CO885(2-3) — Page 407

G weeks

18 month

28

1854

1855

3 months

1857

2 months

1858

+ years

1838

months

1862

6 months again

1862

3 months

1863

6 year-

1863

With these previous convictions against him, Thomas Smith was committed in January 1869 to take his trial for twelve burglaries, then charged against him; a long sentence of penal servitude was to follow, and if he should live to be let loose upon society once more, his past. career renders it no more than reasonable to anticipate that, if not disabled by old age, he will at once plunge into more crime and incur renewed imprisonment. This man has not been condemned to imprisonment for life: his sentences have been hitherto for no very long terms; yet practically it is but a fraction of his life that hus not been passed in prison, and a large portion of the imprisonment has been under the severely penal conditions which are provided for short terms of imprisonment with hard labour and for the earlier stages of penal servitude. In reality the principal distinction between his imprison- ment and imprisonment for life is that sundry though brief opportunities have been afforded him of committing crimes no one knows how numerous (for the erines in which such men are

System of protective imprison- ment lends itself to modification and tentative beginnings.

29

detected are commonly a mere per-centage of those they commit) and to inflict injuries no one knows how dreadful on his victims. Would it not have been better, even for Thomas Smith himself, that his third sentence should have been for five years of penal imprisonment, followed by protective imprisonment for life? It may be that Thomas Smith would have felt imprisonment for life, however alleviated, an unpleasant and dreary state of existence. It may be also that some persons who felt, and will feel as long as they live, the effects of a bludgeon in the hands of Thomas Smith, wielded in the intervals in which he enjoyed his liberty, find their lives dreary and unpleasant too. The protective imprisonment for life would, at all events, have spared the unfortu- nate victims their sufferings, whilst it would have spared Thomas Smith much of what was severest in his.

It may be asked, Is the case of Thomas Smith common, or is it exceptional? Similar cases, as I have said, are frequent in the police reports and reports of criminal trials; but the question cannot be answered with confidence from any data to be found in the "Judicial Statistics" presented to Parliament, and it might be well if such returns were to be given as would show what proportion of the lives of criminals released from penal servitude after a second or third conviction is on an average passed in prison. Whatever the result might prove to be, the argument to be drawn from it by those to whom any such argu-

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C.O.885

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