and punishment of offenders is between two | tions was very great. Transportation was and three millions annually, while the amount likewise used very freely, and many thousands of mischief which their depredations inflict of the worst class of criminals were thus reupon the community has been estimated at moved from the country every year. Since eleven millions per year. the growing humanity of the age has, practically, confined death-punishment to the worst cases of murder, sentences have been constantly becoming more and more.lenient, and 'now they are frequently almost ludicrous in their, extreme mildness. Thus offences, such as violent street robberies, &c., which within memory of many persons now living were not only legally capital, but often actually visited with death, are dealt with summarily, and punished with a few months' imprisonment; and even where offenders are sent to the assizes, they frequently escape with trifling penalties. We fear that the audacious crimes perpetrated nightly in our streets must give foreigners but a low opinion of the civilisation of England; and if the evil were to be attributed to any deep seated cause-such as hostility to justice and sympathy with wrongdoing on the part of the people, or a callous disregard of public interests on the part of the Government—such a judgment could not be gainsaid. A perusal of the books enumerated at the head of this Article will satisfy any unprejudiced mind that the phenomenon is to be accounted for by neither of these causes, but is Ten years ago, the refusal of the penal setmainly attributable to the mistaken manage tlements to receive any more convicts placed ment of one of the Government departments. a great difficulty in the way of effectual seAll these works contain much valuable in- condary punishments. It is true that one formation, but one of them is particularly colony-Western Australia-took a different worthy of perusal-we mean the little bro- course. But that province contains only chure by the Four Yorkshire Justices. Owing 15,000 inhabitants, and cannot therefore abto the fact that for many years past the West sorb more than a very small proportion of Riding Gaol has had a twofold character- our criminals; and, considering how far incontaining as it does, not only the County ferior it is in natural resources to the other prisoners, but also several hundred Govern- Australian settlements, there is little likeliment convicts, the Visiting Justices have hood that it can ever take more than it does had peculiar opportunities of studying the at present; and even this colony now desystem of convict management in England-mands that it shall not receive the worst of opportunities of which their keen northern intellects have made the best use. Feeling strong dissatisfaction with the results obtained, and hearing rumours of a better state of things beyond St. George's Channel, these magistrates, in the autumn of last year, deputed four of their number, accompanied by Mr. Sheppard, the able governor of their prison, to proceed to Ireland and inquire into the matter. The result of this visit is the little book before us, which is certainly a model of its kind. For acute and intelligent investigation, clear and vivid statement of facts, able reasoning, and for-what one rarely finds in works of this nature-terse vigorous English, with occasionally a dash of sarcastic humour not unworthy of our best writers, we never saw its equal in a publication de circon stance. Before proceeding to discuss the convict system as it is, it will be well to consider briefly how it was brought into its present state. Formerly the criminal code of England was perhaps the severest that was to be found in any civilised nation; one hundred and sixty offences being punishable by death; and although it was only in a minority of cases that the extreme penalty was actually carried into effect, still the number of execu our convicts, but, on the contrary, that the selection shall be of the most hopeful class. In consequence of the accustomed outfall of our moral sewerage being thus closed up, we are compelled to discharge our criminals, when they have completed the term of their imprisonment, into our population at home. Now, a prisoner never stands still in gaol: if he does not improve while in confinement, he must become worse. But to turn an unreformed criminal loose on the community is as absurd as to set at large a wolf from the trap. It cannot be denied that our Executive Government was placed in a difficult position. Still, in company with the nation, it is open to this charge-that it did not heed the signs of strong discontent which the colonies had from time to time put forth, and that it made no preparation to meet the coming evil. This was the more inexcusable, as the practicability of dealing effectively with the mischief had been demonstrated. Howard, Elizabeth Fry, and one less known, yet inferior to neither of these admirable persons in zeal and self-sacrifice-Sarah Martin, the poor sempstress of Yarmouth-had laboured in the cause of reformation with a success which ought to have proved that this object was no philanthropic will-of-the-wisp. The present Archbishop of Dublin, in a pub lication which appeared so long ago as the year 1829, gave utterance to a profound and most important truth, namely, that prisoners ought not to be consigned to confinement for times certain, but should be sentenced to the performance of so much labour. Thus would they feel that they could never gratify their yearnings after liberty before the completion of their task, however long, whether by obstinacy or by indolence, they suffer the hour of release to be delayed. The most generally popular opinion was that transportation should be continued, either by sending the convicts to existing colonies willing to receive them, or by establishing new penal settlements for their reception; and at first sight this seemed a feasible. and desirable plan. The practice of removing our most dangerous characters to such a distance that very few of them ever returned, certainly had the effect of ridding this country of a great pest; and indeed to this it was "The great advantage,' he said, 'would be mainly owing that, notwithstanding the great that criminals whose habits probably had prefaults of our criminal management, a toleraviously been idle would thus be habituated, not ble degree of security had prevailed here. only to labour, but to form some agreeable asso-But when the matter came to be seriously ciation with the idea of labour. Every step a man took on the treadwheel, he would be walking out of prison. Every stroke of the spade would be cutting a passage for restoration to society.' examined, the apparent feasibility of the scheme vanished. With regard to existing settlements, none could be found willing to receive convicts. And as to purely penal colonies, the experience of those which had existed--as Port Arthur, Norfolk Island, and indeed New South Wales itself in its early days before free emigrants had begun to settle there was not of a character to encourage a repetition of the experiment. It may be answered that, if properly governed, these places might have been as free from tyranny and vice as any penitentiary at home; that it is not fair to argue from the abuse, against the use of an institution. But, as an eminent philosopher has remarked, the abuse of a thing is as much a consequence of it as the use, and must be equally taken into account in estimating the desirableness of the thing. Now the fact that purely penal settlements are necessarily at a distance from all persons except the prisoners and the officers that Captain Maconochie saw that, to the minds of convicts, even the prospect of liberation, while very distant, was insufficient as a stimulus; some power of obtaining immediate gratification and some fear of immediate loss must be added, which, while increasing the force of the inducement to do well, would train the prisoner to habits of self-government. He therefore proposed to charge against the convict the expense of his maintenance, allowing him out of his gains to increase his comforts, but keeping a strict account against him, and showing him from time to time how self-denial would accelerate his restoration to freedom. Again, out of the fund supplied by his gains, the prisoner would pay his fines for misconduct in prison. Although the views of Archbishop Whately and Cap-guard them, must ever prevent these estatain Maconochie were never adopted in their entirety even by way of experiment, yet they had no slight influence on the public mind. For a very long time previous to 1853, when the colonies closed their doors, it had been the practice of England and Scotland (in Ireland a different course was taken) to send out of the country those only who were sentenced to be transported for ten years and upwards. This left the larger portion of the convicts at home, to be detained in the hulks and other convict prisons, and liberated here when they had undergone imprisonment for half the periods for which they had been respectively sentenced to be transported. The reason for this early liberation was, that confinement in a convict establishment at home was, time for time, a severer punishment than transportation. Still, for several years past about three thousand convicts annually had been actually sent to the colonies; and as Western Australia could only receive about five hundred per year, the question arose,how were the remainder to be disposed of? blishments from coming under the influence of that healthy public opinion which all experience proves to be essential to the permanent success of any institution. Thus, at Norfolk Island, under the humane (though not perhaps invariably judicious) management of Captain Maconochie, the administration was for a time greatly ameliorated; but on the removal of that gentleman from the governorship, the old barbarity was restored in all its hideousness, and continued unmitigated until the abolition of the settlement. Indeed, at the best, a purely penal colony can be but a huge and very costly prison, and must ever lack the element which alone makes transportation valuable as a permanent means of disposing of criminals, viz., the opportunity for their absorption into the ranks of honest and industrious citizens. In a colony containing a numerous free population and yet having a brisk demand for labour, convicts who are disposed to amend their lives have a very fair chance. There is nothing to prevent their becoming useful and prosperous citizens; and this actually occurred with a large proportion of those formerly sent to Australia. Had the transported criminals been subjected to a wellconsidered reformatory discipline in this country before the voyage, and a judicious supervision after landing in the settlements, and had only those been sent out of whose amendment there was some hope, the colonies might have long continued willing to receive our malefactors. But the manner in which prisoners were for years poured into Van Diemen's Land without these precautions, and, what was worse, after they had passed a preliminary stage among the abominations of Norfolk Island, has produced so strong a feeling in the colonial mind against transportation in any form, that there is little hope that the public opinion of the provinces. will ever permit the system, to be restored, even if the changed circumstances of the Australian settlements, consequent on the discovery of the gold mines, had not made these countries, in the eyes of the classes from which convicts are chiefly drawn, an elysium rather than a purgatory. We think, therefore, that the Government could not be blamed when it determined (except on a small scale to Western Australia) to discontinue transportation.* Seeing that the sentence had become a farce, since it could be so seldom carried into effect, and rightly considering that it was desirable to remove the anomaly, the Ministry, in 1853, brought a Bill into Parliament to substitute sentences of penal servitude for those of transportation, except where the transportation was for periods of fourteen years and upwards; and as it had been long the practice, for the reason already stated, to release the convicts who were left at home at the expiration of half their periods, the Bill proposed a similar reduction in the terms of penal servitude. Thus offences hitherto punishable by transportation for seven or ten years were to be visited with penal servitude for four or six years, and so on. But the Administration did not seem to appreciate the necessity of establishing a new system of treatment for prisoners, such as might diminish the evils which were likely to ensue when criminals of all classes were to be discharged at home. Lord Campbell, Earl Grey, and other speakers (including even Lord Cranworth, who had charge of the Bill), strongly expressed their regret at the necessity for abolishing Prisoners, it is true, were still sent to Bermu da and Gibraltar; but as these men are all brought back and discharged in the United Kingdom, for our present purpose they may be looked upon as among those detained in this country. transportation, and their fears for the consequences of the measure to public security here. But no important suggestion for the improvement of the measure was made until Earl Grey proposed the introduction into this country of the system of conditional discharge-popularly called the ticket-of-leave system'-as administered in the penal settlements; to which his attention had been drawn when Colonial Secretary. He said that it had been found of the greatest advantage that convicts should not be discharged at once from a state of punishment to unrestricted liberty, and that consequently they had been placed in a modified state of freedom by means of what were called 'tickets of leave.' For bad conduct those documents could be at once withdrawn. The Ministry adopted this suggestion, and altered the Bill so as to carry it into effect; but they refused to sanction the very essential correlative alteration proposed by Earl Grey, and supported by Lord Brougham, that-as the reason for shortening the sentences was thus removed-the sentences of penal servitude should be made equal in duration to those for which they were substituted. And thus, as the Bill became law, offenders were to be condemned to penal servitude for terms not much longer than those during which the convicts retained at home had been theretofore actually kept in confinement; and these periods the Crown was empowered to diminish still further by means of conditional release. Prisoners already sentenced to transportation were also to be eligible for licences to be at large. It is quite clear, however, from the speeches delivered in Parliament while this Bill was in progress, that all parties contemplated that the ticket of leave would be a reality—that it would be confined to those prisoners who had shown signs of amendment, and certainly that it would not be granted indiscriminately to all convicts so soon as each should have undergone the minimum period of confinement required by the regulations of the Home Office, and that the convict,. when discharged, would be placed under such conditions, and subjected to such supervision, as would render it almost impossible for him to resume his old courses without the fact coming to the knowledge of the authorities, when the licence to be at large would be revoked, and the offender remitted to confinement, there to remain for the rest of his sentence, or at any rate until it was considered that he might be safely liberated. To meet the obvious danger that newly-released prisoners might be forced into crime by destitution, it was contemplated that employment in the harbours of refuge and The old system being at an end, the time was come when a new one ought to have been devised, suitable to the requirements of the age. The object of all criminal jurisprudence is the repression of crime; and the means whereby this object can be attained may be ranged under two heads, namely Deterring and Incapacitating the offender from again offending. Nearly all penalties combine more or less these two principles. The example of the punishment of an individual has a certain effect-greater or less, accorning to the idiosyncracy of those influenced-in deterring others from committing the crime for which they see the penalty inflicted; while on the other hand, there are few inflictions which have not the effect of incapacitating the sufferer from further offence for some time at least. The punishment of death makes it impossible for the offender to sin again, and therefore is a most perfeet incapacitation; but experience proves that it is impracticable to inflict it with any certainty except for the gravest crimes, which causes its deterrent effect to be weak. The experience of all systems of punishment where deterring alone is aimed at shows that a very large proportion of those punished relapse into crime,—indeed, that the effect of this principle of punishment, so far as regards the class of habitual criminals (ie., persons who gain the whole or the main portion of their livelihood by crime), is generally small; so that, to repress crime, we must rely mainly upon incapacitation. Still the other principle must not for a moment be lost sight of, since it acts with great vigour upon some-and very large-classes of persons. Now, except death, the only modes of incapacitating the prisoner from again offending are, first, keeping him in custody, which is physical incapacitation: and secondly, so reforming him that the desire to commit crime has left him; this may be termed moral incapacitation. A system of incapacitative discipline would be perfect, if it applied these two modes to every prisoner so far as either is necessary to produce the desired effect. For this object it would be requisite that every offender should be condemned to be kept in confinement until really reformed, however long a period that process might require. This would be a theoretically perfect system, but as is the case with most other theoretic perfections-there are great, perhaps insurmountable, obstacles to its complete adoption in the present state of society. The judges of the land deservedly stand high in public estimation; yet few Englishmen, we think, would consent to entrust them with the power of consigning a man to what might be life-long incarceration for a minor offence. And, however well our prison authorities—in whose hands the power of detention must be practically placed-might be selected, the objection to giving them this unlimited control over the liberty of their fellow-creatures would be even stronger, as they could not, like the judges, exercise it in open court. Fortunately, however, most of the practical benefits of the systein might be obtained by a modification of it to which no reasonable objection can be made, since it merely requires that judges should sentence offenders to periods of penal servitude not longer than the terms of transportation which were constantly being awarded within the last twenty or thirty years, and during which periods the Crown (.e. the colonial authorities) might keep the convicts in confinement. Certainly, officers of convict prisons in this country, acting under the eye of public opinion, may be safely entrusted with a power which was freely given to governors and officials of penal settlements at the Antipodes. Were offenders consigned to long terms of penal servitude, but with a power, as Captain Maconochie proposed, of working their way out of prison by dint of industry and good conduct at an earlier period-after which they should be still subject to supervision, and, in case of relapse into crime, to a return to prison, the object we have indicated might be effected. It would merely require a tolerable management of the convicts in and out of prison to ensure that during the periods of the sentences they could not be again offending; while the experience of Ireland, to which we shall hereafter advert, has proved that the great majority, even of the hardened habitual depredators, may be really reformed. Doubtlessly, there would be always a residue who would resist the ameliorative process, and who would consequently be refused conditional discharge; or if, by means of apparent reformation, any of them obtained it (which would rarely happen under a really well-considered and wellmanaged system), the supervision would enable them, on relapse, to be easily brought back before they had had the opportunity of doing much mischief. Thus, during the long periods for which they would be sentenced, | ter than mere passive good behaviour, such even these hopeless criminals would be inca- as can be obtained from nearly all prisoners pacitated from further offending, and when by means of the separate cell, and which discharged on the termination of their sen- many of the worst characters are cunning tences, being so few in number, they might enough to assume throughout their prison be easily watched, and, on the commission career. The safety of the community (and, of new offences, reapprehended and prose- indeed, the real interest of the man himself) cuted to conviction, when, of course, they demands further safeguards against relapse. would receive sentences of a length which Supervision was always considered indiswould keep them in confinement or under pensable even among the sparse population the supervision consequent on conditional dis-of Australia, and it ought certainly not to charge during the remainder of their lives. We consider, therefore, that the Act of 1853 was defective in the shortness of the sentences of penal servitude which it authorised; but otherwise it conferred upon the Secretary of State all powers necessary to introduce a really effective system of convict management. Let us now see what use was made of these powers. When the Act passed there were in the convict prisons a large number of men sentenced to transportation, to whom, under its provisions, conditional discharges might be granted. The Secretary of State, therefore, published a scale of the time which must be passed in confinement before the convicts should be eligible for liberation on tickets of leave. In the case of those who received the short sentences sanctioned by the Act, the Government refused to grant any conditional discharge; and this refusal caused so serious a rebellion in Portland Prison that the mutineers had to be charged with the bayonet by the military. To compensate the men for the loss of the expected privilege, beer and other additions to their already generous diet were made, and they were thus enconraged in tastes not likely to aid in keeping them from relapse when at liberty. Eventually the privilege was conceded, even to those who were at first denied it. have been neglected when the convict was to be discharged in the country which contains his old haunts and vicious connexions, and whose vast and wealthy cities afford him the means of concealment, and abound with temptations of all kinds. It has since been discovered-indeed stated in Parliament by the Secretary of State, Sir George Grey himself that none of these precautions were taken. As soon as each convict had been in prison for the minimum time required by the regulations, he received. his ticket of leave-unless, indeed, he had grossly misconducted himself in prison, and even then he was deprived of it but for a short time. Thus, it appears that, of the notorious Chatham mutineers, a large portion were deprived of their licences to be at large, for a month only beyond the earliest time at which they could have been granted, although many of the men were almost ripe for ticket of leave when the outbreak occurred! To suppose that men could possibly be fit to be at liberty within so short a time after having been concerned in the violent and disgraceful scenes of that mutiny, is out of the question. We can only, therefore, conclude that the Directors of Convict Prisons did not attempt to obtain the objects anticipated by Parlia ment, but simply (as Sir John Pakington had feared they would do) used the conditional discharge as a means of relieving their overcrowded prisons-a most short-sighted policy even for that end, since, when a criminal is Conditional discharge had received the sanction of Parliament expressly as a reward for good behaviour and a stimulant to inlet loose unreformed and without supervision, dustry and good conduct in the convict prisons and on the public works. One would therefore have expected the adoption of some species of discipline which would have the effect of enabling the prisoner to win his way ont of confinement, not by merely passing his time in such a manner as not to incur serious censure—avoiding the graver class of prison offences, and doing just as much work ('government stroke,' as the men call it) as would save him from being punished for idleness-but by hearty and energetic labour, and earnest attention to his school instruction, combined with really good behaviour. Conduct of this sort is far more to be relied on as a proof of real amendment of charac he soon returns, bringing with him several others whom he has trained and led into. crime; for it is well known to the police that the trainers and captains of gangs of thieves are usually discharged convicts. Sir George Grey informed the house in 1856 that there is an erroneous impression that a ticket of leave is a certificate of good character, and that those men only obtain it who can prove that they are reformed. There was never a more fallacious idea. is very desirable that the illusion should be dispelled that the holder of a ticket of leave is ascertained to be less likely to relapse into crime than any other discharged crimi nal.' It |