. If the pioneers of prison-reform simply persevere in reiterating the facts and arguments, already becoming familiar to the publio, it will be impossible that the Executive Government should commit any one of these great offences.
With the progress of civilization crime is multiplying, especially that kind of crime which consists in frauds and offences against property; but public opinion is gradually becoming systematized on subjects of that same kind, from the effect of prompt and direct information. All classes now know better than they did how men are trained to commit offences by the example and positive tuition of their companions and predecessors ; they know through the "twopenny trash," what kind of fate attends them under different sentences ; the public is by degrees comparing the effect of one mode of treatment with another; and sooner or later—not much later—that same public will insist upon distinct sentences, which can be understood by the rude and perverted minds of the criminally-disposed. By degrees, therefore, but not by very slow degrees, we shall get rid of ambiguity of sentence; and even the present puny bill is some step toward& a simplification.
As to the employment of the prisoners, the subject has been thoroughly investigated by the Select Committee on .Transportation.; it is illustrated already in the Irish prisons ; and by degrees the official administrators in this country will be compelled to illustrate it here. Although Mr. Charles Pearson could hardly muster a meeting in the City, and could only obtain some few gentlemen to stand by him while other friends converted his discussion into a burlesque, the debate in the House of Commons has shown that men on both sides of the House who are conscious of some responsibility are gradually becoming informed and are learning to discriminate. The number of these persons is increasing, and with the increase of number the legislative force on the side of improvement is growing too great for the Executive to counteract it. We have, by innumerable experiments abroad and at home—in American, Spanish, German, and our own Irish prisons—tested the two great elements of truth in respect of prison-discipline. First, that simple incturoeration, or incarceration accompanied by useless penal labour, is injurious to prisoners and detrimental to the discipline of the prison. It converts those who are subject to it into more hardened oulprits—from bad men to something like fiends. Secondly, we have proved experimentally that useful employment operates advantageously to the discipline of the prison, keeps the worst men in the highest degree of control, improves an increasing proportion of the better men, and greatly lessens the cost. We find innumerable instances recorded in Mr. Hill's volume; we have restatements of these facts and official admission of them in the Transportation Report ; we hold in our hand the most recent evidence, in "the Third Annual Report of the Directors of the Convict Prisons in Ireland, for the year ended on the 31st December 1856." We shall probably refer to this volume again; but these, the latest official words on the subject, will clinch the asseveration which we have repeated here " Generally speaking, the industry of the convicts has been very satisfactory, especially of those in the intermediate stages at Smithfield and at Forts Camden and Carlisle. The record of industry being known to effect their progress in the advantages of classification, has been a constant stimulus, which we hope will become still more powerful with the mon now under sentence of penal servitude, when we are enabled to place before them some more tangible reward than is afforded by the mere increase of earnings consequent on their attaining higher classification."
A hope seems to lurk in the official mind, of the renewal of transportation, could the officials only discover the terra incognita which would accept it. But even before the Committee on the Hudson's Bay Company had been sitting, it had become notorious that a penal settlement in North America would be too dangerous for our relations with the British Colonies, which must be pre-. served in their allegiance, or with the Great Republic+, which must not be goaded into irreconoileable enmity. As to any part of Australia, the expedition to North Australia will have shown the way by which convicts would pass from the shores of the Indian Seas into New South Wales, a colony where their intrusion would be equivalent to rebellion. Victoria is as resolved. against renewal of transportation in any part of the Australian continent as New South Wales, or even as South Australia. Again, the very latest intelligence clinches all our information on this subject. In Victoria, positively violating "the constitution," they have been enforcing a local law which threw upon labouring emigrants from Western Australia the onus of proving that they were not convicts, before they were admitted. There is no fear that the Executive will be permitted to renew transportation until it shall have discovered. the New Atlantis. The discussion which would draw it into a proper course of legislation will lie in reproducing these facts. Even the Transportation Bill shows, in its compromising character, that the Home Office is not confident of its own position. Its principal supports, such as Lord Campbell and in some degree Lord Grey, are losing ground; while the promoters of the better system have established in the country, in Parliament, and in the Irish prisons, a firm position from which they may steadily advance.
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