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other hand, there must be a large amount of waste, for those who have more than they require cannot give the surplus to their neighbours, and with cellular catering it cannot be avoided. On one question,-that of the evils of association in convict prisons without a more highly developed system of classification-convict-authors agree. At present the line is drawn between men undergoing their first term of imprisonment and the remainder; and considering that a sentence of penal servitude is never awarded for a first offence, except in cases of grave crimes of passion or of serious fraud by one in a position of trust, the latter by men of education and with family ties which will probably prevent their being drawn into the vortex of crime, we can appreciate W. B. N.'s point, when he suggests that association among themselves by men of this class is not likely to be materially injurious. But as to the others, looking at the question from the broad point of view of worldly experience, no one can doubt that the standard of the community will be formed on the lines of the strongest personality. In a community composed of men whose power of resist ance to temptation was not strong enough to restrain them from a first lapse, whose moral strength has necessarily grown weaker with each succeeding fall, there cannot be one whose influence for good is sufficiently potent to sway his his companions. Given, then, an atmosphere of evil, it may be assumed that the personality of the man who has had most success in crime, or most experience of prisons, or is the most daring in defiance of authority, will set the tone. Under such conditions, we must take it that, except in the case of those segregated as first offenders, a convict prison is more

punitive than reformative. That is the worst that can be fairly said; but in his criticisms of the system the man who has spent twenty-five years in seventeen prisons is not quite logical. "So long," he writes, "as the present gang system obtains, a force is at work which can produce but one result, viz., the manufacture of criminals. Every working party in every prison in the country is an incubator, and produces through the infallible law of cause and effect, a daily brood of criminal chickens.” The point of this passage turns upon the words manufacture and incubator; but a manufactory deals with raw material, and an incubator with a form of life which has not yet taken shape. If the recruits who join the gangs of convict prisons were made of the raw material of innocence, or were filled with the negative virtues and the interesting possibilities of an egg, the metaphor would be absolutely true. It must be remembered, however, that the manufacturing and hatching processes have been consummated outside the prison, that the manufactory and the incubator are to be found in those conditions of life enumerated at the commencement of this article as working towards crime; the results of which only reach the prison when they have drifted through the preventive and reformatory agencies set up to save them. It is not fair to say that the prison manufactures criminals; on the other hand, statistics of reconvictions show that it does not reform them; therefore, say the convict and the unphilosophical observer, the prison is a failure. The student of criminology, however, must take a broader view. The reason for the existence of capital punishment is the hope that it may deter others from committing murder. Similarly, the only reason for the imprisonment of a man, whose cure

will not probably be effected by it, is the certainty that if he went unpunished others would be more likely to follow in his footsteps, to their own condemnation and to the undoing of the community. Some form of punishment must be kept in hand for the deterrence of those who are not amenable to social laws, and civilisation has hitherto failed to evolve anything better than deprivation of liberty under penal conditions.

What form those conditions take in this country is the feature in prison literature which interests the general public, for a knowledge of the existing state of things is necessary before improvements can be considered. To attain such knowledge a perusal of these books will be found useful; though, as has been said before, the student of criminology will look mainly for side-lights on the varying criminal individualities, and to the views which the writers express on the results of prison treatment upon themselves and others. But when we come to examine criticisms and recommendations, taking first him of the twenty-five years' experience, the results are disappointing. He suggests that the "commercial element in the employment of convict labour " should be eliminated, for to this he attributes the "promiscuous association," being apparently under the impression that it is with a view to making prisons self-supporting that such association exists. If this be the idea of the Home Office, it cannot be congratulated on success, for the estimates for the Department are still considerable, nor do they show any sign of annual decrease. It is generally supposed that the associated work in convict prisons was adopted as being more humane than the alternative of keeping a man in a cell by himself for a long term of years; while in the ordinary local prisons

the opposition of Trade Unions to the State-supported output of manufactures is said to make it exceedingly difficult to find profitable or even useful work for their inmates. The military element he also thinks too strong in prison administration. That is a moot point, but as he goes on to suggest more highly paid officials as an alternative, we fear that the economising spirit of the Treasury will bar a trial. Under another heading it is suggested that "an opportunity should be given to every person to start life afresh under favourable conditions." The Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society exists to ensure such chances to those willing to make use of them; but, it is suggested, County Councils should establish public workshops to meet this need, or, failing that, a larger sum of money should be handed over to prisoners on discharge than is now the rule. The efficacy of the latter does not strike one as being demonstrated, while, if local authorities are to set up public workshops, it should be in the interests, primarily, of those who have not yet fallen into paths of crime. Another suggestion is the institution of "mutual improvement" classes in convict prisons, and the author thinks that a "counteracting influence" to the vicious agencies" would be so produced. If worked by carefully selected instructors from outside, such an institution might have good results; but the "mutual" idea, for reasons stated previously by this writer himself, would tend to vice rather than to reformation. That a free interview with a parent, a wife, or a child would produce a "wonderful effect upon most men," and that the encouragement of instrumental music in prisons would operate powerfully as a reforming agency, are the two final suggestions.

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It has been said that the view of

the convict is narrow; and if these six suggestions embody the experiences of twenty-five years, we are justified in our conclusion. W. B. N. suggests improvements in food, more especially in the matter of vegetables, and an extension of the privileges of talking and of earning remission amongst the less hardened, and then devotes himself to the inequalities of sentences. The first two are worth consideration; the third, by far the most important, lands us at the door of a very serious and insurmountable problem. The fact is that in the administration of criminal law the only factor that is constant is the prison. There nothing is left to chance; neither sentimentality nor passion can alter the course of events, for the nature of imprisonment is laid down by statute, and its details are filled in by orders of the Secretary of State amplified by instructions from the Prisons Board. The once convicted criminal thus knows what form his punishment will take, if he is caught and convicted; but his capture will depend very largely on the intelligence of the police and his own cunning, both varying factors. If caught, the skill of his advocate and the dulness or sympathy of a jury may ward off conviction; and if convicted, his sentence may be for any term, from one day to a long period of penal servitude, depending, in part, upon the gravity of his offence, and, in part, upon the temperament and prejudices of the presiding judge. As W. B. N. points out, and illustrates, this last factor introduces an enormous element of chance; but until all men's minds are equally balanced, -when judges would become unnecessary or until a fixed ratio of punishment is laid down for every variety of offence, this uncertainty must exist. And the adoption of the latter system would probably lead to more hardship

to

than does the present one, for it would be obviously impossible provide for circumstances which are never the same in any two cases.

Two chapters of PENAL SERVITUDE are devoted to criticising certain articles in the London daily journals and some papers contributed by Mr. George Griffith to PEARSON'S MAGAZINE. The latter have recently been republished in book form, with a number of other articles descriptive of prisons by the same writer. W. B. N. comments severely on the mention of his own and other names by one or other of these journalists; and the fact that any individual, while behind the barrier, should be brought before the public in а descriptive article on a prison, is certainly in questionable taste. The differences between the author of PENAL SERVITUDE and Mr. Griffith are, however, principally concerned with details, on which the former, as an inhabitant of Parkhurst Prison for several years, is more likely to be accurate than the casual visitor. The statement of the latter that his articles were "passed as correct" by both the governor of the establishment in question and by the Prison Commission is hardly satisfying; for it appears to the outsider that the, duties of these authorities would be completed when they had satisfied themselves that there was nothing in the articles subversive of discipline or detrimental to the public interest. This little passage of arms between the writer from inside the prison and the looker-on from without is only alluded to here to assist us in judging of the value of the point of view of the latter. The descriptions of the places visited, as well as the illustrations in the book, appear to be full and detailed, but in reading SIDELIGHTS ON CONVICT LIFE one does not feel that one has got any further,

either in the unravelling of the problems of penology, or in acquaintance with the convict from the psychological standpoint.

Of a more weighty calibre were the series of articles published in THE DAILY MAIL last October. Though the writer, seemingly, started on his task with little knowledge of the subject, he was evidently equipped with a keen power of observation, and perhaps had facilities denied to less fortunate journalists. Certainly his articles, whether descriptive of prisons or descriptive of their work and results, leave the reader with a feeling that he has learned something, and with an appetite for more. Here, again, we have an instance of the observations of the onlooker being checked by a critic from inside, for this series of papers was followed by two articles written by an ex-convict of superior intelligence and with some gifts of composition. Unfortunately for the enquirer, his articles are marred by a personal bitterness which makes one distrust his fairness as a critic; and he falls into the same error that we have noticed on a previous page, namely, previous page, namely, basing his argument against the prison system on the fallacy that good men are made evil by its influence. The fact being that the elimination of first offenders from the sphere of habitual criminals is a safeguard against the propaganda of crime which is so sedulously insisted upon by the ex-convict.

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AND REFORMATION by an American (Dr. F. H. Wines) and Mr. Havelock Ellis's THE CRIMINAL. Of this more serious form of prison literature, the student will find Dr. Wines's book the most comprehensive guide to the knowledge of criminological matters yet published. In this article, however, it was intended to deal with the literature of the prison rather than of penology, and these books are only mentioned for the guidance of anyone who may desire to pursue the subject from the concrete to the abstract. On the other hand, having dealt with the point of view of the prisoner and of the outside observer, it is but fair to glance at the official view as set forth in the Annual Report of the Commissioners of Prisons. A bluebook is not the most attractive form of reading, and this particular volume with its statistics and returns, its reports by governors, chaplains and medical officers, containing none of those exciting tales which adorn the pages of an ex-convict's book, would not appeal to the general public. There are, nevertheless, in the Report passages full of hopefulness and pointing towards progress. It has been suggested more than once in this paper that the prison, as a punitive instrument, is the last resort of civilisation in its war against crime, and no one will deny that the less punishment there is, commensurate with the public safety, the better. It is, then, more than satisfactory to see endeavours being made to reduce the punishment of the prison at both ends of the scale, substituting for it, in the case of the class called juvenile adults, a reformative treatment; and for the hopelessly irreclaimable, putting forth a scheme, the details of which are not more than hinted at, under which these people shall be restrained from depredations on society under conditions, irksome no doubt, but not

punitive. These two schemes, of for dealing with crime; on the one

which the former is in its infancy and the latter but foreshadowed, will, as they develope, narrow the field of punishment on both sides.

We may count upon the new treatment of these youths as yet another obstacle that the young criminal must pass before his downward career lands him in a state of habitual criminality. Already, we learn from the Report, steps are to be taken to multiply these establishments, by allocating a a part of certain prisons in different parts of the country to the reception of juvenile adults. So far Borstal has been the scene of the experiment in the case of youths committed to terms of imprisonment, and Dartmoor in the case of those sent to penal servitude; and the officials in charge of both these establishments speak hopefully of success.

The Prison Board is to be congratulated on their two new schemes

hand, a purgatory in which the criminally-inclined youth may be purified, as well as punished, and so have a chance of social salvation; and on the other, a limbo for the detention of habitual and professional organisers of crime, on whom experience has shown that punishment has no effect, but whose seclusion is necessary as a safeguard to the community at large, and as a means of preventing contamination. When these two developments have become mature, and if means of carrying out a stricter classification of the criminals who belong to neither of these categories can be arrived at, the convict-writer of the future will no longer be able to allege, as he so often does now, in excuse for his criminality, that his evil propensities have been increased by contact with others worse than himself under the roof of a prison.

CRIMINOLOGIST.

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