19.
PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
Reference
MC.O.
885
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PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- | COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO
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proprietors would not employ discharged con- victs as soon as that mode of resistance was once thoroughly established, would baffle the most determined measures, and reduce the Government to defeat.
What good could there be in filling a country with starving and unemployed men who had once been convicts ?
With these difficulties pressing upon them, the conclusions adopted by the Government in Decem- her 1852, were summed up as follows, in a paper prepared in this office at that time :-
1st. That transportation, so long as suitable out- lets can be commanded, is an excellent portion of any system of secondary punishment.
2nd. That all the Colonies, however, on the southern and eastern sides of Australia, have now, for different reasons, ceased to afford such an outlet. 3rd. That the formation of new Penal Settlements would not meet the real difficulty of the case.
4th. Tha Western Australia continues for the present to be eligible for the reception of convicts, but that it can by no means absorb the whole number who, in the existing state of the law, are annually sentenced to transportation.
5th. That, independently of these considerations connected with transportation, it is at all events a defect in the present state of the law, that there is no intervening sentence between two years' imprisonment and seven years' transportation.
6th. That the best course, therefore, is to provide for carrying into effect at home a larger number of sentences to long terms of imprisonment, and to substitute these for all sentences of transportation not exceeding fourteen years, and to abolish trans- portation altogether, except for crines involving sentences to more than fourteen years' punishment.
7th. That when these measures can be brought sufficiently into execution, transportation to Van Diemen's Land shall wholly cease, and Western Australia become the only place for the reception of transported offenders.
Transportation to Van Diemen's Land did accord- ingly cease with the year 1852, and the Penal Servitude Act was passed on the 20th of August, 1853.
Some statistical tables are appended.
Conclusions, therefore, which led the Government to give up the Punishment, and to substitute Penal Servitude.
Statistics,
P
•
this
BERMUDA AND GIBRALTAR.
Bermuda and Gibraltar have not been included in
paper because both in law and fact they are not places of transportation properly so called, but only
places for working convicts at hard labour, in like manner as our English convict prisons, or the English dockyards.
The number of prisoners at Bermuda is about 1,600, and at Gibraltar about 850.
T. F. E.