MR. BRUCE'S FIRST BILL.
MR. BRUCE'S Bill for the prevention of crime—for though. introduced in the Peers by Lord Kimberley, it is• Mr. Bruce's bill—is a very efficient and yet very moderate measure. The Home Secretary has entirely avoided the rock upon which so many feared that he was going to split, the subjection of unconvicted persons of presumably criminal habits to police surveillance. A hatred of thecriminal class is slowly growing in England—a symptom. also strongly manifested in the United States—and a good many things may be done, and a good many will be done, to repress them which twenty years ago would have produced a violent outcry, but the surveillance of the unconvicted is not among the changes sanctioned by opinion. If the police could be implicitly trusted not to oppress, and all men living on criminal gains were amenable to the law, it might be possible to depart so far from the first principles of our social system ; but the public is not prepared to invest policemen with semi-judicial power over an indefinable class which that very police hates, and has reason to hate, with a deadly hatred. Not to mention still more serious objections, arising from the condition of a society in which a child may be so bred to crime that its moral responsibility is scarcely provable, no such law would work in England for a year. It would break down under the odium produced by half-a-dozen• sensational cases of oppression, and the task of protecfinssociety would become more difficult than ever, from increased distrust of the Police. Mr. Bruce, therefore, wisely leaves the untried alone, and does not attempt by over-strict supervision to diminish the desire which the " rough or undeveloped criminal still feels to keep outside the grasp of the law. The greatest ruffian in London, if he has committed no crime, remains under this Bill asfree as ever he was, and retains his chance of finding an endurable place within the social system. Even for a first offence, if committed against ordinary citizens, he is not visited more heavily than he has always been—rather, we confess, to our regret, as violent assaults on the laity might just as well have received an additional punishment as violent assaults on the police. The receivers of stolen goods are attacked by the Bill, but not the men who to secure a Ibtea will maim a decent citizen for life. The Bill applies y to convicts under tickets of leave, that is, to men who legally still under sentence, and to whom any modicum of erty is a grace, and to those who have been twice convicted of felonies. The new restrictions imposed on the former imply, of course, no new principle, involving only rules of practice quite in accord with the convictions of society ; and it is to the twice convicted only, to the men who are either avowedly or presumably at war with society, that a new doctrine is applied. They are declared to be " suspect " in the eye of the law. The burden of proving their innocence is thrown on them and off society. The police can summon them at any time within seven years of the second conviction, on suspicion that they live by crime, and they must prove that they are living without crime, by labour or on acquired means, otherwise any magistrate before whom they are taken can summarily recommit them to prison, for one year, says the Act, but really for the whole period of liability, as they can be resummoned seven times over. For seven years the Habeas Corpus Act is suspended for them, and if they are thrice convicted, it is in addition suspended for life, with this modification, that to be imprisoned after the seven years have expired they must be found " lurking " for a dishonest purpose, and not be merely suspected of gaining a livelihood by crime. They are, in fact, treated like persons violently suspected in dangerous times of raising war against the State, which is precisely what they are doing, in an unusually dangerous way.
That the law will immensely increase the power of the police to deal with crime scarcely needs demonstration. It makes them at once the masters of the most daring and most dangerous criminals, the men who make crime a profession, who like its excitements, and who have the courage to face its risks. Such men have for the future no protection from the law, and may, where need exists, be mercilessly hunted down. For them, loitering about with the intention of committing crime is equivalent to crime, and their chance of escaping the law will practically be reduced to their power of leading a regular and a very quiet life. Policemen will no longer be compelled, as in a recent case, to watch men who they know are about to commit a burglary till they actually have committed it, nor will a convict get off because he has felled a policeman who tried to arrest him. The aristocracy of crime are deprived of the special privileges they have hitherto derived from their experience and their recklessness, and are reduced to a level below that of the beginners in the trade. The latter must be tried first, and may bamboozle a jury or intimidate a witness, and have at least a chance of exhibiting their firmness and their impudence before a full Court, while their superiors, whom they have hitherto respected, are convicted with as little eclat and trouble as if they had filched a pocket-handkerchief or robbed a hen-roost. That is a decided gain, if only because it makes a conviction an injury to caste, because it limits the privileges of crime in the eyes of criminals, and makes a conviction a drawback instead of a decoration in the regard of the profession. To have been caught out twice is to be at the mercy of the police, to lose a privilege which even convicts value. And we cannot see that this great advantage which, be it observed, is a moral as well as a social one, is obtained by any sacrifice of substantial justice or social expediency. The convict's power of obtaining work is not diminished by the new plan. On the contrary, it is increased, for the employer will now have the guarantee of the police and of the power vested in the police to punish grave misconduct. It has been found not only in Ireland, where the sympathy of the people is slightly against the law, but in Birmingham, where it is for the law, that men under strict surveillance find work more readily than men against whom there is only a vague suspicion ; and the system, if carefully administered, may turn out a real protection to convicts desirous of making one more effort to gain a living by honest industry. The grand defect not so mach of English law as of English manners,—the want of a complete pardon for the completely repentant,—will still exist, but it will exist in a less aggravated rather than in a more aggravated form. The single danger in the scheme, that a policeman may summon an ex-convict merely for being out of work, as the most honest man might be, can be avoided by instructions to the force, and we presume the receipt of pariah relief will be considered an honest or, at least, a legal mode of livelihood. Black mail might, indeed, possibly be levied from such men ; but so it might now, the right of aPPeariug before a magistrate being rather a new protection
March 6, 1869.]
than a new danger.—a security to the convict that his own story will be fully heard. Some risk of this kind must be incurred under any system, and it is better that it should be borne by the convict than by society,—better, in fact, that he should know that war with society means war by the weak against the strong, and not, as he is now tempted to think, by the strong against the weak.
The rest of the Bill is of less importance. We rather dislike the clause which enables magistrates to imprison any " vagrant " found lurking, even though no overt act is proved against him, but it will be welcomed in the villages, has, Lord Kimberley says, already been illegally carried out, and has proved successful, so successful that criminal tramps avoid the districts where magistrates put that interpretation on the law. Still, it will hit persons not necessarily criminal very heavily ; the gipsies, for instance, and it quadruples in their cases the penalty for petty larceny. Of course a gipsy has no business in an honest man's farmyard, but a year's imprisonment is a heavy penalty for the theft of a hen. And we utterly disapprove the new provision against the receivers of stolen goods, as calculated to make receiving a better trade than ever. Any man who has been imprisoned, if charged with receiving stolen goods, will be convicted unless he can prove that he knew they were not stolen, whereas at present the prosecutor must prove the guilty knowledge. There is no direct harm in that, as persons who have been imprisoned need not take to dealing in marine stores, but Lord Kimberley seems to imply that most of the receivers of stolen goods are convicts. That may be true, but what does society gain by throwing the whole trade into the hands of the unconvicted ? They will run rather less risk than their rivals as being less suspected, and can, therefore, offer rather better prices, to the increase, not the decrease, of the temptation to rob. For the rest, the Bill seems sound, and an incidental recommendation ventured by Lord Kimberley while introducing it deserves the careful attention of every reformer. We greatly want something between supervision and ordinary imprisonment, a plan of detention which shall be effective, yet not be absolutely penal,—a prison where good life prisoners might be sent as a reward, where men strongly recommended to mercy, yet guilty, might be transferred, and where, as we should advise, political prisoners should be detained. An industrial prison, managed like a great factory, except so far as strict obedience is concerned, would just answer that end, and ought, if properly linked into the official system, to cost nothing. Let the prisoners manufacture some one thing which the State wants at once good and cheap, and cannot get at once good and cheap,—say boots for the Army,—and let the penalties be moderate but constant toil, and perfect seclusion from the world, such as is maintained at Broadmoor. Such a prison would, for the majority of prisoners, be a relief from penal servitude, and would mitigate one great hardship, the fate of men whom Government and the prison authorities would gladly release as no longer dangerous to society, but who are detained lest their release should impair the deterrent effect of law, and would immensely facilitate the discipline of gaols, which cannot be maintained without hope.
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