These tables elicit two remarks: 1st, That notwithstanding the great increase of commitments, the increase in the daily number in confinements is very small, showing that the periods of detention had been exceedingly short, 63 per cent. are ten days and under; 2nd. That the frequent recommitments show that imprisonment had neither deterred nor reformed, and had not accomplished either of its legitimate ends. It could hardly be supposed that it would, for imprisonments are often so short, that before the prisoner has had time to undergo the ordeal of weighing and washing, telling his age, place of birth, and usual place of residence, showing that he can hardly read or write, or state to what religious body he belongs, the period has expired, and he is turned again into the street. But, in attending to these often repeated matters, the governor is sometimes occupied two hours a day, to the neglect of more important duties, while the offices of teacher and chaplain are made little more than sinecures.

And, if no good has been done, has no evil been committed? Is it a slight thing to cause such flights of jail birds, impressed with the prison brand, so easily put on and so difficult to efface, which renders them so shameless or indifferent that they reckon imprisonment neither a punishment nor a disgrace? Now punishment which does not deter or reform, has always been considered worse than useless, yet the Aberdeen prison returns show that there it has produced neither result, and we may therefore ask why criminal legislation has been so liberally awarded to Scotland in general, and Aberdeen in particular. We probably should not inquire why Scotland has got a Public-house Act, which was not thought good enough to be given to England, but we may surely be permitted to ask why Aberdeen obtained a Police Act containing a number of criminal enactments which were not admitted into the general Act.

It is truly vexing to see individual efforts for the prevention of crime utterly paralysed by statutory enactments, which expose the poor children of Aberdeen to imprisonment for fourteen days for offences which, if committed elsewhere, would not be punished with imprisonment at all, but by detention in a place, not a lock-up or a common jail, for a period not exceeding ten hours.

It is hoped that such partial legislation will not be deemed unworthy the consideration of the Association, and the subject is brought before them in the confident expectation that an emphatic deliverance will be expressed that a general criminal statute for Scotland should be passed, and all local criminal acts immediately repealed.

Further, that criminal statistics, officially made up, shall exhibit the crimes or offences for which parties were committed, and not merely the number of individuals who have entered the prison. If such recommendations were given and carried out, crime would be much less frequent, at any rate it would be clearly seen whether it had increased or diminished.

CONVICT AND PRISON DISCIPLINE.

On the late Reports on Transportation and Penal Servitude: and on Prison Discipline. By the Right Hon. C. B. Adderley, M.P.

PROPOSE giving a short review of the Report of Lord Grey's Commission on transportation and penal servitude, with its counter memorandum by the Chief Justice, and of that of Lord Carnarvon's Committee on prison discipline.

All agree, and with no dissentient witness, that our secondary punishments have lost effect and even recognition. In earlier times punishments were arbitrary and severe; every criminal ran a great chance of being hung. Of late there has been a great change to leniency, but punishments are as faulty as ever in uncertainty. Fortunately few are hung, but unfortunately there is nothing else deserving the name of punishment; nor can any one read to the second page of the Commissioners' evidence without seeing the hopelessness of our attempting to understand what punishments are really threatened by our law, 12-17, 1590, 1659, 3623, 4215, 4241. Our penal code, like an African river, after one brief cataract, is lost in shifting sands, with no course traceable even to scientific eyes. We have arrived at a complete negation of first principles. No one knows or fears what he may become liable to by any crime. The object of the Reports I have to review is to suggest how secondary punishments may be made efficient.

We are now practically reduced to the one expedient of imprisonment, with its various combinations. We depend, says the first Report, on imprisonment with hard labour (p. 36). The adjunct of corporal chastisement has been nearly abandoned. Although of acknowledged efficiency, it is condemned as brutal. The truth is not seen that in moral as in physical surgery the most effectual treatment is the least brutal. Corporal chastisement is restricted to internal prison discipline, where it continues exhibiting the mercy of an appropriate remedy never requiring repetition.

Transportation also is given up as a penal treatment. It is at length recognised in these Reports as a boon to a criminal who has been stigmatised by punishment, and whose removal elsewhere is the interest alike of himself and of his country. As the Commissioners purpose to retain it, it is in no sense penal but post-penal treat

ment.

It is unfortunate that our last device for aggravated punishment, penal servitude, should have been introduced as a substitute for what proves to be of the nature of a boon. I have lately published a tract called "A Century of Experiments in Secondary Punishments," which might have been called "Variations of Transportation." It shows all the various phases through which transportation has personated punishment during one hundred years, and so infected with

uncertainty and inefficiency our whole penal code. Penal servitude, being confused with it, has become as terrorless. The Commissioners say that crimes have even been committed for the sole purpose of obtaining its supposed advantages. Penal servitude must itself be transported into the category of real punishment; and transportation brought clearly out of it into its true use, as new life to those who have lost caste at home.

From the problem how to make imprisonment in all its forms effective, we may eliminate much as now conceded by all.

It is agreed that it should be, in all its details, severer, and more uniform, more definite, and less at the discretion of judges. This is the substance of Lord Carnarvon's Report; and Lord Grey's refers with satisfaction to those features of the question having been referred to his inquiry, and expresses generally a similar view. Want of uniformity of system, say the Committee, has led to inequality, uncertainty, and inefficiency of punishment. The labour in prisons has not been properly penal, nor of so definite and known a meaning as it should be. Separation in prison is not yet universal, nor solitude occasionally utilised, capable as it is of being complete punishment for many cases in so short a space as from three to seven days. Diet might be made more penal yet wholesome; beds put on planks, and general regulations made more stringent by Act of Parliament. So say the Committee on prison discipline. Were it not that change is of the essence of the evil in hand, and fixity of the essence of its remedy, one would wish for a new nomenclature for our revised punishments, and to escape from that which has incurred contempt. As it is, we must suppose imprisonment and penal servitude made severer, more uniform and definite, and see how, so corrected, they may be most efficiently applied. Little discussion, in fact, remains, but whether the process, so corrected, should be prolonged and ordered in an educationary view, or shortened up to its briefest capacity for stopping crime, and warning the public. But in this discussion is involved the whole philosophy of punishment. The terms long and short are comparative; the shorter punishment need not be too short. The advocates of the educationary view take no less than the reformation of the criminal to be the undertaking of every punishment. Those who take the simpler view would limit the scope of punishment to deterring a criminal from the repetition of his act, and so far indeed, reforming him; and presenting a conspicuous example to the public. Six years ago I attempted the discussion of this question in a pamphlet entitled "Punishment is not Education," to which Mr. Recorder Hill replied. Since that time we have more completely disembarrassed the question of two difficulties which used to be in its way.

First, we have no longer weighing on our consciences a sense of great national neglect of the education of the poor, who must always furnish nine-tenths of the criminals against municipal law. Lord Russell once complained that education was withheld from the labouring classes until they got into prison, and so crime became the

preliminary condition of popular education. But now there is not a child in the country who may not have a good education, and those children who fall into crime from parental neglect, we send to reformatories or penal schools. We may, therefore, with good conscience, treat adult criminals as responsible for their crimes; and not feel bound, by way of making up a debt of education, to modify whatever may seem abstractedly to be the best punishment. The medicine of the nation's moral pharmacopoeia need no longer be its ordinary food, the stint of which is not the cause of ailment.

Secondly, we have no longer such defective prisons that we need fear our actual means of punishment. In former prisons, which were sinks of filth, disease, and every sort of corruption, the younger criminals became adepts, and the older more hardened. The exposure of this scandal drove us to an opposite extreme. To cure our prisons of being schools of vice, we sought to make them schools of virtue. Let us not recoil too far from this extreme, but settle on the middle truth, that, avoiding chimerical notions of punishment, we take care that all its influences should be salutary, while the subject of it is in our hands.

It is, then, a much simpler question now than formerly-How may imprisonment be made effective punishment for responsible criminals, in well-regulated prisons and public works? Is it possible to make it a means of reformation, or only of terror and example? The Commissioners base their report on the theory of reformation; that on every occasion of a crime being committed, the perpetrator should be subjected to ameliorating influences, and a long course of moral treatment, which may turn him out a renovated being. The Chief Justice in his counter-memorandum, and Lord Carnarvon's Committee, think this view speculative, and contemplate a more practicable scope for punishment.

Now, first, I observe, that the Commissioners weaken their argument by basing it on glaring assumptions. For example, they assume that the recent increase of crime must partly have arisen from the unprecedented number of convicts set at large on the expiration of the shorter sentences passed since 1857; pp. 23, 25, 80. For this preconception of their case they only adduce as evidence the general assertions of Sir Richard Mayne and Mr. Smith, that criminals when discharged become suspicious elements of society. Evidence which only implies the truism that there would be less crime, if criminals were not set at large at all.

Another assumption is that the acknowledged inefficiency of punishment must have arisen from its diminished terms; for which assertion there is no evidence, but only opinions that the present system of punishment requires longer time for its purpose. Both assumptions the Chief Justice disposes of by observing that there could be nothing special in the shorter sentences, either to increase the number of criminals, or to neutralize punishment; for a like accumulation of convicts, discharged after similar terms of detention, has been long going on, and the late particular increase of violence (p. 81) was not

likely to come from short-sentenced men; and long and short punishments have been alike followed by recommittals. He also remarks that the penal servitude, which is now too short, may be long enough if more rigorously carried out.

I next observe great inconsistencies in the Commissioners' Report. For instance, in order to make penal servitude reformatory they first desire labour to be made attractive, by its association with remission of punishment. But, soon after, fearing it might be thought that such labour would not be penal, they proceed to show that prison labour must be a dull unvarying routine of distasteful employment, adding that, though it may be less than free men do, yet it must under compulsion be much disliked. One despairs of a theory which embraces two such contradictory views, and requires the same thing to be both attractive and distasteful, by way of serving two purposes at once.

Again, why should it be wrong in England, as observed, p. 29, to give a criminal credit for good conduct on public works, but right in Western Australia? (p. 58). The anxiety for scientific reform of prisoners ceases with the possibility of transporting them. There is also this fundamental inconsistency in the Report, that a sharp deterrent character is recommended for separate imprisonment (p. 41) whether as a first stage of penal servitude, or in ordinary prisons; but the second process of penal servitude, the associated labour, by which addition it is distinguished as an aggravation of punishment, is only to have fear attached to it by prolongation, which, in the Chief Justice's words, "can only be had on the condition of a corresponding diminution in the intensity of the punishment" (p. 76). Moral persuasion is the punitive influence reserved for the worst cases. Indeed, the incurables are specially devoted to moral care. Those who are "so inveterately addicted to dishonesty that there is no chance of their mending for a very considerable time," are the subjects recommended for incentives to good conduct, by way of facilitating their control and their reformation.

The Commissioners have also an odd way of treating objections which present themselves to their propositions, namely, by accounting for them; as, for instance, the objection that in the present system of public works, convicts have to be brought away from labour when it rains, is disposed of by the explanation that it arises from the difficulty of drying their clothes (p. 41). Is there not, moreover, something contradictory in a reformatory plan which proposes to shelve schooling in after hours as incompatible with the main process? (p. 44.) The attempt to make prisons schools ends in schooling being rejected from prisons. "Then, on the other hand," says Captain Powell, in answer to 1252, "you cannot force a man to work, you can only induce him." So the penal part of the diluted process is persuasion, and in the double process of reforming and punishing both parts are neutralized.

The Commissioners, however, always fall back on their theory; and all the contradictions it leads them into only drive them to reassert that it cannot be carried out otherwise. Without longer sentences,

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