PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
miniwil
། ། ། ། །
C.O.885
Reference :-
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC.
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3 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
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punishable under our law by long terms of penal servitude, the great majority are of a class accus- tomed to take short views of life. At the present time, and probably at all times, the great majo- rity are habitual criminals, or at least men of had character and lawless life. Moreover, four is more or less even amongst the educated and thoughtful, but more and not less amongst the ignorant, the drunken and the dissolute,-a passion of short forecasts. It is so even amongst the ignorant and industrious. For a small additional wage artizans will engage in employments which are shown by our vital statistics, and must be well known to themselves, to be fatal to health and life in a few years. It may well, then, be a question for consideration whether our habitual and reckless criminals, in some of whom one can scarcely trace the human attribute of looking before and after, will deliberately and advisedly count and compute the difference between five years and ten and between ten years and twenty of penal ser- vitude, and estimate their respective values in the debtor and creditor reckoning of crime and punishment, so as to be deterred by the longer It may be a term and not by the shorter? question, indeed, whether the only real good effected by long terms of penal imprisonment be not in preventing the commission of more erimes by the person imprisoned, and whether this good might not be equally effected by short terms of severely penal imprisonment, to be followed by long terms of what i would call protective impri-
Protective imprisonment.
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sonment, this latter not to involve more suffering than discipline and economy shall render neces-
sary.
It should be divided, we will say, into three successive terms, of five years each, the first of which should be exempt from any rigours of dis- cipline not required for the maintenance of order and for pecuniary purposes, whilst each of the others should bring with them more and more of indulgence. During the first so much labour should be enforced as would provide the cost of the prisoner's subsistence on prison diet, such cost to be computed as for a diet regulated under the pro- visions of the Imperial Prisons Act, 1865 (28 and 29 Vict., c. 126, sec. 21). But after so much labour shall have been exacted as may be sufficient to pay for his prison diet and other costs of his con- finement, the prisoner should be at liberty to improve his diet, so far as food is concerned, by the fruits of any additional labour he may be disposed to employ for that purpose. In the second quinquennial term he should be privileged to provide himself, at his own cost, by additional industry, with tobacco and a duly limited quantity of spirituous or fermented liquors, and with harmless books, whether instructive or enter- taining, and with any other innoxious article · which may contribute to his comfort or enjoy- ment. In the third quinquennial term, he should enjoy, in addition to the privileges of the second, that of absence on leave within prescribed limits of time and place, and on prescribed conditions,