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THE HONGKONG GOVERNMENT GAZETTE, 17TH NOVEMBER, 1877.
1871, 1,303; annual average from 1872 to 1876, 1,351; annual number of offences of all kinds during the five years from 1867 to 1871, 5,718 as against 7,124 offences of all kinds committed during the five years from 1872 to 1876. It is quite possible also, that those who have looked into the matter, may have noticed something else relating to prison discipline in this Colony, and that is the increase in the number of prison offences of late years. They are also recorded in our books and have been transmitted every year to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Taking them for the last three years, here is the result: 1874, 426; 1875, 1.085; 1876, 2,726. Such a startling increase in the number of prison offences--out of all proportion to the increase of crime--indicates something radically wrong. An annual increase of 250 per cent in the number of prison offences is a serious and significant fact. Is it surprising, with such prima facie evidence of prison disorganization laid before him in the returns forwarded by my predecessor for the years 1874, 1875, and 1876, that Lord CARNARVON should instruct me to review the whole system of prison discipline in Hongkong?
In the returns laid before Lord CARNARVON are also given the exact number of cases. brought before the Police Magistrates, and the number of prisoners convicted by them. You will perhaps be surprised to learn--as I was very much surprised to see it that the number of prisoners brought before the Police Magistrates in 1876 amounted to 10,426, and the number of persons convicted and punished amounted to 7,998. These figures appear in returns dated Colonial Secretary's Office, Hongkong, 24th of February, 1877.
Now, gentlemen, with some small experience, I venture to assert that such an amount of crime, and such an extraordinary growth of prison offences as you have seen recorded in this Colony last year and preceding years is without precedent in any part of the British Empire with a population of only 140,000.
How is this to be accounted for? The system of prison discipline is the system by which crime should be stamped out. It is the great engine the Government is bound to use to repress crime and reduce the number of criminals; joined, to efficiency in the administration of justice. With these two in proper working order, the crime which has been recorded before my arrival in the Colony should not have existed. How has the grave result come to pass? Well, I am myself slow to form a decision on this question, but it is manifest from the Secretary of State's despatches that he has been struck with some facts which it was impossible not to see. How could he shut his eyes to the authentic returns to which I have referred? But, it is quite possible, his Lordship may have noticed something more than those figures. In the report of the Gaol Committee, the guiding principle upon which the prison was administered is laid down in these words:- Owing to the peculiar circumstances of this Colony, and the fact that by far the larger proportion of the criminals confined in the gaol are Chinese, whose language is but little known to those who have charge of them, whose characters and dispositions are imperfectly understood, and of whose previous history and lives it is almost impossible to obtain any knowledge, any attempt to cultivate their higher faculties, and to improve their moral condition seems hopeless.
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Gentlemen, that was a very grave sentence for the Committee to write. In every part of British Empire Her Majesty's Government have laid down what they believe to be sound principles of prison discipline. Over and over again it has been said that that system should consist of a due mixture of severe punishment with some attempt at reformation; that the moment you assume one of these to be hopeless and act on that assumption, you deviate from a well established principle, and you are trying not a new, but a very old worn out experiment; an experiment tried years ago, but never with success; on the contrary, with the same lamentable result that you have seen here. departure from that sound and axiomatic principle of prison discipline, does not however entirely account for the extraordinary number and steady increase of criminal class.
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It is a rule laid down over and over again by Secretaries of State, that when a man is sentenced to undergo, for example, eight years of penal servitude, he should undergo at least two-thirds of that punishment; that release from gaol must depend upon a man's steady good conduct in prison, and under no circumstances should he be released without undergoing two-thirds of his sentence. what do I find here? In January last, no less than fifty prisoners are branded and deported to China from Hongkong, thirty-nine of them after having served one-third only of their legal sentences. Some were sentenced by my honourable and learned friend on the right (the Chief Justice) to eight years' penal servitude; others by my honourable friend on the left (the Hon. C. MAY) to three months' imprisonment. They are all treated in the same way; and this curious fact is recorded on the books—recorded in the very papers laid before the Executive that the prison conduct of one man is "very bad," according to the Superintendent's report, and the next man's "very good;" another prisoner's conduct is recorded as "indifferent," another as "well conducted;" some had been repeatedly punished for the worst class of prison offences, others had not a single bad record against them; yet all treated in the same way: with different sentences, but all sent out of the Colony after passing one-third of their sentence only in prison, quite irrespective of what their conduct in prison had been. That, I need hardly assure you, is opposed to all sound principles of prison discipline. Bad as its moral effect in the prison must have been, it did not prove of much benefit either to the honest community outside. This wholesale branding and deportation was avowedly done "to relieve the overcrowding in the prison." Of the two batches of criminals thus transferred to the neighbouring shores of China in January, some found their way back to commit robberies again in Hongkong before the month of April.
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