Main features of plan.
Test of reformation
Seclusion
Labour.
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same manner, and according to the same rule -the judge admeasuring his sentence rather to the proved character and antecedents of the prisoner, than to the individual specimen of these furnished by the charge in the indictment. To the very heinous, the notoriously incorrigible, the judge should award detention for life. To those convicted of crimes of violence and brutality, he should award, where he sees fit, a given number of lashes, in addition to their other sentence. To all others, without excep- tion,, he should award a sentence in three divisions, varying merely in extent and in amount-seclusion, atonement, and provision.
And this brings us to the difficult question-on which, indeed, the whole matter must eventually hinge "How are we to ascertain when the convict is reclaimed and fit to be discharged? and who are to deter- mine his fitness or unfitness ?"
It must be avowed at once, that no infallible test can be discovered; the utmost acuteness and the longest experience will sometimes be at fault, and, under any system, some criminals will be liberated while their reformation is yet imperfect or superficial. Those who relapse after having undergone the ordeal we propose, should, in the majority of cases. be classed with the incorrigible, and be detained for life. But it is believed that with nine tenths of the number, the test, strictly applied, will be found reliable and sure. It must be in the main a self-acting one; it must depend as little as possible upon the fallible sagacity of Governor or Chaplain; and the onus probandi must be thrown upon the prisoner.
1. Every convicted offender, then, as well in the ordinary gaols as in the convict prisons under Government control, should be subjected to a period of strict seclusion, cut off from all intercourse with old associates; exposed to an entirely new set of influences, visited daily by the chaplain, school- master, governor and turnkey, but by no one else; seeing and speaking to none but those whose sentiments and interests are all on the side of law and virtue, as those of his former intimates were all set in the opposite direction. It would seem superfluous to insist upon this-to urge the entire and certain discomfiture and neutralization of all reforming and deterring influences where prisoners in gaol are allowed to herd together, are shut up at night, and have free intercourse by day, with a number of other offenders, thinking and talking of nothing but their criminal experiences -were it not that separation is still, in the majority of county gaols, the exception rather than the rule. It is utterly monstrous to expect any diminution of crime to arise from imprisonment as long as this self-evident and suicidal absurdity is suffered to continue.
The period of this seclusion should be not less than six months, nor more than twelve. Few regular criminals need less than the shorter, or can bear more than the longer, term. Between the two, the judge must decide according to such opinion as the evidence of the prisoner's character which comes before him will enable him to form. Probably, in the vast majority of cases, from nine months to a year would be found necessary to produce the requisite effect. This effect, according to the testimony of all who have watched it, is most powerful. It subdues and intenerates in a singular degree. The criminal propensities of the sequestered prisoner, fed by no fresh fuel, fall into atrophy or abeyance; solitude and reflection, and converse only with the good-an altogether novel and abnormal set of circumstances for him-develope feelings and notions incongruous and antagonistic to his past; and he comes out of his cell at the expigation of the period assigned a wholly different man; not reformed, but in a state favourable to reformation-weak, flexible, and impressible in the highest degree. Nothing, however, has yet been done, except in the way of preparation. The impressibility we have mentioned is the impressibility of almost childlike weakness: it is equal towards bad influences as towards good. With the latter it must now be our care to surround him : if we were to liberate him on issuing from this first stage, his relapse would be a matter of almost certainty,
[The remaining portion of the convict's sentence should be passed in labour. Of what description this labour should be, and how provided,
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there is no need to speak here. Handicrafts in prison, agricultural labour out of it, labour on useful public works, in fixed and moveable prisons, may all be resorted to, and we need apprehend no serious difficulties of practice in carrying out these plans. They belong, however, to the domain of executive experience.]
2. The prisoner, having now undergone the preparatory discipline Atonement. necessary to correct and in a degree wipe out the past, and make him ready for initiation into a different career, enters on the second stage of his sentence. He has now to make atonement for his former depredations on the community, and for the expense which he has entailed upon it in providing for his maintenance and detention. He must work out this atonement. He must be sentenced to discharge such labour as shall be assigned him, at such rate of wages as the State shall fix, till he has earned the sum which the judge, on passing sentence, shall have named. The reflection that he is working in a manner for himself, and to hasten the day of his liberation, will stimulate his efforts and render compara- tively easy and attractive those habits of incessant industry which else would have been difficult and irksome; while the element of hope will greatly facilitate the maintenance of discipline within the gaol.
3. But even after a prisoner shall have been subdued and softened by Provision on dis- seclusion, and taught skill and habits of industry by enforced but atoning charge. and encouraged toil, it would still, in most instances, be unsafe to discharge him without any provision for his future, or any precautions for assisting him to place his new-born virtue in favourable circumstances—in circum- stances at least where he will not be surrounded by more than ordinary temptations. It should, therefore, be a portion of his sentence that he should further earn, before he can be liberated, such a sum of money as will suffice to enable him to emigrate to other shores, or to start in resjfectable industry at home.
Now, if the sums designed for atonement and provision are fixed at a sufficiently high amount-and there is no conceivable motive for indiscri- minate lenience—-the criminal, by earning them, will have afforded the best possible presumption that he can be discharged with safety. It is scarcely possible that a man who has passed a year in entire seclusion from all evil influences and all old associations, who has, by steady industry for years, repaid to society a fair portion of the sums of which he had defrauded it, and who has further provided himself with a fund in hand which makes him almost a capitalist at home, or will carry him to new scenes and new prospects,-shall not have undergone both such a real change and such a salutary penance as will make him anxious and able to pursue an honest course thenceforth, unless exposed to trials of unusual severity. Il a fait ses épreuves: he has had no motive and no power to deceive the chaplain: the special representations of the chaplain and the governor as to bad conduct in gaol should be allowed a veto on his liberation, but no more.
Nor should the convict, when his term of sentence has expired—or, What to do with rather, when the conditions of his sentence have been fulfilled-be libe. the convict when rated simply, and without precaution. To do this would be to risk the discharged. undoing of what has been so laboriously effected. The prisoner has been sequestered from the world, and in leading-strings. for years; he is necessarily unlit, at once, to meet it alone and unassisted; and the new world into which he is issuing the honest one-is one of which, even formerly, he had small experience. In order to give him a good start much individual care and attention will be requisite.
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Were it possible, it would, no doubt, be desirable, that nearly all these Emigration. discharged and reformed criminals should emigrate at once. Nowhere, at home, can they find such hopeful openings for a new career; nowhere, at home, can they so surely and thoroughly get away from their unhappy antecedents. There may, however, be some difficulties in the way of the universal adoption of this resource. Government is pledged not to send any more convicts to our recalcitrant Colonies; and to send liberated, even if reformed. criminals, might be deemed an evasion of this pledge.
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