CO885(2-3) — Page 411

36

of penal servitude differs from that of the county gaols. The prisoner is not taken out of his cell for labour on the tread-wheel or otherwise; he works within his cell and sees no one but the When the nine warders and the Chaplain.

months are past, the separate is followed by asso- ciated labour under certain penal and disciplinary restraints.

Such are the appliances of severity of which there is experience in this country and in France.

The question is, by what combinations they can be made to answer the purpose of abridging penal imprisonment and substituting protective, without a sacrifice of deterrent efficacy.

The strictly penal labour at the tread-wheel might perhaps be usefully combined by succes- sion, if not by alternation, with the nine months of solitude constituting the first step of penal servitude. This might be one combination.

Corporal punishment might afford another.

It

is sanctioned in this country in the ease of male offenders under 10 years of age by divers sections of the consolidation acts of 21 and 25 Vict., and in case of males of any age convicted of robbery with violence by the 26 and 27 Vict., cap. 41, as well as for offences committed in prison by the 28 and 29 Vict. cap. 120.

The 26 and 27 Viet,, cap. 44, following on the consolidated acts, like so many of the statutes preceding those acts and embodied in them, was a mere accident of the moment. There was a sudden access of robbery with violence in the

Question concerning corporal

punishment.

37

streets of Loudon in 1862-63 (in the form of garotting) and a Member of Parliament was garotted on his way home from the House of Commons. So this Act was passed in 1803, for flogging garotters. And the measure in which effect is given to it seems to be equally accidental. Some Judges include flogging in their sentences; others do not. "The Judicial Statistics" ought to show whether the Act has presumably and primai facie taken effect upon erime, and how far opera- tion has been given to it in one year or another, and how far there may have been an increase'or, decrease of crime presumably and primâ facié attributable to variations in the degree of operation given to it. I am not sure whether or not our Judicial Statistics" will show this; but even if all we can derive from them is a knowledge of the amount of robbery with violence proximately preceding the Act and proximately following it, the knowledge would not be without its value.

*

There is another question bearing upon cor- poral punishment which has been raised both in old times and recently.

B

It was alleged by Lord Coke that the fre- quency of a punishment makes it so familiar, as not to be feared;" and some witnesses before committees and writers and speakers, adverting to the lavish use of severe punishments sixty or a hundred years ago, and of flogging in the Army and Navy more recently, and the pre- valence of crime notwithstanding, have conceived

[254]

}

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

Reference --

TC.O.885

3 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

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