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The transfer of prisoners at Stave Cutters Island to Victoria Gaol, forming a Central penal establishment for all the Colonial Criminals.
In that Despatch I entered into details of the general system of what I may call the criminal administration of the Colony which appeared most applicable to its special and exceptional circumstances, though I was at the time only enabled to speak of the arrangements as "essentially experimental", but I am now entitled to describe them as eminently successful.
The total average number of prisoners maintained by the Colony, including several sentenced by the Military and others imprisoned by Sentence of the Shanghai Court and Consular Authority elsewhere, has for some time been rather under 300 than above it - a most remarkable decrease from the total to which the number of prisoners had risen in October 1865, a few months before my arrival here.
If, however, this decrease in the number of prisoners had arisen from some exceptional and partial cause, applicable only temporarily, as for example an indiscriminate release of prisoners - a most questionable and even unsound salutary principle - that decrease of nearly 45 per cent in the number of prisoners might be a positive detriment to the public interests.