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Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941
PAPERS RELATING TO
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53. On further inquiry I ascertained that the places where these old offenders were seen were not a hundred yards from the boundary of the Colony, and on sending for the gentleman who was acting as the head of our police force he assured me that the night robberies and the serious crimes that were causing alarm had been committed by branded men, some of whom had been flogged and deported more than once. Some of them had committed felonies half a dozen times. Others were well-known burglars. Others had been simply branded and deported as rogues and vagabonds, and thus rendered permanent outcasts.
54. Knowing the strong feeling that existed in certain quarters in favour of treating the Chinese with exceptional severity, I submitted the facts to the Legislative Council so as to elicit a full expression of their opinions on the subject before I made any suggestions to Her Majesty's Government. In September 1877, in laying certain returns and papers before the Council, I quoted the opinion of the late Lord Derby, who, when Secretary of State for the Colonies, in refusing to sanction an application from Hong Kong in 1845 for the branding of the Chinese, had said:-
"An indelible mark impressed on the cheek of a criminal, even if unattended by pain, is yet evidently objectionable, as fastening on the delinquent a stigma from which he could never be rescued by any future course of good conduct; it would consign him to permanent infamy, and would finally obstruct his return to virtue and his admission into reputable society."
55. The returns and papers I printed for the information of the Council showed but too clearly the soundness of Lord Derby's judgment, and the inconvenient consequences of turning out batches of criminals with indelible marks that tended to consign them to a life of permanent shame, and by an Act of the State to render their reformation difficult and sometimes impossible.
56. As to the alleged economy of the system, I found that some of these branded, flogged, and repeatedly deported criminals had by their night raids on the Colony destroyed property in a few months to a greater amount than the whole cost of their maintenance in gaol would have been in 10 years, had they been kept in prison under the rational system established by Sir Hercules Robinson and Mr. Cardwell.
57. Furthermore, I ascertained beyond all doubt that the negation of prison discipline, the excessive use of the lash, and the illegal punishments that had become mixed up with this system, had created and fostered a criminal class in the Colony and the neighbourhood, instead of diminishing the number of criminals. In short, a system devised for the suppression of crime had increased crime.
58. Before, however, venturing to deal with what seemed to be some blemishes in the penal legislation of Hong Kong, I was able to make some changes in the Hong Kong Prison. As a temporary measure, until a new prison or a new site could be built, I ordered some of the large associated wards to be converted