ART. II.-A MORTIFYING RETROSPECT.

1. Our Convicts. By Mary Carpenter. London: Longmans. 1864.

2. De l'Amelioration de la Loi Criminelle. Paris: Cope et Marchal.

1864.

3. Report of the Liverpool Police for the year 1864.

So m

years

10 much has been said and written within the last few on efforts for the diminution of crime and reformation of criminals, that it may be supposed we need no new work on this subject. But, however much may have been published, there is no book at present in existence holding the position to which 'Our Convicts' is justly entitled. It supplies a want long felt by the friends of reformation, namely, that of a popular exposition of the principles of reformatory treatment. The author points out who our convicts are, and the causes which have led them into crime; illustrating her arguments with very interesting narratives, derived sometimes from her own varied experience, but more generally from the reports of the late excellent chaplain of Preston Gaol, the Rev. John Clay, or from the newspapers.

The appearance of this book at the present juncture is extremely opportune, for while the discontinuance of transportation will compel us to retain our criminals at home, the new Penal Servitude Amendment Act, if its provisions be honestly enforced, will ensure their more rational treatment in our convict prisons. It is, therefore, highly expedient that the public should understand those principles of punishment which alone are able to effect true reformation.

The name of Mary Carpenter, on the title-page of this book, is ample guarantee for the value of its contents. The practical experience she has acquired by her long and unwearied labours in rescuing the perishing classes, gives peculiar weight to her opinions on the most efficacious method of reforming our criminals, the cause to which she has devoted her genius and her life.

The present volume (the first half of the whole work) is divided into six chapters, the two first showing who are our convicts and how they are made; the third, the principles on which they must be treated if we desire to reform them; the fourth and fifth describe their management under the English convict system (now, we trust, for ever passing away), both during their imprisonment and after their release on ticketof-leave; and the sixth is devoted to the subject of transporta

Short Imprisonments Useless.

311

tion. In the two first chapters Miss Carpenter shows that the hardened criminals, who fill our convict prisons, are almost entirely persons who have either fallen into crime through indulgence in profligate habits, especially that of drunkenness, or they are the unhappy beings who, either as orphans or as the offspring of careless or wicked parents, grow up amid ignorance and vice, and take to crime as their calling as naturally as the children of the respectable classes learn the trade or profession by which they intend to gain their livelihood. Penal servitude is a punishment awarded only, except in rare instances, to offenders who have been repeatedly convicted; therefore the great majority of those who incur that sentence have pursued a criminal career for a long time, occasionally, indeed, interrupted by a term of imprisonment more or less short, according to the character of the offence for which they are punished. Practice in their nefarious calling, while it gradually closes their hearts against every good influence, makes them both skilful and daring in their evil pursuits. Such are the wretched creatures who compose the mass of our convicts; coerced into external order during their incarceration; but, alas, returning to society unreformed, ready to recommence their vicious career, thus spreading misery and pollution over the land.

The short imprisonments, to which persons convicted of petty offences are so frequently subjected, form one of the principal preparatives for admission to the convict prison. Such punishment is useless whether inflicted on children or adults; all it can effect is to make its recipients lose their wholesome dread of a gaol, and to bring them acquainted with criminals older and more hardened than themselves. To boys and girls this treatment is especially pernicious; it affixes upon these helpless creatures the prison brand, thus depriving them of all power of obtaining honest employment on their release. Miss Carpenter cites the opinions of judges, magistrates, and governors of gaols, all persons of great experience, on the subject of punishment, to prove the utter inefficacy of short terms of imprisonment to deter young persons from crime. It seems incomprehensible that such arguments should still require enforcing ten years after the Reformatory Schools Act, and seven years after the Industrial Schools Act have become the law of the land. These two statutes provide for the care of all young persons under sixteen years of age brought before the magistrates. The first deals with those who are sufficiently demoralized to need the correction and training they can receive only in a reformatory school; the second with those who are guilty of

vagrancy

vagrancy or other light offences, only requiring the more lenient discipline of an industrial school. Nobody disputes the benefits these institutions have conferred on the commuuity, yet we frequently hear of children being committed to gaol. Indeed, Mr. Weatherhead, governor of Holloway Prison, stated before the Royal Commission in March, 1863, that there were at that time fifty-one young persons under seventeen years of age in his prison, only two of whom were there as a preparation for entering a reformatory-the reformatory to which he alluded being Parkhurst, in the Isle of Wight, which was then really nothing more than a Government prison for juvenile male offenders, since converted into a prison for female convicts.* Surely some change in the law is necessary which shall render it impossible to commit children to gaol, except as a preparative for entering a reformatory.

With respect to another mode of convict manufacture, Miss Carpenter says :—

Regarding it, then, as an acknowledged fact, that imprisonment of children is the surest way to raise for our country a large body of hardened convicts, and to ensure a continually recurring supply, what must we think of that system in our country which, while professedly established to relieve destitution, does its part towards converting the pauper into the criminal? Without attempting to discover how many of our convicts were reared and prepared for a life of vice in a workhouse, we can state that the system often adopted for juveniles in those establishments is such as must necessarily lead to their becoming convicts. It does so indirectly by the neglect of destitute children without their walls, and by the treatment of them very frequently when in the workhouse. We have already traced the history of the wretched convict D., and have seen him allowed to leave the workhouse to which he had been taken, without any effort to detain or reclaim him. We saw him afterwards apply for admission, when discharged from gaol, without a home, and softened by his solitary confinement; we saw him refused, and again driven to crime.'

Further on, in allusion to some workhouse lads committed to prison for refusing to work, the author says:

It is possible, indeed, that the gaol has nothing deterrent for these unhappy lads, and that they have intentionally made their way there to escape from the workhouse; for the chaplain of a gaol has told us of a lad who, when advised to go to the workhouse after his imprisonment here, replied, "that they should not keep him there, he would run away, as he preferred the prison, where he was better fed" and when on the point of leaving the gaol, when the same lad was asked what course he intended to take, he said, "I will beg to get work in the brick-croft during the summer, and come here in the winter."'

It seems incredible that workhouses, supported as they are at the public expense, should send forth those whose calling it is to prey upon society; but, alas, such is the disgraceful

*We do not receive favourable reports of the Middlesex Reformatories, the only ones in the country excluded from the inspection of the Rev. Sydney Turner. The London police magistrates may perhaps feel no confidence that these institutions possess the power of reforming juvenile offenders.

truth

truth. The managers of these institutions have complete power over the child-paupers, and yet they cannot succeed in bringing them up to be honest and industrious. It is a notorious fact, that a large proportion of young persons brought up in our unions return to them as paupers, or enter our gaols as criminals.

Miss Carpenter introduces several narratives to show the existence of schools directed by adepts in crime, in which boys and girls receive regular instruction in their nefarious calling; and, although these abominable establishments are more carefully watched by the police than they used to be, we fear they still exist in considerable numbers, both in London and in the larger provincial towns.

Immoral books, and penny theatres, in which obscene and disgusting plays are performed, afford another mode of successful training to crime.

The lads under seventeen years of age who, after robbing various persons in Hull last year, agreed to murder the driver of the cab in which they hoped to escape from justice, confessed that their imagination had been excited by the perusal of such works of fiction as the 'Life of Dick Turpin,' 'Jack Sheppard,'*Paul Clifford,' and others. Mr. Clay's reports furnish further evidence of the pernicious influence immoral books exert over the youthful mind. Low concert-rooms and penny theatres, technically termed 'penny gaffs,' have done much in demoralizing the young. We trust these abominations are not so numerous as they were when Mr. Clay wrote his twenty-seventh report; but no doubt they still exert their baleful influence. We hope the penny readings, now happily so common all over the country, will prove formidable rivals to the penny gaffs.

The last incentive to crime mentioned by Miss Carpenterdrunkenness is the most potent of agents for replenishing the convict prisons. The enormous evils resulting from an indulgence in this vice must be familiar to the readers of 'Meliora,' and we need not further discuss this portion of the subject, but will pass on to the chapter devoted to the principles on which criminals should be treated after they have entered the convict prison.

'We have,' says the author, traced the course by which convicts have arrived at their present very degraded and dangerous state. Though in some cases a succession of unfortunate circumstances, over which society had no direct control, may have carried on the unhappy victim from one step to another, each plunging him deeper and deeper in an abyss of crime, from which he was unable to extricate himself, and for which society could not be held directly responsible, yet even in these cases we must have perceived that the prevalence of a more Christian spirit

* Reformatory and Refuge Journal,' January, 1864.

in society, of a stronger moral repugnance to evil, of a greater readiness to help the weak, may have arrested the criminal in an earlier stage of his career. But, in the great bulk of the instances adduced, young persons have become gradually hardened in guilt through causes over which they had no control, and for which society is directly responsible. The practice still continues of sending children to prison, though for so long a time it has been declared by the highest authorities worse than useless, and though the existence of schools authorized by the Government renders this incarceration unnecessary. The workhouses do not yet provide a true home for destitute children, who find themselves better cared for in the hands of justice than in the keeping of those misnamed their guardians. Dens of infamy are still tolerated in our cities, to give to our young children that schooling to vice which no one gives them to lead them in the right way. The uncertainty of punishment, the glaring defects still existing in our criminal law, allure by impunity or slight punishment to repetition of crime. Society is responsible for all this, and therefore is bound to remedy as far as possible the evils arising from these various abuses. It is, then, our solemn duty, both as members of society and as professing Christians, to endeavour to bring these people to a sense of their responsibility to God and to man, and of their own immortal destiny.'

Reformers have often been stigmatized as persons who would treat the law-breakers more kindly than those who have suffered by their depredations. But in this they have been most unjustly accused; their aim has always been the diminution of crime, and they desire the reformation of the criminal, because they believe it to be the best means of attaining that end. And. in pursuing their desire, they have never endeavoured to shield a criminal from the suffering his sins have entailed upon him, because they believe that, rightly used, this suffering is the means of his amendment. It has only been of late years that reformation has had any part in the treatment of criminals; and even now it is only recognized by law with regard to penal servitude men. For the offenders confined in our county and borough gaols, who, we must remember, have not committed the repeated crimes which consign others to the convict prisons, the law recognizes no reformatory expedients. The efforts made towards their amendment have been, with rare exceptions, the work of benevolent officials, who have made the best arrangements in their power in spite of the numerous obstacles our prison code in its present state offers to their philanthropic efforts. Miss Carpenter adduces the successful labours of Colonel Montesinos, at Valencia; of Herr Obermaier, at Munich; and, lastly, the marvellous achievements of Captain Maconochie, in Norfolk Island; to show that, wherever reformatory principles have been acted upon, their success has been most encouraging. As the labours of Colonel Montesinos are but little known in England, and as the books in which they are described are not now easily to be met with, we venture to quote the short account of what he effected, which Miss Carpenter takes from the Recorder of Birmingham's book on the Repression of Crime,* to which we shall also add the Colonel's * 'Suggestions for the Repression of Crime.' M. D. Hill. Parker: London. 1857.

Own