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I PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE ..

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

Reference

IC.O.88

ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

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No one will say so who is conversant with the evidence as to the very moderate amount of labour which can be enforced in a prison by mere disciplinary agencies, or by these in conjunction with the object of earning a ticket-of-leave not to be obtained till three-fourths of the sentence shall have been undergone, and in conjunction also with the quantulum of enjoyment of the fruits of industry now offered to the convict in the later In the convict, that stages of imprisonment.

is, the penal servitude, prisons of England, this moderate Inbour suffices to defray the cost of the convict to the State whilst in prison, and to provide a small sum of money payable to But there is a wide him on his release. margin between the productiveness of convict labour thus coerced or induced, and that of the free labour by which a man defrays not only his own cost but the cost of his family. If the prisoner be willing to work for freedom as other men do in freedom, it is no small amount of free- And if dom which he would be able to earn. whilst abroad upon leave of absence, he should find it practicable to obtain employment (which Though not probable is possible), the wages he earned would be a provision and ground of further leave in due season; and the criminal's case might be made to differ from what it is under the system which our Habitual Criminals' Bill of 1869 sought to establish chiefly in this,- that the one system assumes that he can find employment, sends him forth to find it, and sends

Costs of prime compared with

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him back to penal imprisonment when he fails to find it; whereas the other assumes that he can not find employment, sends him forth only for such a time as it is known that he can live honestly without finding it, and brings him back, not to penal, but merely to protective imprison- ment.

But even if the protective imprisonment, with costs of protective imprison its leaves of absence in its ultimate stage and its divers indulgencies in the previous stages, should

ment.

be found not to be fully provided for by the convict's industry and some cost should be incurred by the State, we have still to calculate and consider the cost of the present system,—— calculate the cost which in some sort can be calculated, and consider the cost which may fairly be said to be incalculable—the cost of watching the criminal and catching him; the cost of com- mitting him for trial; the cost of confinement before trial (when, presumed to be innocent till proved to be guilty, he is not to be put to work), the cost of trying him, and the cost of his earlier stages of imprisonment after conviction, when the law provides, most needfully and wisely, that his labour is to be strictly penal rather than productive. We have to count those costs and to consider, moreover, the cost to society of wayfarers knocked

on the head, or men, women, or children con- fronted by burglars in the dead of the night; the cost of the property plundered, with or without murder, or assault with intent to murder, or assault with grievous bodily harm; the cost of

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