James Devon

CHAPTER I

THE MACHINERY OF THE LAW

The police and their duties—Divided control—Need for knowledge of local peculiarities—The fear of “corruption”—The police cell—Cleanliness and discomfort—Insufficient provision of diet, etc.—The casualty surgeon—The police court—The untrained magistrate—The assessor—Pleas of “guilty”—Case—Apathy of the public—Agents for the Poor—The prison van—The sheriff court—The procurator-fiscal—Procedure in the higher courts—The Scottish jury.

To the majority of people the living representative of the law is the policeman. It is his duty to protect the citizens from evil-doers, and to arrest offenders. He is the subject of a good deal of chaff, but his position is generally respected; and although men get into the force who by temper and experience are quite unsuited for their work, the great majority discharge the duties laid upon them in a manner that is surprisingly satisfactory, when the demands made upon them are taken into account. They are supposed to have a knowledge of the law, and for practical purposes they must know something of medicine in order that they may give first aid to the injured; they are expected to be able to answer questions of an exceedingly miscellaneous nature when asked by the passing stranger; and they require to be always cool and clear-headed, to be ready for any emergency, and to have a temper that nothing can ruffle. If they have enough of these desirable qualifications to satisfy the authorities they may receive a salary for their services rather better than that given to the unskilled labourer.

That efforts are made to obtain good men for the post is undeniable. That these efforts are always so enlightened or so successful as they might be is not so certain. In Glasgow, for instance, a standard of height is set up which excludes the vast majority of Glasgow-bred men from this occupation. In some parts of the country men go to flesh and bone, and they are big-framed and brawny; but this is not the case in the town. Yet a man’s height offers no presumption of his fitness for any position involving the exercise of judgment. A minimum 5 ft. 6 in. includes all the 5 ft. 7 in. and 5 ft. 8 in. men; and a minimum 5 ft. 9 in. excludes all these and limits the choice of candidates very much. It is not the best men to act as guardians to the public peace that are sought, but the best men amongst those of a certain height; and this is bound to lower the standard of efficiency. Indeed, the higher the standard of height the lower the standard of efficiency will tend to become, because of the limitation of choice implied.

The police force is a civil force and ought to be entirely under the control of the citizens through their representatives, but this civil force is not formed on any conception of civic needs. It is organised on a military model, and subject to inspection by a military man on whose reports to the Secretary of State its efficiency is decided. Nobody seems to think of asking what such an inspector knows of the needs of the district whose police he inspects. His training enables him to tell when a man carries himself well and turns out his toes nicely, and the ability of the police to do so is aided by their going to inspection in new uniforms; so that the inspector sees a number of men in new clothes, and decides by their bearing their fitness to act as policemen. This condition of things enables a man to earn a salary who might otherwise be unemployed, and if it stopped there the absurdity might be worth the money; but when a police force is to be judged and their grants to be graduated, not according to their knowledge of the work, but according to the ignorance of their inspectors, there is likely to be trouble. If the police require to pay more attention to the inspector who can stop their grant than to representatives of the citizens in whose service they are supposed to act, it is a bad thing for the police and for the citizens.

Every district has its own peculiarities, not observed by those who live there because of custom, but noticed by strangers and sometimes disapproved by them. It is an advantage, therefore, that those set in positions of authority should be acquainted with the customs and manners of the people among whom they live. A policeman will discharge his duties with more comfort to himself, more credit to the force, and greater benefit to the community if he knows those in the district in which his duties lie. Unless he is in touch with the law-abiding elements therein, unless he knows them and has their confidence and support, in many cases he will not be in a position to distinguish between conduct that is harmless and conduct that is criminal. For instance, it is well known that professional thieves depend largely on their coolness and daring for their success. If “thief” were written all over them they would starve, and they only earn their living because, to those who are personally unacquainted with them, they are not distinguishable from honest men. The policeman knows this; and if he sees a person coming out of business premises long after business hours, he quite naturally questions that person by look or by word. If he does not know whether the person has a right to be there he may make a fool of himself, either by arresting a man who has had legitimate business on the premises or by letting a thief get away. He is on the horns of a dilemma in which he should not be placed.

Again, supposing complaints have been made about lads loitering around certain closes or corners, and the policeman has been instructed to have this stopped. If he knows the inhabitants of his beat he is able to discriminate between those who have a certain right to be about the place and those against whom the complaint is directed. If he does not know them he may reprimand or arrest the wrong people altogether, causing trouble for himself and widespread irritation that need never have been aroused. Those who have been affronted or injured do not take his difficulties into account; and it may be that those who are responsible for placing him in what is, after all, a false position, have not sufficiently considered the evil results caused thereby.

The military habit of assuming that every man is like every other man, and shifting people about like so many dolls, has its disadvantages in civil life. It does make a difference whether the man set to do a certain duty is acquainted with the conditions in which he is placed or is ignorant of them. Even at the door of a court not only discretion but knowledge is necessary on the part of the door-keeper, and from neglect to recognise this simple fact a Sheriff has been stopped at the door of a High Court; a Procurator-Fiscal after thirty years’ service in the court has been refused admission; and the medical officer in attendance has had to demand to see a superintendent before he could get in. If such things are possible in cases like these, it is quite clear a good deal of trouble and annoyance, and possibly a good deal of injustice, may result in quarters which cannot be said to be influential.

It has been said that it is advisable to move men about from one district and from one duty to another in order to prevent their possible corruption; but the men are neither so stupid nor so bad as this reason would imply. The person who is corrupt will carry his corrupt tendencies with him over a wider area and be quite as dangerous there; for the less he is known the more readily will his personal defects escape supervision and criticism on the part of those among whom he works; and it is better that he should be discovered and dismissed than that the great mass of policemen, who are neither stupid nor corrupt, but who are honestly seeking to discharge their duty in such a manner as to gain them the goodwill of their fellow-citizens, should have their work rendered unnecessarily arduous and difficult. Too much is expected of them considering the opportunities they are allowed, and their faults are due more to the system by which they are ruled than to any personal defects on the part of the men. Anything that will bring that system more intimately in touch with the needs of the community and more sympathetically in contact with the difficulties of the poorer classes will help towards the efficiency and also the comfort of the force.

When a person is arrested on any criminal charge he is first taken to the local police station, where the charge is entered. He is searched and placed in a cell, and if there is anything special in the charge against him, or in his appearance and behaviour, his treatment may be modified accordingly. In the great majority of cases the person arrested is only a petty offender at most. If he has money sufficient, he may hand it over as bail and be released with a notice that if he does not appear at a time and place specified his money will be forfeited and he may again be taken into custody. If he or his friends cannot leave a pledge for his appearance he makes acquaintance with the routine of administration. He becomes the tenant of a cell where he remains till the sitting of the court next morning. If the cell accommodation is fully taken up he may have company; and while every effort is made to prevent old offenders being placed in the same cell with those who are in for the first time, the best that can be done is bad.

Although prisoners are presumed to be innocent till they are found guilty, they are in many respects worse treated while waiting to be sent to prison than after they arrive there. This is not the fault of the police so much as that of the authorities who are responsible for the accommodation or the want of it. A drunk man may be a very helpless or a very intractable person, and little can be done for him till he is sober. His condition is such that it is quite clearly not the best practice to put him in a cell and leave him there. It is no uncommon thing to find that the drunkenness has masked some more serious condition; but even although there should be nothing behind his intoxication, the man is more liable to contract illness than a sober person. In less enlightened countries than ours such prisoners are not left alone, but are kept warm and placed under observation till they are sober. In our country they are less carefully treated. Drunk or sober the prisoner is in an uncomfortable position.The police have difficulties to contend with that are not present in the prisons. The prisoners they arrest are not appreciably more dirty than when they arrive at the prison, but in the police cells there are not the same facilities for making and keeping things clean. There is no supply of free labour and not a generous provision of paid cleaners, and the cells in some cases seem to be constructed more with a view to saving the expense of cleaning than to providing for the reasonable custody of prisoners. Wooden floors are less easily cleaned than asphalt or cement, and both in the prisons and the police cells this seems to determine their construction. It is a piece of senseless cruelty in a climate such as ours, as anyone can easily find out for himself if he cares to try. In such a place even in warm weather it is difficult to keep the feet warm, and cold feet do not improve a man’s temper.

The newer cells are lined with glazed brick in deference to some sanitary notions. It is a great pity that the apostles of sanitation cannot be compelled to live in the places they design. No doubt the glazed walls are more easily cleaned than whitewashed brick would be, but they strike a chill into the occupants of the place, and moisture condenses on them in a way that it does not elsewhere. Cleanliness let us have by all reasonable means, but to be clean it is not necessary to be uncomfortable; and such methods are enough to disgust with cleanliness those who have to submit to their results. Another objectionable feature of the cell is the presence of a water-closet in it. Surely the sanitary expert has been napping when this was arranged; but here again the matter seems to be one of expense. The reasonable way would be to escort prisoners to a place when necessary, but that would mean the provision of a proper staff of warders. The cell is otherwise unfurnished save for a raised slab of wood which takes the place of a bed. There is no bedding provided. It is a barbarous provision for the man who is presumed to be innocent. As for his diet, there is none prescribed. He may have food sent in or he may have money to purchase it. If not, he will have to get along on bread and water, not having been proved guilty. In the morning he will be brought before the court, and if he asks for it he may have water to wash himself before appearing there. Cleanliness is not enforced, though it may be encouraged; but judging by their appearance when admitted to prison, not many have sought the water-basin during their stay in the police cell.

By the Summary Jurisdiction Act, 1908, it was provided that persons should not be kept in police cells for more than one night, and all persons remanded were sent to prison, to their distinct advantage; for there the staff and conditions are arranged for the custody of prisoners, and they are free for the time being from the noises incidental to the arrest and confinement of drunken persons, while they have a better chance of having their needs attended to. This procedure entailed more work on the officials, a difficulty that could easily have been overcome by a small increase in the staff. It meant not more trouble than is necessitated in the case of persons remitted to higher courts, and if the interests of the prisoners who are presumed to be innocent had been considered the Act would have remained in force; but their convenience was not represented so powerfully as that of the officials, and reversion to the old, bad plan of retaining prisoners in the custody of the police has taken place. They may be kept in the police cells for forty-eight hours.Some of those who are arrested may be suffering from injuries or disease. To attend these a casualty surgeon is employed. When he is asked to do so, it is his duty to call and see prisoners who complain or who are obviously ill. His pay is small; and from it, until lately, he had to provide any dressings and medicines that were required. It is not part of his duty to see every prisoner before the court begins. Occasionally people are sent to prison who should never have been brought before the courts at all. Both police and surgeon are placed in a very difficult position by the system. The police may err in their judgment as to the condition of a prisoner and may fail to direct the attention of the medical man to him. On the other hand, if they call in the surgeon too frequently to see persons who are not in need of his services he may reasonably complain, and dissensions may arise on this account which will make the working of the system irritating to all parties. In order to their comfort, surgeon and police have to make allowances for each other and to stand by one another in a way that is not likely to make for such efficiency of service to the public on the part of either as is desirable. When some extraordinary case attracts attention blame is lavishly showered upon the police; and it is generally undeserved, at least in the form it takes. They are not to blame because of their failure to do things for which they are unfitted. They may be to blame for not protesting against duties being thrust upon them which should be performed by others. It is misdirected economy to underpay medical men, and until this is recognised accidents may be looked for and incidents will occur to shock the public because of the injury which some person has inadvertently sustained.In the Court the Burgh Procurator-Fiscal may prosecute, or his depute may act for him. In Glasgow with all its police courts there is only one trained lawyer who prosecutes. The great mass of the charges are conducted by his deputes, who are invariably police officers. The only witnesses in many cases are constables and the prosecutor is one of their superior officers. It is a state of affairs that does not impress an outsider by its wisdom, and it is not regarded by those who come within its scope as being fair. The police have too many duties thrust upon them.

On the bench, in the great majority of cases, there is an untrained judge. In Glasgow there is only one stipendiary magistrate, who is a trained lawyer. The others are magistrates of the city, who have to discharge a multitude of duties, among which is that of sitting in judgment on their fellow-citizens. They have been elected to the Town Council to serve their constituents as members of that body, and in due course they are made Bailies. Nobody pretends that they are thereby endowed with a knowledge of the law, experience in weighing evidence, or the judicial mind; but they are invested with judicial powers, and in certain cases can send men to prison for twelve months. They are usually men of excellent character and intentions, but unfortunately both of these qualities may exist with utter incompetence from a judicial standpoint. The draper would not admit that a grocer could exchange businesses with him and the concern go on as well as ever. Each man knows that to learn his own trade requires time, to speak of nothing else; but they appear to believe that all that is required to enable them to execute what in law stands for justice is the possession of a chain of office. Were there any foundation in fact for such an idea many weary years of study would be saved; for it is easier to get a chain than a licence to practise. That they are usually quite satisfied of their own fitness for the work goes without saying; and it would be a piece of vanity as harmless as it is foolish if the liberty of so many were not placed in jeopardy by it. It has been urged as an argument against the appointment of trained lawyers that there were fewer appeals from the decisions of the Bailies than from those of the professional man. This is meant as a testimony to their superior fitness, presumably; for the only relevant inference from the statement is that the Bailie is better qualified to act as a judge than the man who has had a training in the work. It is a startling testimony to the superiority of inspiration to reason. There are no testimonials from those who had appeared before the courts either as prisoners or agents, however; and the plea is not convincing. That it should ever have been made is a striking commentary on the fitness of those who made it; or on their modesty.

Appeals from police-court decisions can only be made on a case stated by the magistrate whose judgment is appealed against. Trained men are not free from liability to error, and they recognise the fact. If a case is stated in such a way that the issue is obscured there is no use in attempting an appeal; so that freedom from appeals may as readily be a testimony to the inefficiency of a judge as to his efficiency. It may afford a presumption that he is not only unfit to try a case, but not to be trusted in stating one. To suggest that it affords evidence of the superior ability of the draper and the grocer to the lawyer in law matters, is to presume too much on the credulity of the public. If they are really so splendidly endowed it is surprising that they should not place their services at the disposal of one another when a question of trade causes dispute. In that they might be expected to have knowledge at least; but though Bailies have power to send men to prison they are not empowered to try civil causes involving the property of their fellow-citizens. That is to say, they have power over the lives, but not over the property of the lieges. This is surely a grave injustice; either to them or to the prisoners.

In every court where a bailie presides he is aided and advised by an assessor, whose duty it is to keep him within the law. It is a somewhat farcical situation. The prisoner is there because he is charged with breaking the law; the bailie is there to try him on the charge; and behind him is a legal gentleman to see that the judge does not himself break the law in the process! He may either take the advice of the assessor or disregard it, but he is the responsible magistrate. If he follows the assessor’s advice, that official is in the exercise of power without responsibility, which is not a position in which anybody should be placed; if he follows the inner light, the “safeguard” which the assessor is supposed to be is useless.

It is looked upon by many as a very small affair, this whole matter of the Police Court, but it is really a very large affair and a very important one. Police Courts are those where most offenders appear for the first time, and from them they are first sent to prison. As the first step counts for so much, it is of the utmost importance that those who come before these Courts should have their cases thoroughly considered. This cannot be done if the proceedings are hurried, and it is notorious that Bailies “try” scores of prisoners in a day, the work not appearing to interfere with their ordinary occupations. Many of the prisoners plead guilty; but it is well known that there is a widespread belief among the labouring classes that if you plead guilty you get a shorter sentence. What justification there is for this belief I cannot say, but of its existence and its operative effect there is no room for doubt. They do not seem to take into account the effect the registration of a conviction may have against them at any future time, and pleas are given that no lawyer would advise.

I do not mean to suggest that people in large numbers plead guilty when they have no knowledge of the offence, but that the act they have committed may have been capable of another than a criminal construction. X 30, a girl, is charged with fraud, which is a sufficiently serious crime. She has no previous convictions against her. She is remanded to prison, and there states she has been advised to plead guilty and she will get off lightly. She is told of the grave nature of the offence and legal assistance is obtained for her. It is found that she is a wayward girl who left her people and came to Glasgow. She obtained employment in a shop, and got lodgings in a part of Glasgow that is not very reputable and with people who were not likely to keep her straight. She lost her work and was kept on in her lodgings; but an event occurred there which made it imperative that she should go elsewhere, and she removed to the house of her landlady’s daughter. She was there a fortnight when she met a woman whom she knew and through her obtained a situation. She left her lodgings and went to live with this woman. At the instance of her former landlady she was arrested for obtaining board and lodgings on false pretences. It was shown that she had paid her debt while she was working; and she protested she had made no false pretences, but meant to pay the balance when she could. The case was adjourned to enable her to do so. If she had not had legal advice and assistance there is no doubt that this girl would have had a conviction for fraud recorded against her. She had got into bad company and was on the way to the gutter, but by the operation of the law she would have been driven there. To deal properly with the large numbers which come before the Police Courts would take a great deal of time, but that is no reason why the cases should be hurried through.

If a man has the means to fee a lawyer he is in a better case, or if he has committed an offence which is serious enough to cause his remand to a higher Court, for there he will get legal assistance free; but if he is simply a petty offender with no one to help him he will probably get dealt with without any loss of time and be sentenced by scale.

It is time that some provision was made to have the police court made less a police court and more a court of justice. There is far too much police about it for the public interest. Anybody may attend, but few do so; and the proceedings might for all practical purposes be conducted in private, so far as the towns are concerned. The cases are seldom reported, and when the newspapers do notice the proceedings it is usually in a jocular way; but they are no joke to the persons concerned. A sensational murder is detailed and canvassed as though the only matter of importance to the country was the hanging of the wretch who has got into the limelight. Every hysterical theorist is anxious to get his opinion of the proper way to treat criminals put before the public; and all the time we are busily engaged in putting into our machine young and old who have taken the first step downwards, and congratulating ourselves on the smoothness with which it works. It is not cruelty that causes us to behave in this way, but sheer stupidity and lack of imagination. Now and then a man who has eyes to see gets made a Bailie, but he makes a poor police judge. Those who look upon themselves and are credited by others with the heaven-born instinct are as likely to be the men whom no one would trust to be a judge in his own cause; and it is quite possible for a man who is narrow-minded, vindictive, and callous to have the fate of his poorer fellow-citizens placed in his hands, and, because he likes the work, to continue on the bench long after his term as a Bailie has expired. If it is important to deal with wrongdoing in the beginning; if it is desirable to prevent people from being sent to prison when that can be avoided; it is obvious that we must see that our minor courts are so arranged and so officered that those who come before them have at least as good a chance of having their cases weighed as the old hands who go to the higher Courts get there.

The Sheriff may sit to try cases summarily, just as the Bailie does; but the court is ordered differently. The Procurator-Fiscal has no connection with the police. The case is reported by them to him and he makes his own enquiries and may drop proceedings altogether. The Sheriff is an experienced lawyer and he sees that the prisoner’s case is properly presented. The prisoner, if he wishes, may have a law-agent to appear on his behalf, and in jury cases it is the duty of the prison authorities to see that a lawyer has the defence in hand.

In Scotland it has been the custom for all indicted prisoners who have not the means to pay for legal advice to receive competent legal representation. The Agents for the Poor give their services freely and ungrudgingly. They behave towards the poor person who is accused of crime in the same way as the hospital doctors do to the sick who present themselves. In the course of their work they have to devote considerable time to the cases of those whose defence is entrusted to them; and if the charge is one that brings the accused before the High Court they appear by counsel for him. No person appears in the dock of the High Courts in Scotland who has not a qualified member of the Bar to defend him; and the absence of financial means does not affect this privilege. This provision of legal advice and assistance is not made at the expense of the public, but at that of the profession; and it is of as much benefit in its own way as that made for the sick by the members of the medical profession. I have never seen young medical men work with more enthusiasm to pull a patient from the jaws of death than is shown by the lawyers in their efforts to snatch the accused poor person from the hands of the prosecution. In both cases the energy might be expended to better purpose; for sick persons are frequently restored to health only to become a greater nuisance to their neighbours, and some accused persons are acquitted and sent out to prey on society; but when all discount has been made there is left a great deal of good work that was well worth doing. With regard to the work of both doctor and lawyer, we may some day take steps to see that the persons restored to health do not use their powers to the disadvantage of society, and that those restored to liberty do not use their freedom to molest others. At present we take no account of them once they have ceased to be cases—to our disadvantage as well as to theirs—and no one recognises more clearly than the lawyer that he is sometimes engaged in the attempt to turn loose on society a man who has no intention of conforming to its laws. On the other hand, everyone who has taken part in the work knows that were it not for his action serious injustice would be likely to take place.

If there were as full a provision made for the defence of prisoners who come before the Police Courts as exists for that of those who appear in the higher Courts, it would be alike to the advantage of the officials, the prisoners, and the public; but to ask that such a provision should be made at the sole cost of the legal profession is to ask too much. In special cases they have never been appealed to in vain; and they need to give more time to one case than would enable a medical man to attend twenty. Their services are not sufficiently appreciated and known by the general public, or it would be recognised that they have contributed to save many poor people from degradation and helped to prevent accessions to the ranks of the habitual offender. No one would propose that prisoners who are called before the higher Courts should be deprived of skilled advice and advocacy unless they are able to pay, and yet there is less need in these Courts than in the Police Courts for the provision that exists.

When a prisoner has been remitted from a Police Court he is transferred in a van to prison, to await further proceedings. It has often been remarked that the various departments in Corporations seem to act independently of each other. The Sanitary Department acts energetically to prevent overcrowding in some circumstances, but the van used for conveying prisoners to prison seems to have escaped their notice. It is a prehistoric vehicle in the form of a bus without windows. It is divided into compartments each holding a number of prisoners, and the partitions contribute to prevent proper ventilation. It is lit by a few panes in the roof. On a hot day it is stifling. Any vehicle of the kind would never be licensed for the conveyance of ordinary passengers, animal or human, by a modern sanitary authority.

The presiding judge in the Higher Courts is either a Sheriff or a Lord of Justiciary. The Sheriff has jurisdiction over a County and may sit both as judge and jury; that is to say, he may try cases summarily; but his Court differs materially, even when he is doing so, from that of the Burgh Magistrate. In the first place, more public attention is given to the proceedings, for the higher the Court the greater is the interest shown in its work. In small country burghs this rule may not hold good, for there the inhabitants know more of what is doing in their midst. They may be acquainted with police, judge, and offender, personally; and in that case are likely to take a lively interest in the proceedings, criticising freely all the parties and influencing powerfully the tone of the Court; but in a great city the Police Courts might as well be held anywhere for all the effective public supervision and informed criticism they receive. Then the police are not prosecutors in the Sheriff Summary Courts. The prosecution is conducted by a Procurator-Fiscal who is appointed by the Lord Advocate, and who holds his appointment for life and is not in any way under the authority of the police. The Sheriff is a man of experience in his profession, and is continually engaged in judicial work, mostly of a civil character. He is not merely or mainly engaged in dealing with criminals, and is not likely to acquire a subconscious prejudice against the defendant.

The Lord Advocate is the head of the department concerned with prosecutions in Scotland, and no criminal action can be taken without his direction or concurrence. Private prosecutions at common law are practically unknown. His deputes act for him in the higher Courts and are instructed by the procurators-fiscal, who are solicitors and prosecute in the Sheriff Courts themselves. It is their duty to make enquiries into all charges with which the Police Courts are not competent to deal, and these enquiries are conducted privately. From the time a prisoner is passed on to them until he appears at the Court to plead or to be tried there are no public proceedings against him. He is brought into the Court at an early stage, the charge is read over to him, and he is asked to make a declaration. A law-agent is provided for his assistance, and he is told that anything he says by way of declaration may be used against him. The agent may advise him to say nothing and he usually does so, his declaration amounting simply to a denial of the charge. This is signed by him and read at his trial, usually closing the case for the Crown. While the declaration is being taken the public are excluded from the Court. If the Procurator-Fiscal considers that his enquiry does not justify further proceedings the charge is dropped, provided the Lord Advocate agrees; but if the authorities are satisfied there is a case for trial an indictment is served.

In Scotland when a prisoner is indicted to appear before a jury court he must be served seventeen days before his trial with a copy of the indictment, containing the charge, a list of the productions against him, and a list of the witnesses to be called for the prosecution. Seven days thereafter he is brought before the Court to plead to the charge. If he plead guilty he may be dealt with there and then. If he plead not guilty his plea is recorded and he is sent back till the second diet of the court. If he intend to set up a special defence, such as insanity or an alibi, notice of such defence has to be given at the pleading diet; but the witnesses he intends to call need not be notified to the Crown until three days before the trial by jury. The prosecution cannot add any productions or any witnesses to the list furnished in the indictment; but if it is decided that additional witnesses are required the diet may be deserted and a new indictment served. In no case, however, can a prisoner be kept with a charge hanging over his head for more than one hundred and seventeen days from the date of his committal. After that time he is entitled to be liberated and no further proceedings on the charge can be taken against him at any time.

The Crown usually makes careful enquiries in the public interest when any special plea of insanity is brought forward; and if satisfied that the plea is a valid one, has provided, at the public expense, expert testimony to that effect on behalf of the prisoner. The greatest care has been taken to ensure that prisoners brought before the higher Courts do not suffer from lack of means, and there is never any disposition on the part of the prosecutor to make it a point of honour that he should obtain a conviction. There is no speech by the prosecutor in opening his case. So far as the Court is concerned the jury start without any bias against the prisoner, and as the evidence is led they gain their knowledge of the case. In most cases the prosecutor does not address the jury at all. He contents himself with leading evidence. The character of the prisoner is not disclosed to the jury until after their verdict has been returned. If during the trial any reference is initiated by the prosecution as to previous convictions, the prisoner is entitled to an acquittal upon the charge against him. The point the jury has to determine is whether the person committed the crime charged, and they have to find their verdict simply on the evidence led.

The Scottish jury consists of fifteen men, and the verdict of a majority is required. They may decline on the evidence to express an opinion on the prisoner’s guilt, but instead may find the charge not proven. This is the most practical provision for giving a prisoner the benefit of any doubt that exists in their minds after hearing the evidence. Whatever the verdict may be, the prisoner, having been once tried, cannot again be charged with the same offence. It is difficult to conceive any system under which a prisoner charged with crime could be more fairly treated; and if in the minor Courts offenders received the same consideration, the number sent to prison would be greatly diminished and the ranks of the habitual offender would fail to receive so many recruits.

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CHAPTER II

THE PRISON SYSTEM

Centralisation—The constitution of the Prison Commission—Parliamentary control—The Commissioners—The rules—The visiting committee—The governor and the matron—The chaplain—The medical officer—The staff.

Before the year 1877 all the Scottish prisons, with the exception of the Penitentiary at Perth, were under the control and management of the local authorities. One result was that there were many standards of treatment, and Parliament decided that as the prevailing methods were unsatisfactory the treatment of prisoners and the management of prisons should be vested in a central Board.

The changes made by the Prison Commission have been many, and the prison of to-day is widely different from that of forty years ago; but before attributing all improvements to the new system it is fair to take into account the progress made in local administration during that time. The true comparison is not between the prison of forty years ago and that of to-day, but between the prison and the local institutions of to-day. Central management is likely to result in uniformity of routine and treatment in all prisons; but it is questionable whether that is a gain. It may tend to more economical administration if the test is one of expenditure of money, but it makes experiment in the way of reform very difficult. Not only are no two men alike, but no two districts are alike; and methods of dealing with people belonging to one part of Scotland are not necessarily the best to apply to the inhabitants of another part. It is not a good thing to bring prisoners from outlying districts to centres; there is always a danger of their remaining there after their liberation and obtaining introductions that will not be likely to help them except in the way of wrongdoing. The large institution may cost less money, but it can never have such intimate supervision as the small one.

The Prison Commission for Scotland consists of two ex-officio and two paid members. The ex-officio members are the Crown Agent and the Sheriff of Perthshire. The Crown Agent goes out with the Government of the day, but he is not usually a Member of Parliament. The Sheriff of Perthshire in virtue of his office had a place on the board which managed the old Penitentiary at Perth; that is probably the reason why he is a Commissioner of Prisons under the Act of 1877. It is certainly not because Perthshire is a county which contributes many criminals from its Courts to the prison population.

There are thus two lawyers on the Board, one being a judge and the other being the solicitor in whose office public prosecutions are directed. The other Commissioners are permanent civil servants, appointed by the Secretary for Scotland.

At first there were also two Inspectors who gave their whole time to the work of visiting the various prisons and reporting on their condition and management to the Secretary of State, but in process of time there has been a change, and now the Secretary of the Commission is the only Inspector.

The Commissioners themselves visit the prisons and inspect them; but as they are responsible for the management, the arrangement is open to the criticism that they report on their own work, without independent inspection.

The Secretary of State is the head of the Board, and is responsible to Parliament for the work of the department; but his sole means of knowing that work is the reports he receives from the Commission. Whether on all boards Members of Parliament should not have a place and power, just as members of a town council form the supervising authority over the work of its departments, is a question that will bear discussion. At present the Member of Parliament can only make himself a nuisance by asking questions; that is what it amounts to, since no matter what the answer may be, it leaves him very much where he was. He is usually as ignorant at the end as he was when he began. Some aggrieved constituent having more faith than knowledge has made an ex-parte statement to his representative, who puts a question to the Minister, who passes it on to the department concerned, which transmits to him the answer given by the person complained of, which shows that there is no ground for the complaint. It may be uncomfortable for someone, but it is not business. If the complaints are too frequent or the complainers too influential to be disregarded, the Minister forms a committee of enquiry which turns things up for a time, censures somebody who is too small to cause trouble, makes a few apologetic suggestions for alterations, white-washes with liberality those who most need it, and presents another report for the waste-paper basket.

Spasmodic enquiries can never make up for systematic neglect, and their effect is seldom to cause as much improvement as irritation. The danger to the public service is not from corruption, but from the official mind getting out of touch with the spirit of the time and the needs of the public.

Rules for the government of prisons are laid down by the Secretary for Scotland, and these rules become statutory after they have been laid on the table of the House of Commons for a period. They define the duties of the various officials, lay down regulations for the treatment of the prisoners, and deal in detail with the management of the prisons.

The Commissioners have the whole control in their hands, subject to the rules. They appoint all the inferior officers; transfer and promote them; or dismiss them if their conduct is unsatisfactory. They do not appoint the superior officers, but it is to be expected that their advice will be considered by the Secretary of State, with whom the nominations lie. As a Commissioner cannot be in more than one place at a time, they cannot be expected to have any intimate knowledge of the capability of the men who depend for promotion on them; and their task in this matter alone is no easy one. As for knowledge of the prisoners at first hand, that is impossible; for prisoners are as hard to know as other people, and one person cannot know much of another as the result of an occasional short conversation. If they were liable to err they could not be criticised effectively; for any official who might be in a position to criticise would run the risk of not being in that position long; any prisoner might be looked upon as a prejudiced person; and no member of the public is able to offer criticism, for he does not know the facts. This is an unfortunate state of affairs; for even the ablest minds are the better for being brought in conflict with others and in contact with other ideas, and a system that discourages independent thought is not likely to lead to rapid progress. It has its advantages, however, for a knowledge of the rules and a habit of always carrying them out ensure to the prisoner, peace, and to the officer a good reputation and better prospects than he could ever hope for if he were foolish enough to set his brains to work.

In a private business, when a man gets a position, he cannot hold it unless by exercising his judgment in such a way as to satisfy his employer that he is worth his salt; when he fails in this he is liable to dismissal. In the public service the case is different. There is no question of bankruptcy for one thing, and there is security of tenure for another. You cannot depend on always having men of ability in the posts, but by the aid of rules you can teach a person of moderate talent to get through his work. To disregard the rules may be justifiable in a given case and so far as that case is concerned, but it is liable to knock the whole machine out of gear.

There are many able men in all branches of the civil service, and the fact is often referred to by Cabinet Ministers amid loud cheers from the public; but they recognise the need for routine and follow it. They would otherwise have less time for literary work, in which they can use their original powers to greater advantage. The public departments have produced more poets, novelists, critics, and playwrights than any other large businesses, as, for instance, the railways or the engineering trades. These also employ talented men, but their talents are deflected to business channels. If they had their work laid down for them in rules and regulations they also might add to the gaiety of nations.

Commissioners are always appointed from among men in a good position whose minds have not been warped by any previous association with prisons. They can thus approach their duties without prejudice; and officials and prisoners alike have the satisfaction of knowing that they are in the hands of gentlemen.

Each prison has its visiting committee, consisting of members nominated by various local authorities with the addition of ladies nominated by the Secretary of State. Under the rules for prisons it has considerable powers of criticism, but they are not much used. In Glasgow the committee meets once a year, when its members arrange to visit the prison in pairs once monthly. In practice this means that each member spends in the prison two or three hours on an average every year. How much the members can learn about the work of the prison in that time may be surmised. They go round the place and ask each prisoner if he has any complaints, and they seldom receive any. They see that the place and its inmates are kept clean; that the food is good; that the sick are being attended to; and they may hear a complaint of breach of discipline and award a punishment therefor occasionally. They record their visits and make any suggestion that may occur to them. They may communicate direct with the Secretary of State if they choose.

They might perform a very useful part in the management of the prison if their powers were used to the full extent and their meetings were more frequent. They have no power to incur expenditure, but without doing so it is quite conceivable that by inviting the officials to explain matters and to direct their attention to special cases they might do a great deal to suggest improvements, with a view to prevent certain people from being sent to prison and to provide for others on their release.

They have the power to allow or to refuse certain privileges to untried prisoners. They are all agreed that the prison is an admirably managed institution, as free from faults as any place could be; but whether they have ever got the length of asking themselves what is the use of it is doubtful. It is clean—as it well may be; it is orderly—which causes no surprise, although its inmates are there because they “cannot behave themselves”; there are no complaints, and at the end of a visit they know as much of the inmates as they might learn of natural history by a walk round the Zoo.

They might conceivably be set to find out on behalf of the local authorities they represent why the prisoners are there and why so many of them return; whether it is not time we were seeking other means of dealing with them, and what means; whether nothing more and nothing else can be done than is done at present to help them on their liberation. The Commissioners have enough to do; and in the nature of things they are not so well qualified to deal with these subjects as the local authorities, for they cannot come so intimately in touch with local conditions. But the members of the visiting committees are usually busy men on the local Councils and have little time to spend on prison affairs, which may be a very good reason for the Councils nominating others who could find the time. So long as they merely see that the prisoner is not being ill-used outwith the rules, they are only looking after the interest of prisoners and public in a partial way. When they begin to examine matters from the standpoint of the public welfare—when they realise that the treatment of the criminal is as much a matter of public health as the treatment of the sick, and that it is to the interest of the community that it should be undertaken in such a way as to lead to his reformation—it will be better for everybody, including the prisoner.

I can imagine local committees making discoveries for themselves with regard to the causation of crime that would influence powerfully their whole administration; bringing pressure to bear within the law where it is most required and relieving pressure where it is harmful; using the powers they have, instead of lamenting the want of power which there is no evidence they could use if it were given them; but it needs a beginning.

Each prison is in charge of a Governor who is in daily communication with the office in Edinburgh. He visits the prisoners once daily and hears any complaints by them or regarding them. He has the power to impose certain punishments for offences against discipline, but if they involve a decrease of diet they must be confirmed by the Medical Officer, who may refuse to allow them on medical grounds. He is responsible for the carrying out of the rules and his discretionary power is very small. No qualification has been laid down for the position, and this leaves the Secretary of State free to appoint anybody whom he considers most likely to perform the duties satisfactorily, and prevents the post becoming a preserve for the members of any profession. In Scotland military men have been appointed, and members of the clerical staff and warders have been promoted to governorships, but no professional man has ever been placed in such an important position. When the Governor is absent or on leave his place is taken by the head warder, who performs the duties of this important office in addition to his own.

Where there are a sufficient number of female prisoners there is a Matron in charge of them, who visits them in the same way as the Governor does the males and discharges similar duties towards them.

The Prison Chaplain must be an ordained minister, and in the larger prisons he holds services weekly and conducts prayers daily. He visits the prisoners in their cells and administers spiritual consolation and advice; and he does what he can to help them on their liberation. Prisoners who are Roman Catholics and those who are Episcopalians are visited by clergymen of those Churches in a similar way.

The Medical Officer must be a registered practitioner, and it is his duty to look after the health of the staff and of the prisoners. Of all the officials he has the freest hand, for it has not so far been practicable to direct the treatment of the sick from a central office; but his very freedom—such as it is—may lead him into trouble should he pay regard to differences of temperament among prisoners and go beyond a consideration of merely physical signs. If he confine his energies to carrying out the rules he need never fear death from work or worry. He may hope to become a highly respectable fossil and have a place in the esteem of everyone to whom he has caused no trouble. He can do much to help prisoners, not by indulging them, but by humanising the place to some extent and setting the tone. He need not be a better man than his colleagues, but he is less a part of the working machine, and that should make a difference in his attitude. He is not concerned with discipline, for the sick are free of it, so that in a sense it is his business to interfere with discipline. His work is to do the prisoners good in a way they can understand; and he has even an advantage over the Chaplain, whom they also recognise as a humanising influence, for men are usually a good deal more anxious about their bodies than about their souls. The Governor may be a better man than either the Doctor or the Chaplain, but his position as the head of a system that the prisoners do not regard as directed to their aid handicaps his influence on them.

At one time the clerical staff of the prisons was composed of clerks, but now men who join as warders are promoted to clerkships, serving part of the day in the prison and part in the office. All applicants for warderships have to pass a series of examinations and to serve on probation for twelve months before being finally admitted to the service. A rigid enquiry is made as to their antecedents; their health forms the subject of a careful enquiry; and they have to pass an examination in general education. After all this they receive a salary which is not large, to put it mildly. It is a steady job, and therefore sought after by those who prefer to take a small salary with security of tenure to risking the rough-and-tumble of industrial life. Female warders are paid better than men, as women’s wages go. Compared with the work done by them in other institutions they are well off, but there is not a rush for vacancies. Both male and female warders in Scottish prisons will compare favourably with any other body of officials; and the prevailing spirit shown by them towards prisoners is kindly and human.

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CHAPTER III

THE PRISON AND ITS ROUTINE

Reception of the prisoner—Cleanliness and order—The plan of the prison—The cells—Their furniture—The diet—The clothing—Work—The workshops—Separate confinement and association—Gratuities—Prison offences—Complaints—Punishment cells—Visits of the chaplain—Visits of representatives of the Churches—The gulf between visitor and visited—The Chapel—The Salvation Army—Rest—Recreation—The prison library—Lectures—The airing-yard—Physical drill.

Once prisoners are within the prison their condition is much more comfortable than it had been when they were under the charge of the policeman. When they leave the van their identity is checked and the warrants for their detention are inspected. They are then passed into the reception-room and are placed each in a separate box. They are taken one by one and questioned as to certain details that are noted for purposes of identification and for statistical records. Then comes the bath. The prisoner removes all his clothing and an inventory of it is taken. When he leaves the bath his own clothing has been replaced by a dress provided by the State. His clothing is disinfected and placed aside in a bundle, against the time of his liberation. He now receives a copy of the prison rules, which he must obey; a Bible, which he may study; a hymn-book; an industry-card, on which his earnings will be noted; and some other articles; and he is passed on to prison. His life there is one of monotonous routine whether his sentence be short or long.

The prison surprises visitors by its quiet and by the conspicuous cleanliness which is its characteristic feature. Yet it is not surprising that people should be able to keep the place clean and tidy, when they have little else to do and no opportunity for making it dirty and untidy. The cleanliness and tidiness of a prison is different from that of any household. It is not the cleanliness and tidiness of healthy life. It is part of the prisoner’s work to keep his cell and its furniture in order.

One thing visitors cannot miss seeing, yet do not observe, though it is of much more significance than the cleanliness they admire: the good temper and tractability of the prisoners. That a prisoner should be clean is wonderful; that people who have been committing breaches of the peace, assaults, thefts, and have been generally a nuisance or a terror to the public, should be moving about at work or at exercises quietly and peaceably, should be so obedient and tractable that one warder can look after twenty of them and seldom have anything to report to their discredit, is far more wonderful. These people are sent to prison because they cannot obey the law, but while in prison they are not rebellious; so that it is reasonable to infer that there has been something in the conditions of their life outside which has led them into misconduct, and not that they are inherently incapable of behaving themselves.

The modern prison is built on a simple plan. Roughly it may be described as two blocks of cells joined by a gable at each end and roofed over; a well being left between the blocks and lighted from the roof. All the cells have windows in the outer, and doors in the inner, walls. Balconies run round these inner walls, from which access is had to the cells in each flat. The cells in which the prisoners are confined are apartments measuring about 10 ft. by 7 ft. by 10 ft. high. The partitions and roofs of the cells are of whitewashed brickwork, and the floor of stone and asphalt. Each cell has a little window in the wall near the door glazed with obscured glass, and on the outside of these windows a gas bracket is placed. At night the cell is lit by this arrangement, which diminishes the amount of light and fixes its source in a corner. It is designed to prevent any person from attempting suicide by inhalation of gas; but in institutions where attempts at suicide are more likely to take place other means have been found to prevent the adoption of this method. It ensures that one hundred thousand people are inconvenienced in order that one may be prevented from ending his discomfort. There are other ways of breaking a walnut than crushing it with a steam-hammer.

A prison cell does not contain much furniture. The bed is a wooden shutter hinged to the wall, so that it can be folded up during the day-time. When not in use the bedding is rolled together and placed in a corner of the apartment. Convicted male prisoners who are under sixty years of age are not allowed a mattress during the first thirty days of their imprisonment; they just lie on the board. I do not suppose that anybody imagines that a man is more likely to lead a new life if he is made to sleep on a bare board, than he would be if he were allowed a mattress. It is intended to hurt, and it will hurt the more sensitive in a greater degree than those of a coarser constitution. It is a part of the system, and will go with it when people wake up to the fact that it is a senseless thing to set about to irritate and annoy others.Of late years it has been discovered that prisoners were as little likely to escape if their cells were well lit as they would be their cells being ill lit. The windows have consequently been enlarged and nobody has been the loser. The cell at the best is not a place to inspire cheerfulness, but an effort has been made to make the place less bare. Some years ago a six-inch circle of glass was attached to the wall in many cells. The glass was of that variety that distorts everything seen through it when it is used for windows, and when it is silvered and converted into a mirror the effect is peculiar.

The walls of some of the cells are decorated with a chromolithograph, such as is given to customers as a calendar by many shopkeepers at the New Year time. The mirror and the print, bad work and bad art though they may be, relieve the bare, ugly walls of the cells, and indicate a consciousness that the present system is not quite so perfect as it might be. Whether any such mitigations (if it can always be called a mitigation to see your face twisted out of shape and to gaze upon a sentimental chromo) are worthy of the fuss made about them is another matter, for the main question is not whether imprisonment should be mitigated, but—what is its object?

In Scotland the diet prescribed is a very simple one. In quantity it is ample for the needs of the great majority of the prisoners. Indeed, a fair proportion receive more than they are fit to consume. The medical officer may reduce a diet to prevent waste; or he may increase a diet, if in his view the prisoner requires more food. As I believe that nearly every man knows his own needs a great deal better than the diet specialist, a request from a prisoner for more food is never refused provided he is consuming all he gets. A request for a change of food is quite another thing; but a man who for gluttony would gorge himself with the diet provided for prisoners would be a curiosity.

The food is excellent in quality, but there is not much variety. There are three meals daily. Porridge and sour milk with bread form the morning and evening meals, and the dinner usually consists of broth and bread. This is the ordinary routine diet, and one can understand that after a time it is not unnatural there should be longings for a change. It is a simple diet and is sufficient. The death-rate in prisons is small. The improvement in the health of broken-down and habitually debauched persons during their term of imprisonment is marked, and there can be no doubt that the regimen saves many of them from death and prolongs their lives.

In these days the benefits of sour milk have been preached by the scientific man, and the culture of the lactic-acid bacillus has become a recognised industry. In the Scottish prisons the inmates have had the advantage of its beneficent operations for many years, though they did not know its name and would have been glad to have seen sweet milk rather than sour. The state of their health forms a strong argument for the advocates of the simple life, yet most of them would choose greater variety in food, though they should die a few years earlier.

The clothing of prisoners, as regards cutting and material, resembles nothing seen outside. The untried male is officially clothed in brown corduroy, and when convicted he exchanges this for white mole-skin. The surface of the cloth used to be decorated with broad-arrows, so that the prisoner looked like a person in a prehistoric dress over which some gigantic hen had walked after puddling in printer’s ink; but this has been discontinued.

The cut of the clothing seems to be designed to save cloth, and so long as the prisoner is kept warm he does not concern himself about the unfashionable character of his clothes. As for the women’s dress, being a mere man I cannot describe it; but ladies who visit the prison seem to be agreed that it is plain and neat. It is certainly strikingly different from anything they wear.

It is a rule that all convicted prisoners shall wear prison clothes. There are not very many of them whose own clothing is clean enough for them to wear, and not a few are more ragged than they need be. Whether they would not be better employed in cleaning and mending their own clothes than in doing many of the things they are required to do is a question that might be considered. It certainly does not seem reasonable that because a person has offended we should thrust upon him our hospitality to the extent of causing him to use clothing provided by us, if he has clothing of his own that he can decently wear. His own clothing has been placed aside while under our care, and at the expiry of his sentence it may be handed back to him as it was taken from him, excepting for the creases it has acquired in the interval. It would cost more trouble to the officials to set prisoners to improve their own appearance than to set them to break stones, and yet it might not be a bad thing to do nothing for a man, not even to provide him with clothing, if he can do it for himself.[2]When prisoners’ sentences exceed a certain term their own clothing is washed, and at the end of their imprisonment it is restored to them clean. This teaches them that if they do not keep their clothing clean it will be cleaned for them. At any rate, it does not teach them to do the necessary work themselves; but then it is much easier to do things for some people than to teach them to do these things for themselves.

The work provided for prisoners varies in kind in different districts, but it has one common characteristic, which is that few could earn a living by it outside. It has been said by those who ought to know better that the prisons cannot undertake anything but the lowest kinds of unskilled labour, because of the objections made by trade unions. These societies are no more infallible in their wisdom than their critics, but they do not adopt the foolish attitude attributed to them. Like employers of labour, they have objected to unfair competition on the part of prisons, and quite properly have taken steps to prevent underselling on the part of the authorities. Prisons are not self-supporting institutions, and, in the nature of things as they exist, cannot be made to defray the expenditure incurred in their upkeep. Most prisoners could quite well earn the cost of their food and clothing; but the cost of their supervision is greatly in excess of the cost of their board. It does not take much to keep a prisoner, but it takes a good deal to keep me and my colleagues, and that is a necessary part of the expenditure incurred on behalf of the institution.The prison accounts, as published, show a profit in some departments of prison labour, but this is arrived at by the ingenuous way of leaving out everything but the cost of material and (if the work is not for an outside customer) so much an hour for every prisoner engaged at it. If a manufacturer had only these items to consider there would be fewer bankrupts and more wealthy men; and if the price of goods were determined on an estimate of cost which only included these items plus a reasonable profit, it is quite clear that prison labour could undersell free labour. The trade unions and the private employers have simply insisted on prison-made goods being sold at prices which will not cut the market rate.

Prison labour is never so efficient as free labour, and though the employment of prisoners to do prison work may be justified on other grounds, it cannot be defended on an economic basis. It has often been suggested that tradesmen who have been convicted should be allowed to work at their trades while undergoing imprisonment; thereby they would be kept in practice, and would be less unfitted to resume their ordinary occupation on the expiry of their sentence; but a little consideration of the facts will show that however desirable this might be it is not practicable. In prison at any one time there may be a number of tradesmen, but their occupations are very different; and in many cases they are of such a character that even if work for them could be had it could not be undertaken owing to the fact that expensive machinery would require to be installed.

Even where the work is of such a kind that it could be done in prison it cannot be obtained for other reasons. In Glasgow prison, where there are more women than men incarcerated, a laundry was started some years ago, and customers were invited to send in their washing to be done at ordinary outside rates. The washing is done by hand and no modern laundry machine is employed. The result is that the articles cleaned are not subjected to the same strain, and are likely to last longer. Before long difficulties arose, and it became perfectly clear that these were not due to any action on the part of outside laundries, with which the prison was competing, but to inherent defects in the prison laundry. No business will be successful for long unless it keeps faith with its customers, who require to have their work done and delivered in proper condition within a fixed period. Sometimes there are skilled laundresses among the prisoners, and at other times there are not. Washing may be a very simple process, not requiring much training (although a great many occupations are considered, by those who do not undertake them, to be quite easy, but are difficult to those who try them for the first time), but it requires some skill to starch and iron clothing in a satisfactory way. Customers found this out for themselves. Work of that kind, and it seems a simple kind, is difficult to get, not because competing firms outside put obstacles in the way, but because the customer has no guarantee that he will have it done regularly to his satisfaction.

The workshops vary in kind in different prisons, but they have the common character of differing from any workshop outside a prison. The ability and experience possessed by the managers of prisons are not the same kind as those present in managers of workshops outside. The training has been quite different. The outside man may be very proud of his working arrangements, but if his balance-sheet is unsatisfactory his pride is effectively checked. There is no such check to the satisfaction of those who manage prisons. When one remembers that they are the sole authorised critics of their own work, it is not surprising that its character should differ from that produced by industrial concerns outside. As a general rule prisoners are engaged at unskilled labour. Some of them are associated at work, but always under the supervision of an officer, who sees that they do not engage in conversation with each other.

Public attention has been directed to the cruelty of solitary confinement, and nothing that has been said or written on the subject could be too strong in its condemnation. The term “Solitary Confinement” is generally objected to and that of “Separate Confinement” substituted for it; but the public need not concern itself with differences which are merely technical. The practice of rigidly enforcing silence and attempting to prevent any but the merest official interviews or associations between a prisoner and others will do as much serious harm under whatever name it is called. Experience has shown that the association of prisoners with each other in the absence of strict supervision may result in general corruption, but rational efforts to prevent this evil can be made without the risk of inducing a greater.

It is against the rules for prisoners to engage in conversation with one another; and the officers are not in a position to talk much to them except on business, even if they had the inclination to do so.

Prisoners may not be the most suitable company for each other; but, in the case of most of them, to shut one in to no company but himself can only result in his mental deterioration, and there can be no doubt that some have been driven towards insanity through this treatment.It is not an uncommon characteristic of old convicts that they show delusions of suspicion and of persecution, and this is not to be wondered at when one considers the narrowness of their life in prison, and the undue importance that is apt to be placed on little things by a man who is denied rational intercourse with others and whose natural curiosity is repressed.

The more monotonous his life, the more his mind is compelled to dwell on the trivial incidents that are happening around him; the more he is shut in to himself, the greater the tendency for him to become twisted mentally. The fresher and more varied his interest is kept in things outside of himself the better for him and for others.

The tendency of late years has all been towards a less rigid application of the rules which are designed to enforce silence, and there is now more reasonable association of prisoners than ever there has been, and less tendency when they are associated for their attention to be strained in an effort to watch at the same time their work and the warder who is supervising it.

When they are under supervision by a sensible person there is very little danger of their doing or saying things that would be harmful; and as at night they are all in separate cells, the corruption that sometimes takes place in institutions where the dormitory system is in use is not possible.

Amongst prisoners in Glasgow there has never in my experience been any chance for the development of a brooding, suspicious, unhealthy habit. The fact that so many untried prisoners are detained there, necessarily under conditions more favourable than the convicted, has made the place one in which the life is more varied and in which rules could be less readily enforced than in some other establishments. There have been more occurrences taking place under the prisoners’ eyes, and they have had more to interest them.

A good deal of the work is done in association, and that which is done in the cells is usually engaged in by prisoners who are detained for short terms; but even in their case they are not left alone for long periods. Visits to them are frequent for one purpose or another, and there is no attempt made to harass or drive them. Still, at the best, the life is not a healthy one from the mental standpoint.

Work and good conduct are rewarded by marks. Prisoners whose sentence exceeds fourteen days, and who are not on hard labour, may earn four marks per day. For every six marks earned one penny is allowed as a gratuity to the prisoner at the expiry of his sentence, and this may be paid to him on his discharge, or he may receive it through one or other of the Aid Societies after his liberation. Hard-labour prisoners may receive a gratuity of one shilling a month if their conduct and work have been satisfactory.

The Governor sees each prisoner daily in order to hear any complaint that may arise, either on the part of the prisoner or of the warder; but the visit otherwise is a formal one, as visits of inspection usually are. If the prisoner has a complaint or a request to make it is examined or attended to. Should there be a complaint against the prisoner the parties are heard and judgment is given. There are numerous acts which are offences in prison, and the governor has power in minor cases to deal with them and to award punishment at his discretion; but in no case involving a change of diet or the infliction of any physical discomfort can the punishment be carried out until the prisoner is certified by the Medical Officer to be fit to stand it.

The prisoner may offend in a great variety of ways, as through carelessness breaking a dish; through idleness failing to perform his task; through untidiness keeping his cell in an unsatisfactory condition; he may be insolent and insubordinate towards the officers; or he may be convicted of speaking to another prisoner or of making unauthorised communications. The offences for the most part are trifling in character and would not be offences outside the prison, but if the system is to be maintained the offenders must be dealt with.

In more serious cases the offender is tried by a member of the Visiting Committee of the prison or by a Prison Commissioner. In some cases the conclusion cannot be escaped that offences are due more to an incompatibility of temperament between the prisoner and those over him than to anything else. A prisoner may behave and work well when under the supervision of one officer, and may do badly when under the care of another. Some people can manage those under them better than others; but not infrequently the prisoner is neither a malicious person nor the warder a stupid person, and yet they cannot get on together. The obvious thing to do is to separate them; the easy thing to do is to punish the prisoner.

Sometimes assaults are made on warders by prisoners. In sixteen years’ experience I have seen very few, and the assailants were usually half-witted creatures who had conceived a dislike, which did not seem to be founded on any tangible reason, against the person assailed. In my opinion these cases should never be tried in prison. Offences committed in prison which would be cognisable by the criminal authorities if committed outside should be tried in an open Court. I do not suggest that the prisoner would be treated unjustly if tried in prison, but it cannot be denied that the atmosphere is not favourable to his receiving the impression that he is getting what he would call “a fair show”; and the trial of a man before a Court consisting of those interested in the management of prisons, on the complaint of a prison official, and without the presence of any members of the general public, is not calculated to inspire confidence.

Prisoners are at liberty to make any complaint to the Prison Commissioners in writing, and the governor is obliged to forward it; or they may communicate direct with the Secretary for Scotland without the writing being seen by the prison officials. Such complaints may be referred to those complained against for answer, and if the result is not satisfactory a special enquiry may take place.

Each prison has its punishment cells—places for the incarceration of unruly prisoners. Under rational management there is no use for them except temporarily, and then only to prevent the prisoner from injuring himself or others, or from annoying other prisoners by noise, in a fit of temper suggestive of insanity.

It is one of the Chaplain’s duties to visit the prisoners, and although it is intended that he should minister to them spiritual consolation, that term may mean anything in practice. A man, whether a clergyman or not, who puts himself in a position of censor of morals to his fellows, is not regarded by them with any degree of affection or respect, unless he does not stop there. Few people like to be talked down to, whether they are in prison or out of it. A superior attitude adopted towards some is more likely to draw out their evil qualities, and to excite them to bad temper and wrath, than to help them. I do not think Prison Chaplains in Scotland, whether belonging to one denomination or another, are given to the practice of assuming that with those whom they address necessarily lies all the blame for their position. There is more a disposition to pity than to blame, although an attitude of pity is sometimes a greater insult than one of censure and may irritate as deeply.

There has been a growing disposition to say kind things to and of prisoners. We may believe that more can be done by the kind look than by the harsh word, and lose sight of the fact that pity and sympathy are two quite different things. The fact of the matter is that nobody is able to assess justly the amount of blame to be attached to a man for his misdeeds, and the amount to be placed to the discredit of society; but in few cases is anyone helped by being encouraged to believe that he is free from blame, that he could not do any better than he has done.

Prisoners are not different from others in their tendency to put the best construction on their own behaviour. An astonishing number are in jail because they had bad neighbours. According to their statements, they could get along all right if it were not for the people next door. It may be quite true to some extent, but they are not to be helped in mending their own conduct by attention to the faults of their neighbours. I do not suggest that this attitude on their part, this disposition to prove how comparatively stainless they are and how objectionable are those with whom they have been brought in contact, is due to the ministrations of the clergy, but merely that it affects their estimate of the ministers of religion.

The attitude of the prisoner towards the minister is one thing; his attitude towards the doctor, for instance, is quite another. The Chaplain desires to be regarded as a friend of the prisoner, and that by many he is so regarded there can be no doubt; but unfortunately, with some of them, they seem to measure friendship by their ability to humbug the friend, and the value of the clergyman by what they can put into him which may tell in their favour when he estimates their character, and by what they can get out of him in the way of material help. The Chaplain is sometimes swindled, but so are we all; his office and his message make him a mark for the shafts of the wicked. He sees one side of the prisoner better than any other official, and if he has counterfeit penitents he has also real ones. His visits may be a source of encouragement and strength to the prisoner; but whatever spiritual effect his teaching may have—whether it be great or little—if he has a human interest in those he visits, in so far as his character commands respect his ministrations tend to prevent the prisoner from sinking under the monotony of the discipline to which he is subjected.

Representatives of various religious agencies visit prisoners. They are remarkable for their earnestness and zeal, but there is often a fatal difference of standpoint between visitor and visited. A girl brought up in a slum, seeing and hearing sights and sounds which are an outrage on decency; working for long hours to earn a scanty living; housed rather worse than many horses and dogs; ill-taught and ill-cared for; has transgressed the law and been sent to prison. She knows she is to blame for doing the thing she has done in the way she has done it, but she and those like her regard her imprisonment as in some degree an accident. It is difficult to describe the standpoint. In a busy street where there is a constant stream of horses and mechanical traffic going in different directions and at different rates of speed, there is always danger to the passenger who seeks to cross; and occasionally someone is run down and hurt. The injured party is always to blame to some extent, and is hurt because he has failed to estimate the danger accurately and to avoid it successfully; but others may be to blame also. The fault is never wholly on one side. To the girl the law resembles the traffic in the street; and when she is knocked down she and her friends regard her as the victim of misfortune.

That is not the standpoint of the visitor. She may have known nothing of the trials and temptations of the poor, save what she has seen from the outside. Hunger has never been her attendant; poverty has been unknown to her. She has received attention and care in her early days; has not been tasked beyond her strength; has been able to choose her own work and do it in her own time; has been well housed and well fed; and has found it easy to obey the law. Between the two a great gulf is fixed. Their outlook is as different as their experience.

It is a great mistake to assume that the rich know more of the poor than the poor know of the rich. The street-corner spouter may denounce the luxury of the wealthy and expose himself to their ridicule. They know that they are not as he paints them, and they laugh or sneer at his ignorance; but they are as little qualified to judge him as he is to judge them. Each sees the other’s vices; and every visitor is as much a subject of criticism by the prisoner as a critic.

It is as unreasonable to expect that a woman in prison will give her confidence to a stranger who visits her, as it would be for the prisoner to expect that the visitor would submit to her questions. One thing is absolutely certain, and that is that visitors do not do the good they imagine they are doing when they pass from one cell to another exhorting the prisoners to better behaviour. They stir up the emotions of those to whom they minister, and some of the women find great consolation and relief in a good cry. There are those, however, who have learned to distrust the possibility of wholesale reform of prisoners, and who single out some one whom it seems possible to help and hang on to her, visit and encourage her on her liberation, and have their reward in the consciousness that they have really rendered effective assistance where it was needed.

The ideal held up by the visitors in their advice to prisoners too often seems impossible of attainment by those to whom it is presented. There are some who have no ambition to live within the law, but there are many who would rather do so if they could. Most of us have not in us the capacity to become great saints; and to ask the ordinary person to conform to a standard which would present difficulties to us, does not seem reasonable. Something is gained if, though you fail to persuade a person to be good, you can induce him to be better than he has been. Just as many have drifted into evil courses step by step, they may be led into a better way of living by degrees. Sudden conversions are not uncommon, but they are not the rule. The visits to prisoners on the part of people from outside are of great benefit; anything is that breaks the monotony of the day; and if the visitors are receptive they may learn a good deal from the prisoners, and may be made the better for their visit even though they fail to make the impression they desire on those to whom they have spoken.There are three forms of religion recognised in prison: the Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and Episcopalian. A service is held once a week by a clergyman of each of these Churches, and the Presbyterians go out to prayers daily.

The chapel has a more or less ecclesiastical appearance, and is divided in such a way that the male and the female prisoners do not see each other, though the preacher can see both divisions. Most of the prisoners do not attend religious services when they are at liberty, but some make an ingenious distinction between religion and conduct. I remember one old woman who had grown grey and almost blind after a long course of vicious and criminal conduct. She was eloquent regarding a person whom she described as being “nae better than an infidel.” I replied that “at least he had kept out of prison,” and she replied, “Aye; but though I have been a drunkard, a blackguard, and a thief, thank God I never neglected my religion.”

I do not know whether the Salvation Army representatives are more effective as religious agents than the other visitors. Their work is certainly better advertised, and they belong usually to the same social rank as many of the prisoners. The religion they teach, if more emotionally expressed, is not different from that taught by the other visitors; but they can appeal to the prisoner more effectively because they are better able than many others to appreciate and sympathise with the difficulties and temptations under which the wrongdoer has fallen.

Many of those in prison are not there because of idleness. They have worked harder in their day than the people who talk eloquently about the dignity of labour. Neither are they there because, like the heathen, they have never heard the message of the gospel. As a matter of fact, most of them can never get away from the voice of the preacher for any long time, for the evangelists are abroad nightly singing hymns and exhorting the public in all the poorer working-class districts. They have worked hard enough to earn money and are in prison because they have not known how to spend it wisely. In prison they are not taught useful work, and as little are they taught how to recreate themselves after work. Their day may be divided into four parts: There is a time for eating; there is a time for working; and what they do and what food they have has already been shown. There is a time for sleeping: they go to bed early in the evening and rise early in the morning. “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man——” well, it doesn’t. At any rate, the inmates of the prison have not attracted attention hitherto on account of their wealth or their wisdom. Then there is a time left for meditation.

Every prisoner has his Bible and his Prayer Book. I am far from suggesting that this is a provision that should not be made, but by this time it will be generally admitted that mere Bible reading, or praying, when a prisoner is in a measure compelled to it, are not likely to have the most beneficial effect. It is a useful thing occasionally to be able to quote scripture, and some of those who have spent a considerable portion of their lives in prison have stored their memory with a large and varied assortment of texts, which they are prepared to use when they think a profit is to be made thereby. A profession of reformation seems to have a more powerful effect when buttressed with texts of scripture, and an appeal for help on the part of the penitent is more likely to succeed when heard by the godly, many of whom are exceedingly kind to those who show a disposition to conform to their theological standards.

Persons whose sentences exceed fourteen days may have books from the prison library with which to beguile their time. The books provided resemble the clothing, in respect that it is greatly a matter of chance as to whether they suit the person who gets them. I have seen an illiterate lad from the slums hopelessly wrestling with an elementary manual on Electricity and Magnetism. I suppose this would be regarded as an educational work. The library is carefully selected with the intention of excluding all pernicious literature—certainly the sensational is passed by—but we all differ in our ideas as to the value of books; I myself would describe some popular works as pernicious literature; and many of the papers that one set of people appreciate and are able to read without apparent injury are of no use to others. The complaint which has been made that prison libraries contain a great deal of poor stuff, and do not contain a sufficient representation of the classic writers, leaves out of account the fact that these classic writers are more talked about than read. The popular novelist of to-day has a larger audience in his own generation than ever Shakespeare had. The one writer is read during his lifetime, the other finds his audience all through the ages. In a prison, as in all institutions, the attempt is made to work to an average. When the educated person appears in prison let us refrain from insulting his intelligence by giving him books to read which he despises; but he must remember that others are not as he is, and that they may even derive stimulus and benefit from those works which can only annoy him.The untried prisoner may have newspapers and magazines sent in to him as well as books, unless, indeed, the Visiting Committee refuse to permit this. He can choose suitable literature for himself provided his friends are willing to send it to him, but immediately he is convicted he has no choice in the matter. The State is his librarian; and it seems a little absurd that the taxpayer should be charged for providing him with things which he does not want, and which can do him no good, if he or his friends could, at their own expense, procure him books he would enjoy.

Of late years lectures have been given to prisoners, and occasionally concerts have been provided for them. The lectures have been on all kinds of subjects. Some of them have dealt with travel and have been illustrated by limelight views; others have dealt with sanitation, physiology, and the treatment of common ailments; others have taken the form of cookery demonstrations; and the prison audience is invariably more appreciative than most audiences outside. They enjoy anything that breaks the dulness of their routine life. No sensible person expects that the lectures will make them travellers, or physiologists, or cooks, though an interest in these subjects may be kindled by the lecturer. Few people are ever lectured into a change of life, but anything that prevents them from sinking into apathy, from brooding on the petty incidents that go to make up their lives in prison, from beating against the bars of their cage, is beneficial.

There are those who protest against making the prison too comfortable and who seem to believe that people want to go there. There need be no fear of this. A cage is a cage even though it be gilded, and they are few indeed who seek imprisonment. Occasionally you have some saying they prefer the prison to the poorhouse. I have worked in both places and wholly agree with their preference, but that is not a testimony to the desirability of life in prison, but a reproach to the poorhouse. Those who support efforts to lessen the monotony of prison life are not moved by any desire that the prisoners may have a good time. For my own part, I am not concerned to make their lot less mechanical merely for their sakes, but for the sake of the community of which they are a part. I believe that imprisonment has been shown to have a bad effect on those who suffer it, and as some day they are to be turned loose on the community, it is advisable to prevent them being liberated in a condition that would make them more dangerous to their fellow-citizens, or more troublesome, than they were before their arrest.

Outside the block of cells is an airing-yard, which consists of a space round which two narrow paved walks run. On these the prisoners take their exercise, each walking for an hour daily for the benefit of his health; separated by a space from the prisoner in front and the prisoner behind him, and watched by a warder lest any conversation or sign of recognition takes place between him and his fellows. The elderly or physically defective prisoners walk round the inner ring, where the pace is slower.

Some of the female prisoners undergo a course of instruction in Swedish drill. Their opinion is expressed in the name by which the exercise is known. It is called the “Daft hour,” and they enjoy it. As to its usefulness from an industrial standpoint the less said the better. It does no harm and it is a pleasant break in the day. In short, the prisoners are better employed in going through the drill than in doing something worse.

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CHAPTER IV

VARIATIONS IN ROUTINE

The sick—Prison hospitals—The removal of the sick to outside hospitals—The wisdom of this course—The essential difference between a prison and other public institutions—The treatment of refractory prisoners—The folly of assuming that rules are more sacred than persons—The position of the medical officer in relation to the prisoner—The danger of divided responsibility—The untried prisoner—His privileges—Civil prisoners—Imprisonment for contempt of court—The convict—Short and long sentences.

The system makes no provision for individual differences between prisoners and takes no account of the past training which has made them what they are, but it recognises physical differences. It is the duty of the Medical Officer to see that no one is overtaxed or underfed or insufficiently clothed, and to attend to any sickness that occurs. If a prisoner is insane he is removed to a lunatic asylum. If he is ill he is put under treatment.

In the majority of cases the prison hospitals are simply larger and better-lit cells. They are free from anything but the roughest imitation of modern hospital appliances; but as there is no occasion for the treatment in them of prisoners suffering from acute serious illness, they are sufficient for the needs they are required to meet. What is required for the treatment of such as are sick is not so much stone and lime as flesh and blood. Not new hospitals, but trained nurses.When a prisoner is reported sick or asks to see the doctor, he is automatically freed from the ordinary rules. If the medical man decides that there is nothing in his condition to warrant his being put on the sick list he falls back under prison discipline. If, however, he requires medical treatment, the Medical Officer may prescribe any regimen which he considers applicable to the case, and the Governor has the instructions carried out. It may broadly be stated that cases requiring the constant attendance of a skilled nurse and those demanding serious operative treatment do not need to be treated in Scottish prisons. Section 72 of the Prisons (Scotland) Act, 1877, enables the Governor, in certain cases, to petition the Sheriff for a warrant to remove sick prisoners to hospitals outside. He must present two medical certificates to the effect that the prisoner (1) is suffering from a disease which threatens immediate danger to life and cannot be treated in prison, or (2) a disease which makes his removal necessary for the health of the other inmates of the prison, or (3) that continued confinement would endanger his life. This is one of the wisest provisions in the Act. Cases might occur in which the treatment required would be of such a character as to make it inadvisable to have it carried out in prison.

Assuming that there is no difference in the experience and skill of the prison doctors and their staff from that of the corresponding officials in the general hospital, the conditions in prison are essentially different. In a general hospital there are all sorts of people as patients, and their friends have access to them; it is a public place compared with the prison. The staff is subjected to continual criticism; not always enlightened, and sometimes unfair, but it exercises a healthy effect on their actions. There is no greater danger to the public than the uncontrolled specialist; and it is a bad thing for him if he is led into any belief either in the infallibility of his judgment, or in its necessary applicability to the case with which he deals. He can perform no operation without the consent of the patient or his friends, even though he believe that operation is necessary to the saving of life. There are cases in which this permission is refused in spite of all the persuasions of the medical man; and in some of these cases, contrary to expectation, the patient gets well. In others death takes place where life might have been saved had consent to the necessary treatment been obtained; yet it would be an intolerable condition of affairs if the medical man were to have his patients placed at the discretion of his judgment; and no one would propose that the inmates of a hospital should be compelled to submit to any treatment that the doctors in their wisdom might see fit to prescribe.

In a neighbouring country lately the question of compulsory treatment was raised. All the information I have with regard to it has been obtained from the statements, official and otherwise, which have been published. These statements may have been imperfect, but only from them can the public form an opinion, The statements contradict each other, and as they refer to incidents which took place in a prison—a place to which ordinary members of the public have no access—they are bound to leave an uneasy feeling in the mind of the impartial observer.

Certain women, impelled by the desire to advance a political measure, engaged in conduct which brought them into conflict with the authorities. It was claimed on their behalf that they had committed a political offence, and in that respect differed from other criminals; but all offences are political offences. Whether a woman strikes a man because she is angry with him, or because she is angry with a Cabinet Minister whom she does not know, she commits an assault which is a crime in the eyes of the law. Her motive may differ in the one case from the other, but its issue has no difference; and in both cases, in so far as the State takes notice of it, it is a political offence. Distinctions between offences can only end in confusion; distinctions between offenders have never been sufficiently recognised; and no real progress can ever be made in the treatment of the criminal until the differences between one person and another are taken into account. There can be no question that in character, in training, and in their previous history, these women differed widely from the ordinary prisoner, and all the trouble which resulted was due to the failure of those in authority to act upon their knowledge of this fact. That the conduct for which many of the women were sent to prison was unreasonable, few will deny; but it was no more unreasonable than the treatment they received. If they behaved like mad people, so did the officials.

The only way in which one person can show greater wisdom than another is by conduct. If the women were hysterical, the officials did not exactly shine as examples of calmness. The highly strung person who glories in what she believes to be martyrdom, who sees everything in the light of her own ideals, is not likely to be brought to another frame of mind by receiving the treatment which she regards as persecution. These women had made it necessary that they should be restrained from annoying others by their conduct; but it mattered nothing to the public that they should be restrained in a certain way; what did matter was that the nuisance should be effectively stopped. That the method of dealing with them increased the trouble is beyond question; and there is no justification for interference with anybody except in so far as the method adopted has the result desired.

It is folly, if not worse, to enter upon any course that cannot be carried on indefinitely. If your treatment fails to achieve the end aimed at, that is bad; if it results in the person with whom you are dealing beating you, that is worse. The law attempted to frighten the women, and the women, by their continued resistance, frightened the administrators of the law. Which presented the most sorry spectacle it is hard to say.

The trouble seems to have begun through the refusal on the part of the authorities to allow the women to wear their own clothing. What harm it would have done to anybody to grant this permission it is difficult to see. If they had fed themselves and clothed themselves it would have saved expense to the public. They believed that the clothing was intended to degrade them; and they might have asked, if that was not the intention, why was the proceeding insisted on? Of course, to permit them to save the State the expense of keeping them while they were in custody would have upset the system; but the system is far from being considered by those who are responsible for its administration to be anything approaching perfection, for it is a fashionable thing amongst them to ask for its improvement, and to justify changes, when they make them, on the ground that they were required. Opposition grew with repression; unreason provoked unreason, and the public heard with considerable uneasiness that a hunger strike was taking place, and that the strikers were being artificially fed.

In certain physical diseases resort to artificial feeding may be necessary, but prisoners suffering from these diseases are not fit for prison discipline and should be treated in a hospital outside. Among the insane are those who obstinately refuse to take food, and therefore require to be fed; but an insane person differs from a prisoner in this important respect, that in the eyes of the law he is free from responsibility and has no will of his own. His friends are permitted access to him. They may, and sometimes do, interfere with the discretion of the medical attendant, and in any case his actions are within their supervision and criticism.

Medical men assume that self-preservation is a primal instinct, and that the person who deliberately sets out to maim himself or to destroy his life is insane, even although intellectually he may appear to be quite sound. If a man become possessed by religious zeal and set out to convert his neighbours to his views, he may incidentally be a considerable nuisance to them. He may stand at street corners and annoy the surrounding inhabitants by his exhortation; but, in Glasgow at any rate, they put up with this on account of the good intention they ascribe to him. If, however, he gives up his business, and prevents other people from attending to theirs by calling on them and arguing with them, people begin to suspect his sanity; and the man who would throw a brick into another’s office at the risk of hurting some of the people employed there, in order to convince their principal that if he did not accept the religion the missionary preached he would go to hell, would probably be dealt with as a lunatic. The conduct of some of the women was quite as eccentric, but people may do insane-like things without being insane. That, however, is no reason for disregarding their eccentricities, which should be taken into account when dealing with them. If the women required to be fed artificially, it by no means follows that it was a proper thing to do so in prison. It certainly was indiscreet, and it is difficult to see how, if it was justifiable to resort to this measure in order to save the life of a prisoner, it could be argued that a medical officer would not be equally justified in cutting off the injured or diseased arm of a prisoner, in spite of his protestations, in order to save his life. It is one thing to place the liberties of men, and another thing altogether to place their lives in the hands of officials.

There is no official and no number of officials—by whatever name called—good enough to be entrusted, unchecked by public observation, with the lives of their fellow-citizens; and there is no criminal bad enough to be immured from the public gaze and placed wholly under the control of anyone. It is not that the officials are bad; they are no worse than unofficial persons and no better, and there is far more danger from those who have gained a reputation for humanity and for enlightened opinions, even when they have deserved the reputation, than from the others, because the former are likely to be left more to themselves on account of their good name. Few who read this could be trusted to do as good a day’s work at the end of the year as they did at the beginning, if there were not someone to check and criticise them.

Here and there, now and then, there are violent outcry and excitement because of some administrative scandal, and there is seldom much in it; but there is no continued and intelligent interest in administration on the part of the public. If a man do not fulfil his contract his employer may accept an excuse once or even twice; but if his failure continue he will find himself out of a job, and someone less incompetent or unfortunate will be sought and put in his place. In the public service excuses and exceptions are so much the rule that it would be easy to form a library of blue books containing them, printed and paid for at the public expense.

Only ordinary cases of domestic sickness need be treated in prison, and such ailments or injuries as are dealt with in the outdoor department of a general hospital. In Scotland there is little inducement to prisoners to feign sickness, as there is no automatic change in their diet or location as a result of their being placed on the sick list. The doctor may or may not remove them from their cells and alter their diet. So far as the Act of Parliament is concerned the treatment of the sick lies wholly in his discretion, and there is no power granted to any authority to interfere with or overturn his decision. He may be questioned as to the reason for his conduct; and if foolish enough or weak enough to be persuaded into altering it, in order to please some higher official, he may do so; but the Act of Parliament is absolutely specific in the matter, and refers the sick not to the Commissioners, but to the surgeon of the prison.

It is much easier for a man to carry out an instruction received from above, than to assert and act on the powers conferred on him by statute; but it is not right to do so, and in so far as he is subservient he is unfaithful to his trust. Patients cannot be treated by correspondence. No man, however highly placed, is infallible. Better that the man on the spot should accept his responsibilities frankly, even though he do make mistakes, than that he should look to someone who is not present to direct him in a case of difficulty. No medical man need want for help from his neighbours, and he can easily get someone of approved skill to assist him in the diagnosis or treatment of a difficult case. It is quite proper that his actions should be scrutinised, but it is quite wrong that the scrutiny should take place in private. The statute has recognised this principle, and has ordered that a public enquiry should take place on the occasion of the death of any prisoner in prison. The relatives of the prisoner are there entitled to put any questions to the officials, personally or through an agent; and the Sheriff has to be satisfied that all reasonable care and skill have been exercised in the case.

Private official enquiries give opportunity for petty persecution on the part of any Jack-in-office who fancies his abilities are equal to his position, and whose spleen may be raised against better men than himself. No man eminent in his profession would be likely to be guilty of such conduct, but the occupation of some positions does not necessarily imply professional eminence, though it may infer social influence.

The Medical Officer has not an arduous task in treating the sick. His work practically consists of patching up old offenders, in the knowledge that he is prolonging their lives and their uselessness, to the injury of the public. Many of them would have been dead long ago as the result of their excesses had they not been interfered with. It is well that their lives should be prolonged and their health improved, but only if some security is taken that they use their powers to better purpose in the future than they have done in the past. There is no sense in the State doing anything for anybody without a reasonable guarantee that the person benefited will not use the benefit to the injury of the community. Many are cured of diseases in various public institutions, and turned loose to live on others for the rest of their lives. There is an increasing number of young people who, having suffered from some serious illness, have been saved from death, but have been left permanently crippled to some extent in one or other of their organs. They are not fit for the work they once engaged in, but they are fit for some work, and so far as can be seen, they have no intention of performing any. A number of them drift to the prison and on the strength of their infirmity try to get special treatment. The special treatment they require cannot be had there, nor is there any place at present where it can be had.

The untried prisoner is permitted to wear his own clothing, provided it is clean and that he can have it changed with sufficient frequency. He may hire furniture and pay for the cleaning of his cell. He may have visits from those of his friends he desires to see; and he may correspond with them, provided that in the conversation and correspondence there is nothing said or written regarding the charge against him. All letters to and from him are read and censored on behalf of the Governor. Prisoners are not allowed to see and converse with their friends without the presence of a prison official. The prisoner is put in a box with a latticed front, and his visitor is placed in another box opposite. Between the two boxes there is space for a warder to move. He can see the occupants of both boxes, each of whom can only see the person in the box opposite. When a number of prisoners are having visitors at the same time, there is a shouting and gabbling that makes conversation difficult. Convicted prisoners and convicts of the first class may receive a letter and a visit from a friend once in three months, provided their conduct and industry have been satisfactory. Before their entry into the first class convicts may receive one, two, or three letters and visits in the year, according to the class they have reached. After being a year in the first class they may be placed in a special class, receiving a letter and a visit once in two months.

The prisoner sees his agent in view of but outwith the hearing of the warder. He may have his food sent in to him by his friends, provided it is sufficient in quality and amount, but he may not have part of a meal sent in. He may also receive newspapers, magazines, or books. Any or all of these privileges may be granted or withdrawn at the discretion of the Visiting Committee. It is questionable whether it is right that they should be granted as privileges. The man is, in the eyes of the law, presumed to be innocent of the offence charged against him; and his detention is only justifiable on the ground that he might fail to appear at court for trial. That being so, he ought not to require permission from any committee or official before he is allowed to feed, clothe, and amuse himself; and he should only be prevented from doing so if his act is detrimental to his own health or that of the other inmates of the prison. This might cause more trouble to the officials concerned, but the primary object of the system ought not to be the saving them trouble.

The untried prisoner may have a pint of wine or a pint of beer daily, but on no account is he permitted to smoke. This is a curious restriction nowadays, and there is not the faintest show of reason for its exercise. The proper attitude towards the untried prisoner is not that implied in the question “Why should he be allowed to do this?” The question ought always to be “Why should he not be allowed to do what he wishes?” and this would be the question if the theory that presumes an untried prisoner’s innocence were put in practice. He is detained for the convenience of the public, not for his own, and his liberty should be curtailed as little as possible consistent with good order.

There are very few civil prisoners in Scotland. Failure to pay aliment may entail on a prisoner imprisonment, at the instance and expense of his creditor, for a period of six weeks. At the end of that time the prisoner is free from similar proceedings for six months, but the costs are added to his original debt. He has some of the privileges of an untried prisoner. Failure to pay taxes may cause a man to be imprisoned under similar conditions. Persons sent to prison for failing to have their children vaccinated are treated by the same rule, and persons condemned to indefinite imprisonment for contempt of court.

In Scotland we claim that we do not imprison for debt other than aliment, rates, or taxes; but the rule is evaded by process of law, and the Prison Commissioners are used as debt collectors in some cases. Technically this is not so, but in practice it occurs. X 31, a woman, has obtained jewellery on the hire-purchase system. She is the wife of a labouring man, and there is room for the suspicion that she has been tempted by the seller. A number of payments are made, then the husband loses his employment, and she is not only cut off from the means of paying her instalments, but has not money to get food. She pawns or otherwise disposes of the jewellery, and is called upon either to pay for it or return it. Her intention may be to pay, but she is not able. She is summoned to appear at Court, and fails to do so. In her absence a decree is granted ordaining her to deliver the jewellery to the person from whom she obtained it, in terms of the contract made between them. Failing to do this, she is seized and carried off to prison, on a warrant obtained for Contempt of Court, inasmuch as she had not obeyed its decree. All her friends become alarmed, and by their united efforts the money to satisfy the creditor may be obtained. If this is not done she may be kept in prison for an indefinite period at his expense. Had she contracted a debt with the grocer for food, or with a dressmaker for clothing, they could not have imprisoned her if she did not pay them, even though they desired to do so. They are thus at a serious disadvantage, so far as the exercise of pressure is concerned, compared with the hire-purchase trader; but the ingenious among them who regret the abolition of imprisonment for debt may revive it in effect by selling groceries and clothes on a hire-purchase contract.

The routine treatment to which the convict is subjected is much more severe than that which is applied to the ordinary prisoner, and it does as little good.[3] It is a system of repression mainly; a sitting on the safety-valve that is apt to provoke outbursts of temper and violence resulting in assault. These may be punished with the lash. A power which is not possessed by the Judges of the High Court is granted to the Prison Commissioners. It is considered necessary in order to maintain the system, but as no one claims that the system is in any degree reformatory, it becomes a question whether it is worth maintaining.The same man who is at one time a convicted prisoner in an ordinary prison may at another time be undergoing penal servitude. While he is in an ordinary prison there is neither power nor occasion to order him the severe punishments which may be inflicted on convicts. If he need the lash when he is sent to penal servitude, there is at least the presumption that the cause lies as much in the character of the life he is compelled to lead as in the character of the man. The more punishment inflicted on prisoners in a prison the stronger the probability is that the place is badly managed. Repression is necessary, no doubt, but repressive powers should only co-exist with power to reward. Even a donkey will go further after a carrot than when driven by a stick. It never does any good to a man to treat him as a machine, and the tendency to do so under the name of discipline is a root vice of the system. In the convict prison, as in the ordinary prison, during the last few years the grinding mechanical routine has been relaxed, and the amazing discovery has been made that it is easier and better to manage men if you recognise that they are men than to regard them as mere numbers. There has even been talk of reformation resulting from the changes that have taken place, and to judge by some magazine and newspaper articles from the pens of enthusiastic and ignorant visitors, one would think the prison had become a kind of paradise.

That other men’s behaviour towards us will largely be determined on our behaviour towards them is no new discovery, and that more considerate treatment by officials should result in better conduct on the part of prisoners need surprise no one; but that this better conduct necessarily implies that they will live in conformity with the laws when liberated does not follow at all. You may improve a man’s conduct in prison as you may improve his mental condition in a lunatic asylum, but you never know how he will behave outside until you put him there; and if we acted on the knowledge of this fact we should see that persons liberated from any institution are placed in proper positions outside—that they should be guided and helped in so far as they need guidance and help—so that there would be less excuse for their recurring to their old habits and conduct, and less chance of their relapse into the condition and actions for which we have dealt with them.

Of late years short sentences have been generally denounced on the ground that there is no time to reform a prisoner who is only under the influence of the system for a few days. This would be a reasonable objection if those who are sent to prison for long periods were thereby made better, but that is precisely what cannot be shown; for the longer a person is in prison the less fit he is on liberation to take his place in the community. So that if short sentences are bad, long sentences are worse, from the standpoint of the reformer. A person sent to prison for a few days is usually the cleaner for his experience. Imprisonment has kept him off the streets for a time. It has also caused him to lose his job, and, as usually the short-time prisoner is not a person of means, his position is worse after his imprisonment than it was before. He has to earn his living by his work, if he would avoid coming into conflict with the law; and if he has no means of livelihood it is easy to see that he will find it difficult to avoid recommittal.

In this respect the long-sentence prisoner resembles him, but in addition he has acquired habits in prison that are a hindrance to him outside.

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CHAPTER V

THE PRISONER ON LIBERATION

His condition—His need—Alleged persecution of ex-prisoners—Discharged prisoners’ aid societies—Work—Temptations—The discharged female offender—The attitude of women towards her—“Homes”—The women’s objections to them—Pay—The religious atmosphere and the harmful associations—The effect of imprisonment.

While in prison a man has been cut off from the life of the world. He has had no visits from his friends save once in three months, and as there is no newspaper which he is permitted to see, he is ignorant of any changes that may have occurred during the time of his incarceration. Those who have at any time been confined to the house by sickness may dimly appreciate his condition. Although they may have been visited by their friends; kept in touch with social movements in which they were interested; and generally helped to a knowledge of passing events of interest; they must have found something strange in the aspect of things when they were first allowed out.

Even after a holiday it takes a man some little time to get the hang of his work. In the case of the liberated prisoner the difficulty is greatly aggravated. He may find that during his seclusion friends have died or have left the district, and if a first offender who feels the degradation he has brought on himself, he is likely to be sensitive as to the bearing of others towards him. He needs help; he dreads rebuff; and he does not know where to seek assistance. He may readily misinterpret the attitude of others towards him and imagine that men whom he has known are giving him the cold shoulder, when, in fact, they have not seen him. He has been shut off from the company of others, and he feels the need of fellowship with someone. He can always have that from those who, like himself, have been through the mill; and he may be led by them into further mischief.

Our interference with the offender results in his removal, for a time, from the associations and habits to which he has been accustomed; to that extent the power over him of these associations and habits may be weakened; but no matter where we put him, we cannot hinder him from learning new habits, and these may or may not be useful to him on his liberation. The more powerful the influence of his later interests the less likely he is to seek to return to his old pursuits. The thing which no man can do without is fellowship or comradeship of some sort. He will seek it even although in the process he may be injured thereby; and it is because drink makes the company of some men more tolerable to each other that so many take it. It is not so much that they wish to get drunk; they could do that alone; and at first, at any rate, the drink is not taken merely to intoxicate, but largely to stimulate sociability. The person who has been pent up in an institution for a prolonged period has not learned habits of a sociable character, but quite the contrary; and when he gets out he knows that he will more easily become a part of good company if he takes drink, for thereby he will be set free from the feeling of restraint to which he has been subjected.There has been a great deal of talk about police persecution of liberated prisoners. In some cases the official zeal of a policeman may cause him to act towards an ex-prisoner with a harshness he does not intend, but in most cases the persecution only exists in the imagination of its subject. Few of us see all things as they are. We are influenced by our beliefs quite apart from their foundation in fact, and this is shown in all our actions. We see men believing in others in spite of evidence which we think ought to undeceive them; and people have been known to get married under a quite mistaken estimate of each other’s character.

So long as the discharged prisoner believes that the world is against him, that the hand of the representative of the law is raised to oppress him, his actions will be influenced by that belief; and he may be driven to despair as a consequence. I do not think that policemen generally have any ill-feeling towards offenders; but officially there is no encouragement for any personal feeling on their part, good or bad. Theirs is an unenviable position.

We make no real attempt to investigate the cause of wrongdoing and to prevent crime by a rational method. Should a policeman interfere before an offence has been committed, the motive of his interference will as often as not be misinterpreted and he will be denounced as a busybody. In practice we encourage him to believe that it is his main duty to arrest offenders and he does his best to discharge this duty. It is too much to expect that between him and those whom he is set to hunt there can be any likelihood of mutual regard. As enemies each may have a respect for the other, but friendship and friendly help are out of the question. Unfortunately this fact has been left out of account in some recent proposals for the prevention of crime and the reformation of the offender.

In connection with all the prisons there are discharged prisoners’ aid societies, which seek to help those whose sentences have expired. The number of these societies is increasing; but in Glasgow, praiseworthy as are their efforts, they are quite unable to undertake the work that requires to be done. In practice the societies mainly consist of their officials, and these are few and hardworking. They try to get situations for discharged prisoners and to influence them towards a better way of living. Sometimes their efforts meet with success, but they have far too much to do. Their resources are small, and they are hampered by want of funds, but more by want of helpers. They struggle on valiantly in spite of discouragement, and do what lies in their power to prevent those with whom they come in contact from becoming worse than they otherwise would be.

When a prisoner is liberated it is not always an easy matter for him to find work. The fact of his having been in prison is not a recommendation to anyone who would employ him. When work is found for him by the agents of one of the societies which help discharged prisoners, his position may be a somewhat difficult one. It is not every place where he can be employed without objection on the part of his fellow-workers. As men they recognise the need for charity and tolerance towards their neighbours, but prison has such an evil sound to them that they are prejudiced against the person who has been there. When this prejudice is overcome there is usually a reaction in the ex-prisoner’s favour, resulting in conduct towards him that may be as embarrassing in its way as any springing from the prejudice against him. At the best he is liable to be placed in an atmosphere of suspicion that does not help him to do well. The consciousness that he has been degraded is harmful to his sense of self-respect, and altogether it is not easy for him to find suitable companionship. Wisdom would counsel him to avoid the company of those who have been associated with him in the conduct that led to his fall, but the counsels of wisdom are not always easy to follow.

There are very many who are willing to give assistance to a man who seeks to turn over a new leaf, but they expect to direct him as to what shall be written on the next page. If censure and avoidance may irritate and hurt a man who has been convicted of wrongdoing, patronage may raise a spirit of opposition in him. He does not want to be looked down upon, whether with contempt or with compassion. Of course, he ought to be chastened by his affliction; he ought to be repentant and submissive; he ought to do what he is told; but it is not what ought to be that requires consideration if we would help him to do better, but what is. In spite of their vicious acts, it is never an evidence of wisdom to assume that vicious people are greater fools than others. That they behave foolishly, from the standpoint of their own and our interest, is quite true, and so apparent that it needs no emphasis. The question is, Do we, who are so much wiser than they, show that wisdom in our treatment of them? and the answer, evidenced by the result of our attitude towards them, furnishes no strong testimony in our favour.

When a man has gone wrong it may be generally assumed that there is something in him that has made him unfit to resist the temptations incident to his position. If this assumption be correct it follows that we are not warranted in expecting from him the same power of resistance as others have shown. We are not justified in assuming that with proper assistance his character and powers may not improve, but it is hardly reasonable to expect conduct from him that would be more saintly than our own; and a great many disappointments are suffered by earnest people who seek to lift up the fallen, simply because they have expected too much. When efforts to help a man result in failure it is a safe working rule to assume that the fault is at least as much in the nature of the means employed as in the man. They may have been very good means, but they have not been applicable in the case; which is just to say that the result is the test of their suitability. This is all so obvious that in practice it is disregarded, and we persist in the foolish assumption that people on whom our patent pills fail to act are incorrigible; though the fact is that the offender is no more incorrigible than the reformer, and is sometimes not so stupid.

The position of the man who has been in prison is not so bad as that of the woman who has been there. There can be no question that women less frequently break the laws than men. This may or may not be evidence of superior virtue on the part of women, but the fact itself makes the position of the woman who has fallen more difficult to retrieve. She is more conspicuous than the male offender, if only because there are fewer of her kind, and the attitude of women towards her is less tolerant than the attitude of men, either towards her or towards those of their own sex who have offended. Accordingly, when a woman once loses her reputation she is more liable than a man to accept the position and to sink under her disgrace; so that the fallen woman is regarded by many as the most degraded of beings, and her rescue has a fascination for those who seek to aid the worst. This conception is absurd, as everyone knows who has studied the subject with open eyes, but the question is one that cannot be faithfully dealt with here. The economic position of the woman who has broken away from the standards set by the law need not be, and often is not, worse than that she held before her revolt. It all depends on what she was and how she has rebelled. Vice as little as virtue determines the economic position of those who are subject to it. The transgressor by her transgression is cut off from her class, and she is in danger of failing to gain a footing in any other. She may, and in the majority of cases does, glide out of her folly as she has slipped into it; but when she is publicly branded her chances of recovery are less than those of a man. The attitude of men towards her may be insolent, but it is rarely so brutal as that of women; and it is no uncommon thing to find that the most effective help towards the restoration of a woman has been given by those among her male friends whose character would least bear scrutiny by a censor of morals.

The attitude of her sex towards the woman who is down is generally one of hostility. Whether something of the instinct of self-preservation inspires this need not be here discussed; but it is abundantly clear that the woman whose fall has been publicly recognised cannot hope to resume anything like her old place, even if she were willing to seek it. Her recognition as a respectable woman is too frequently made contingent on her acceptance of a form of religion that enables her past to be always referred to, and herself held up as a brand plucked from the burning. In her attitude towards women she is affected by this knowledge, and their appeal to her loses in effect because of it. There is nothing more difficult than the treatment of these women. The prejudice against them is so strong that it is only here and there a family is willing to take in and look after one of them.

Attempts are made to influence and direct such women as have no friends, by placing them in homes. No doubt the inmates are much better there than they would be if turned on the streets or living in common lodging-houses; but they do not commend themselves to those whom it is sought to rescue; for the majority of them will say quite frankly that it is “not good enough.” They prefer to struggle along as best they may rather than submit to the life offered them. It always appears ungracious to criticise the work of those who are earnestly engaged in trying to help others, but it is fair that the view of those they seek to help should be presented. Their view may be a wrong one, but until it is altered it will affect their conduct; and it cannot be too emphatically insisted on that the opinions of those whom we seek to help should be considered, and when possible acted upon, if it is hoped to render effective aid. The first objection a girl makes to entering a rescue home is that she must bind herself to remain there for a prolonged period. She does not regard the home as a desirable place of residence, but as a step towards restoration to a decent position in the community. She objects to give her work for twelve months, say, getting no other pay than her board, clothing, and lodging, unless she remains in the institution for that time. She claims that she might as well be in prison. The girl is not concerned with the question whether the home pays others or not; she is concerned with the fact that it does not pay her.

Loss of reputation hinders a girl from getting a situation, even when she is willing to drop her way of living and revert to steady work. People who pay well quite naturally prefer not to make an experiment and seek to have their money’s worth, which implies not only an efficient, but a steady and reliable worker. The situations open to the penitent, therefore, are those which are worst paid. When she gains a character she may obtain more remunerative occupation elsewhere. She recognises that on account of her bad reputation she has to do more work for less money, but she does not so readily admit that it is just that it should be so. She thinks that it is one thing for an ordinary person to take advantage of her needs and to underpay her, while it is quite another thing for a Christian institution to keep her working for insufficient wages. In the home she has as hard work and almost as little liberty as she would have were she in prison. Her associates are girls like herself, with whom she can converse on a basis of equality and discourse on life from a similar standpoint. On the other hand, she is preached to, patronised by visitors, entertained in a very proper manner, and taught in a thousand indirect ways that she is different from them. If her associates do not help her to forget her past, neither do her teachers. They want to be kind, and try to be considerate; the effort is obvious. In a gentle way they may tell the girls what they think of them and how much need there is for their reformation, and they do not seem to see that they would come more closely in contact with those they seek to help if they would assume the things they express by word and attitude, and try to draw the girls out. The defect in the teacher is too often a habit of talking at his pupils. The girls are there to learn; the visitors to teach. Are they? What do the girls learn, and what do the visitors teach? That we are all sinners and our position a perilous one; that some of us have been found out and that the penalty should be accepted humbly as being for our good, and so on. If the formula is somewhat stereotyped that is not my fault. The girls who appear to submit most patiently are naturally regarded as most hopeful. What they think about it all does not appear to be considered of much importance. They are wrong or they would not be there; and yet a girl may make a mess of her life in one direction, and be none the less qualified to give a shrewd and useful opinion on the causes of her failure. If those who seek to teach them had less faith in their own doctrine and more desire to learn, they would become less ignorant and would teach to better purpose. Here and there some know this, and acting on the knowledge, are more successful than others who are equally pious, equally well-intentioned, but less well-informed.

One quite recognises that it cannot be charged against the majority of these institutions that they make money by the girls. They are often carried on at a financial loss, for the cost is considerable; but reformatory work cannot be conducted on a commercial basis. It is in the nature of things that it should not pay its way in the narrow sense. The cost of adequate supervision prevents this. But to charge the cost of attempts at their reformation to the girls is to inflict at least an apparent injustice on them that is apt to rankle in their minds, and to drive away a number who would otherwise be helped—helped at a pecuniary loss to the home, but at a great benefit to the community. After all, they are earning their own living by their work. What they fail to do is to earn a living for those who govern them. In exchange for their work they are not permitted to spend their earnings as they please, but as it pleases those who have undertaken to look after them. There may be something to be said for the opinion that if one set of persons seek to direct the lives of another they should be prepared to pay for the privilege; but this subject of charity is one that needs examination. Some people have very quaint ideas regarding it. I remember a decent woman who rather prided herself on her goodness. Her husband had a small business, and she occasionally requisitioned the services of his younger apprentices for assistance at cleaning time. On such an afternoon a newsboy coming to the door, she got a Citizen from him, gave him a penny, and received back the halfpenny of change. When he had gone she remarked to one of the apprentices—a boy with a genius for saying the right thing in the wrong place—“Puir boy, I just take the paper from him for charity.” To which he replied, “Aye, but ye took the halfpenny back!” There was something to be said for both views, but the boy had the last word, and he soon found that his criticism had borne fruit; he was dismissed.

In the home there is more of a religious atmosphere and less mechanical routine than in prison; but the religious atmosphere is as much objected to by many of the girls as the mechanical routine. Both may be good for them from the standpoint of the theorist, but neither seems to result in the effect desired. In the prison there are fewer lectures and fewer visits to the inmates than in the home, and the life is more monotonous, but in the prison there is less opportunity for contamination. In both places the old and degraded, the young and the ignorant, may be confined, but in the prison they are separated.

It is quite a mistake to imagine that the vice and degradation—that the state of morals—of a person can be estimated by her age and the number of her convictions. The old hand need not be so morally corrupt as the younger, though her experiences may have been more numerous and varied. A common statement of those who have been inmates of homes is that what they did not know when they went in they learned before they came out, and certainly they have opportunities of communicating their experiences and relating their adventures while they are in a home that they do not have while they are in prison. This is a thing that cannot be prevented so long as people live together. That many have been restored after passing through the homes is undoubtedly the case, but it does not follow that their restoration was due to their experience there. That many have not been improved, but have been the worse for their residence there, is not at all to be wondered at. Where a religious atmosphere has affected them favourably the disadvantages inherent to the establishment have been overcome. Where it has failed to effect a change in them for good the other associations tend to confirm them in evil.

What effect, then, has imprisonment on those who undergo it? It usually improves their health physically, but impairs their mental capacity. The simple life favours the former; separation and destruction of the sense of initiative favour the latter. Many do not return after a first experience, and it is assumed that they have been deterred from wrongdoing by it; but there is absolutely no ground for this assumption. It may be justified in some cases, but in others there is no reason to suppose that the offender would have repeated his offence, even though he had never been sent to prison for it. Imperfectly as probation of offenders is worked, it has shown this. Indeed, the very imperfection of the method has shown it the more strongly, for so far from the offender having been taken away from the conditions which incited him to commit his transgression, he has been sent back to them, and in many cases has not again offended.

It is not right to make assumptions when there is opportunity of examining the facts; and no enquiry has been made as to the effect of imprisonment in deterring those who have been in prison and have not returned for repeating their offence. A great many do return, and that is positive evidence that their imprisonment has not had a deterrent effect on them. Why do they return? In some cases they have found that prison is not such a horrible place after all, and that though the confinement is irksome the time passes; and at the expiry of their sentence they may do what they like. Many of them have to work hard and long to earn a living when outside, and they learn that they can pick up a living at less cost and have a better time, if they take the risk of being shut up now and again. They have been cut off from their habits, which may not have been a bad thing, and have acquired other habits which do not help them when they are liberated. They have been officially marked with disgrace, and to that extent rendered less able to secure employment and good company. They have been taught to be respectful and obedient, but they have lost, in a corresponding degree to their improvement in manners, their power to act for themselves. In some respects they are better, in others worse, than they were when they were taken in hand; and on the balance there is a distinct loss. Recent attempts at reformation have not taken into account the root causes of failure, and they fail to recognise that the longer a person is cut off from the main current of life in the community the less he is fitted to return to it.

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CHAPTER VI

THE INEBRIATE HOME

The need to find out why people do wrong before attempting to cure them—Enquiries as to inebriety—The inebriates—Official utterances—Cost and results—The grievance of the unreformed—The time limit of cure—The causes of failure—The fostering of old associations—The prospect of the future spree—The institution habit.

It cannot be seriously contended that our methods of dealing with offenders make for their reform. It may be that some of those who do not return to prison have been checked in their career by the treatment they have received, but as a matter of fact, there are a great many people sent to prison who ought never to have been there at all. In my opinion it is beyond dispute that our methods result in the making of criminals; that in the majority of cases imprisonment not only does no good, but does positive and serious harm. It should not be forgotten, however, that there is no ground for supposing that the prison system is intended to reform those who come within its operation. It keeps them off the street for a time and prevents them from annoying those who are at liberty; but this cannot be done without financial cost to the community, and it is only done at a very serious loss in other respects. The same amount of money spent in helping them to do well as it costs to imprison them for doing ill, would prevent many of them from offending; but before this could be done more would require to be known regarding the individuals than the mere fact that they have offended against one or other of our laws.

It is necessary not only to find out where and how the criminal has gone wrong, but also where and why we have gone wrong in our method of treating him. Profitable as it would be, no serious attempt has been made to do this. The most that is done is to admit the inefficacy of prison treatment and to devise some theoretical improvement on it. It seems easier for some people to reason in vacuo—in their own heads—than to examine the facts and face the consequences. Of late years the public has permitted one institution after another to be foisted on it at the bidding of people who have not shown even the most elementary knowledge of the subject with which they were dealing, and of faddists who want to regulate other men’s lives by their own. Their opinion of the offender may be interesting and it may have a value different from what they place upon it; but it is not nearly as interesting, as helpful, or as valuable as the offender’s own opinion of the cause of his fall and of his needs.

The imprisonment and reimprisonment of the habitual offender had become a scandal. It was recognised that inebriety made men and women a danger and a nuisance to the family and their neighbours, but no greater a nuisance than the system by which we dealt with them. Everybody agreed that imprisonment made them no better. It made them abstainers only for the time they were in custody, but it did nothing to destroy the desire for drink. So an Act of Parliament was passed to enable them to be placed in an institution of another sort. If the prison failed to reform them, the Inebriate Homes have proved a more costly, a more ghastly failure. Instead of finding out the cause of the failure, a departmental committee, after examining anybody but those who had been in the homes, has recommended that further parliamentary powers should be granted to the committees managing them and courts sending inmates to them. The rational method of procedure would have been for intelligent and impartial persons to examine those cases which had been improved, and to estimate how far the improvement was due to the treatment received. This would not have been a difficult task, for the cases were few; and having accomplished it, it would have been equally profitable to examine the many cases of failure and to seek the causes of that failure. It is much easier, however, to collect the opinions of officials, of philanthropists, of those who are interested in prescribing for the conduct of others—in short, of people who are called authorities on a given subject, because nobody has been bold enough to challenge them—than to obtain the confidence and open the mouths of those whose wrongdoing it is sought to correct. It is a grotesque statement that the Inebriate Home failed because the wrong people were sent to it; also it is not true. It would be nearer the mark to say that the home failed because it was not suited for the treatment of inebriates. For after all, the very people for whom it was designed to afford treatment were among those sent there.

The patients chosen for treatment in the Inebriate Home were carefully selected by a physician experienced in the treatment of mental diseases. Some of them were mentally affected as a consequence of their drunkenness, and there is room for supposing that some took to drink partly on account of a mental defect; but inebriety is not a physical disease, it is not a mental disease, although it may have some relationship to physical and mental diseases. It was because of its being a social disorder that the State undertook to consider these persons. This being so, each case could only be rationally considered in relation to the social condition of the inebriate. Information about the state of their various internal organs might be useful, but it could never replace in importance or interest information as to their social condition.

The treatment failed because it was not adapted to the persons to be treated, but was adapted to the state of mind of those who, on the strength either of an academic qualification, or a belief in their fitness to judge people who are of a lower social condition, had prescribed a method without any real knowledge of the persons to whom they sought to apply it. The public pays too much attention to the utterances of those in authority, and it is difficult to avoid the habit of mistaking for knowledge what is only a different kind of ignorance from our own. A thing is not true because somebody says it; it may be true in spite of that; but it would repay the trouble were official utterances more closely scrutinised than they are. Zeal, honesty, integrity, may be present in the official, and he may be a very talented man as well, and yet he may lead matters into a sad mess. The less he is questioned, the more he is suffered to go on unchecked, the worse for him and for those whose servant he is. The good servant may become a very bad master. Then all official persons are not equally able. If a man has not wit, it is not likely to be developed in him by giving him a title or a uniform. If he has not much wisdom, he is not likely to become less foolish even though you place him in the seat of Solomon. The fact that a man holds a position is not proof of his fitness to fill it; and respect for an office makes it all the more incumbent on honest men to scrutinise and criticise the actions of the person who occupies it. Loyalty to the public service is too often confused with servility to those in the upper ranks, resulting in something very like a conspiracy to magnify their importance (which would be a small matter), and to induce the public to attach an undue weight to what they say, though their statements may appear foolish enough. All this is quite heterodox doctrine, and in practice will not tend to make a man’s path smooth; but the orthodox method of assuming that the higher in authority a person is, the abler and wiser he must be, has not resulted so satisfactorily that it should escape challenge.

The official reports of Girgenti Inebriate Home were a great deal more satisfactory than the results, and the home might have been in existence yet if the representatives of the public had not informed themselves of the real state of affairs. A few cures are put to its credit at a calamitous expense. The cost of keeping a woman there amounted to between twenty-five and thirty shillings per week, and the odds were proved to be against her being reformed after three years’ treatment. In other words, the public were guaranteed that all persons sent to the home could be kept sober at a cost of from sixty-five to eighty pounds each per year, but they had no reason to believe that when this payment ceased on their part the patient would take her place in the community and remain a sober citizen. If she was not made better, did she become worse as a result of her treatment there? In some respects she did. You cannot meddle with the lives of others without result, for it is impossible to leave them as you find them.

I remember being visited one morning by a woman who had left the home after a three years’ stay there. She had been drinking before she called on me, and she had some complaints to make regarding her treatment there. The complaints were trifling in character, and were more in the nature of gossip than anything else. I told her that she had cost the community some £200 to keep her during the last three years, and they seemed to have made a bad bargain. I advised her to think a little less of her grievances and a little more of the comfort of her neighbours, and dismissed her with the usual censure and advice; but she had a case against the State, although she was not able to express it clearly. I would put it for her thus: “When you interfered with my life I had fallen into the habit of drinking, but in the main I earned my own living and meddled very little with others to their annoyance. I had my friends, whom your judgment might not approve, but between them and myself there were common ties. We sympathised with each other and helped each other. You undertook to reform my life, to break me of my bad habits, to make me more fit to earn my living without offending against your laws. You have ruled and governed me for three years. You put me in a home where my life was regulated for me; you gave me as companions people with whom I had never associated before; you compelled me to live in their company; you taught me nothing that I find of any use to me outside; you kept me from drinking. It may have been a poor pleasure, but it was the only one I had. You did not take the taste for it away, and you have given me nothing to replace it; and now I am three years older, and you turn me loose on the streets of the city to which I belong, and in which I am now through your action very much a stranger, and invite me to work for my living in competition with others. I could work and did work before you meddled with me; I could work yet, but I must have something to fill my life as well as work, and I have taken to drink again, because it is the only thing I know that meets the need I feel. I am worse off than I was before you started to reform me. Then I had friends, now I am alone; for they have gone their own way: some to death, all of them from me. There is nobody from whom I can have the sympathy and the help I once had. My friends had their faults and they knew mine; that was why we were friends. All you can offer me is patronage, advice, direction from people whom I don’t know and who don’t know me. The one thing that I want, which is fellowship, I have not got. You have taught me to depend on others. You have made me obey your rules, and now you set me free to make rules for myself, and leave me to drift back into the place where I was; to face the same difficulties, the same temptations, without the companionship of those who had grown into my life. You have taken three years from my life and you have given me nothing for it. Give me back my life or justify your interference with it by fitting me to become a better citizen than I was.”

This is something like what the woman appeared to feel and tried to say, and there is really no answer to it. It is not a wise proceeding to treat the lives of men and women as toys with which we can play, and throw them aside without practical regard for consequences when we are tired of the game. If we do not direct them, they will direct themselves, and the less fitted they are to do so the worse for us. I remember one woman who was an inmate of a home, but who had been employed on a farm outside under licence. Her behaviour was excellent; she was a good worker, although she had had over a hundred convictions for drunkenness before her admission to the home. She always had been a good worker in the intervals between the drinks. She conformed to the terms of the licence, whatever these were, and seemed to be a reformed character. I suggested to her that it was perfectly clear that, though she could not resist the temptations incident to life in the slums of a great city, she might continue for an indefinite period to live a useful life in the country. She replied, “As soon as my three years are up I am going back to the town,” and she kept her promise, with the result that she went back to her drinking. In her case it was proved that she could behave for a long period when the only alternative presented to a regulated life outside an institution was a more rigidly regulated life inside an institution. She preferred the outside farm to the home, but she preferred the streets of the city to either, and her case raises the question whether it is advisable to withdraw all control from those like her. She did not require to be continually overlooked by officials in order that she should conform to the law. Her life was left under the inspection of the inhabitants of the district in which she worked, and it is quite conceivable that she might have been working there yet, if she had not known that the reward of restraining herself would be not so much a change in character, as freedom from any supervision when a fixed term had expired.

The cause of the failure of the Inebriate Home did not lie in the character of the inmates or of the officials who were placed over them, but in the defect inherent in all institutions; the fact that the manner of living in them differs essentially from anything that obtains outside. They are all founded more or less on the military model, and the military model and the industrial model are different. Far more than most of us suspect we are the creatures of habit:—often of habit acquired slowly, gradually, and unconsciously. To remove ourselves from one place to another implies the breaking off from some habits, but it also implies the formation of others. It did not need the experience of the Inebriate Home to let us know that men might be removed from the opportunity of drinking for long periods and, on return to their former conditions, resume the habit. Years of imprisonment, where teetotalism is rigidly enforced and where the diet is of a non-stimulating character, did not make the men who were submitted to it abstain from drinking on their release. The objectionable habit can only be cured through being replaced by something which is of equal interest, has greater power, and enables the man to live his life without being a nuisance to his neighbours.

When men or women are placed in association with one another, they have to find some common bond of interest. In every voluntary association this is recognised. Religion causes some to cut themselves off from the world and to devote their lives to its pursuit. Men differing in social positions, in age, in experience, in character, in temperament, join together to form a community. The one thing they have in common is their form of belief. They may differ as widely as possible in their views on other subjects, but these differences are not the thing that holds them together. They would rather tend of themselves to break up the association, since disagreement drives people apart. The differences are only tolerable because of the bond of agreement which is strong enough to compensate them. On this subject and around it they may talk. The experience of each will interest the other, will enlighten him, will at any rate be considered by him. The same is true of political associations. Differences there are amongst the members, but these differences cannot go beyond the point at which some common agreement balances them, without breaking up the association.

Inebriate Homes and other reformatory institutions are not voluntary associations, but there can be no intercourse amongst their inmates that is not based on some experience common to them all. In the Inebriate Homes the common factor is inebriety. However much the inmates may differ in other respects, in this they are all alike: that they have indulged in drink to such an extent that the law has interfered to deal with them, and so the question that every newcomer has to face is, “Why are you here?” They are compelled to associate with one another, and they will get on the better together for each knowing something of the others’ story. Scenes are recalled that had better be forgotten. Time spent in regretting the past while detailing its incident may result, and often does, in a repetition of the evils which are deplored.

Better that the mind should dwell on something else than on the errors of time past. It is a common thing to see a man begin to tell a wild episode or experience of his earlier years, and to observe that beneath his expressions of criticism and regret there is a certain tone of satisfaction that he has been through it, and a lingering reminiscence of the enjoyment he has had in it. He condemns the folly, admits it was a mistake, and shows quite clearly that it was quite a pleasure at the time. Talking over the past brings it back and keeps the memory of it alive, and persistence in this course may cause that which has been regarded with disgust to become a thing that is desired, even a thing that is longed for. I remember a conversation with an inmate on the occasion of a visit I made to an Inebriate Home. I had known her as a habitual offender for years before her reformation was undertaken, and at this time she had been in the institution for more than a year. I congratulated her on the improvement in her appearance, and at the end of our talk she said, “It’s a’ quite true, I am better housed than I ever was. Ma meat is a’ that a body could want, and I get it mair easily than I did ootside. The work’s no o’er-hard, and the officials are kind. There are bits o’ rows, of course, noo and then; whaur there are so many weemen you couldna expect onything else; but there’s naething to complain of. The country’s real bonny in the summer, but I get tired of the country. I am a toon bird like yoursel’, doctor, and I weary for the streets.” I suggested to her that since she was so well off and could be suited on the expiry of her term with a place where she would not have the same inducements to drink as she had had, she should make up her mind to keep away from the town; but she answered, “No; it’s a’ very nice and comfortable, but I wouldna gie a walk doon the Candleriggs for the haill o’ it.” Of course she ultimately had a walk down the Candleriggs, followed by a drive to prison; but it was quite apparent that this longing for her old haunts was the result of her failure to be impressed by interests that were equally absorbing, and that would become more powerful. Had such an interest developed in her, the Candleriggs would have been merely an empty sentiment. It would have occupied the position that “Bonnie Scotland” has in the minds of so many of the Scots who, having taken up their residence abroad, and having become absorbed in their affairs, stay there—afraid to return lest they lose even the sentiment. Just as in the religious community the members are stimulated to welldoing, in the reformatory the association of people whose common bond is their offence stimulates them to wrongdoing, or at least tends to hinder them from breaking off their old interests.

Institutional life has points of difference from life outside, which cause the formation of habits that are detrimental to the inmates when they return to the community. They are lodged usually on the model of the barracks; though this does not apply to the lodging of prisoners in prison, as they have separate rooms. Outside an institution most people do not sleep in dormitories or live in common rooms. They may live and sleep in the same room, but the only lodging outside which is on the same model as the dormitory is the common lodging-house, and that is the last place to which anyone would desire that a reformed offender should go.

In an institution division of labour is carried out for reasons of economy. The superintendent directs that different sets of people should perform different duties. Even if all the persons are changed at intervals from one set of duties to another, with a view to each inmate learning to do all parts of the work which is necessary in order that the place may be kept in proper condition, the habit formed is different from that of the housewife outside, who daily has to go over the whole round of her work. She is not responsible for doing a part, knowing that some other is responsible for some other part. Not only each part of the work engages her attention in its turn, but she is accountable for the whole; whether she does it well or ill is beside the point, which is, that there is nobody to rule her and no one whom she can hold accountable for her neglect. The habits of housekeeping acquired by the inmates of a home may tend to make them good servants, but they are certainly not the kind likely to make them more fit than they were to undertake the management of a house of their own; for they do not manage, they are managed.

CHAPTER VII

THE PREVENTION OF CRIMES ACT (1908)

Some few years ago the English Prison Commissioners began a modified system of treating certain offenders. Borstal Prison was set apart for the purpose, a staff was specially chosen, and young offenders were selected for experiment. It was a notable departure, and the authorities seem to have been satisfied with the results. Either they had power to undertake the experiment or they had not. In the former case there was no need for an Act of Parliament to give authority; in the latter case they must have been breaking the law. If they were within their powers there was nothing to hinder them from extending their beneficent work. That work would necessarily depend for its success on the experience and special ability of those who performed it. If the men in office in other prisons do not possess similar qualifications for the work no statute will confer them; but it may cause them to have duties placed upon them which they are not fitted to discharge. So long as the treatment had to be justified by its results, it would be fairly safe to assume that only those who could prove their fitness would direct it; now it needs as little of such justification for its continuance as do the Inebriate Homes.

The Prevention of Crimes Act (1908) deals with the “Reformation of Young Offenders,” and the “Detention of Habitual Criminals.” The young offenders must be not less than sixteen and not more than twenty-one years of age; but the Secretary of State with the concurrence of Parliament may make an order including persons apparently under twenty-one, if they are not really over twenty-three years of age. The young offender must be convicted on indictment of an offence for which he is liable to penal servitude or imprisonment; and it must be apparent to the Court that he is of criminal habits or tendencies, or an associate of bad characters. The Court must consider any report by the Prison Commissioners as to the suitability of the offender for treatment in a Borstal Institution; and may send him there for not less than one and not more than three years. In Scotland the Secretary of State may apply the Act by Order, and may call the institution by any name he chooses.

If a boy in a reformatory commit an offence for which a Court might send him to prison, he may instead be sent to a Borstal Institution, his sentence then superseding that in the reformatory school.

The Secretary of State may transfer persons within the age limit from penal servitude to a Borstal Institution.The Secretary of State may establish Borstal Institutions, and may authorise the Prison Commissioners to acquire land, with the consent of the Treasury, and to erect or convert buildings for the purpose, the expense to be borne by the Exchequer. He may make regulations for the management of the institution, its visitation, the control of persons sent to it, and for their temporary detention before their removal to it.

Subject to the regulations, the Prison Commissioners, if satisfied that the offender is reformed, may liberate him on licence at any time after he has served six months—in the case of a woman, after three months; and the licence will remain in force till the expiry of the sentence, unless it is revoked or forfeited earlier, in which case the offender may be arrested without warrant and taken back to the institution. Subject to regulations, the Prison Commissioners may revoke the licence at any time. If a licensed person escapes from supervision, or commits any breach of the conditions laid down in the licence, he thereby forfeits it; and the time between his forfeiture and failure to return is not computed in reckoning the time of his detention. The time during which he is on licence, and conforming to the conditions therein, counts as time served in the institution.

Every person sentenced to detention in a Borstal Institution remains under the supervision of the Prison Commissioners for six months after his sentence has expired; but the Secretary of State may cancel this provision where he sees fit. The Prison Commissioners may grant a licence to any person under their supervision, and may recall it and place him in the institution if they think this necessary for his protection; but they may not detain him for more than three months, and they cannot detain him at all when six months have passed since his sentence expired.

Young offenders detained in Borstal Institutions, if reported as incorrigible or as exercising a bad influence on the other inmates, may be removed to a prison to serve the remainder of their term, with or without hard labour, as the Secretary of State may decide.

The person under licence must be placed under the supervision of some person or society willing to take charge of him, and named in the licence. Where a society has undertaken the assistance or supervision of persons discharged from the institution, the expenses incurred may be paid from public funds; but, curiously enough, the statute makes no reference to payment of persons willing to act as guardians.

A person may be moved from one Borstal Institution to another, and from one part of the United Kingdom to another. He is to be “under such instruction and discipline as appears most conducive to his reformation and the repression of crime”—which is sufficiently vague. The only thing of any importance in this part of the Act is the provision for letting the offender out on licence. If it is used to board him out, some progress may be made; but if it is merely used to provide funds for some society of philanthropists to play with, there is little ground for the hope that it will do much for the offender.

The second part of the Act is more peculiar than the first. It is designed to deal with the case of the habitual offender, and as originally drafted it provided for retaining him in custody, if the officials thought proper, for the rest of his life. This would have been nearly as certain a preventive as hanging him, and would have been much more costly.A consequence that might be expected to spring from the prevention of crime would be a diminution in the numbers of the police. It is their duty to arrest criminals, and if the criminals are shut up their occupation is gone. It is a striking fact that during all the discussions which took place on the measure, nobody suggested that as a result of its operation there would be any smaller number of policemen required. There was no likelihood of it; for crime will not be prevented to any great extent by the institution of “reformatories”—experience has shown that very clearly—but it will be diminished to some extent while the professionals are incarcerated. This has been tried and found insufficient and unsatisfactory. The new Act makes provision for the care of people who have been liberated from Borstal Institutions, and for the reformatory treatment of those who have become habituals after graduation in crime and in prison experience—neither of which qualifications makes it easier to deal with them.

The “habitual criminal” of the statute is one who, between his attaining the age of sixteen years and his conviction of the crime charged against him, has had three previous convictions and is leading persistently a dishonest or criminal life. Such a person, after being sentenced to penal servitude, may be ordered to be detained on the expiration of that sentence for a period of not less than five and not more than ten years, at the discretion of the Court. The charge of being a habitual offender can only be tried after he pleads or has been found guilty of the crime for which he has been indicted, and seven days’ notice must be given the offender of the intention to make such a charge. The Court has a right to admit evidence of character and repute on the question as to whether the accused is or is not leading persistently a dishonest or criminal life. The person sentenced to preventive detention may appeal against the sentence to a Court consisting of not less than three Judges of the High Court of Justiciary, in Scotland. The Secretary of State may, in the case of persons appearing to be habitual criminals and undergoing sentence of five years’ penal servitude or upwards, transfer them, after three years of the term of penal servitude have expired, to preventive detention for the remainder of their sentence.

Prisoners undergoing preventive detention shall be confined in any prison which the Secretary of State may set apart for the purpose, and shall be subject to the law in force with respect to penal servitude; provided that the rules applicable to convicts shall apply to them, subject to such modifications in the direction of a less rigorous treatment as the Secretary of State may prescribe. This means that the person convicted has to be dealt with by the same officers who have been dealing with him when he was called a convict prisoner. There is no reason to assume that their ability to make him better than he was will be increased because an Act of Parliament has been passed. A change of labels, however dexterous, does not alter the character nor will it change the atmosphere of the prison.

“Prisoners undergoing preventive detention shall be subjected to such disciplinary and reformative influences, and shall be employed on such work as may be best fit to make them able and willing to earn an honest livelihood on discharge.”

This subsection is wide enough to include all reform. It implies that prisoners are not subjected to such disciplinary and reformative influence, and are not employed on such work as may be best fitted to make them able and willing to make an honest livelihood on discharge; but if this implication is justified, why should they not be placed under helpful conditions from the first day of their imprisonment? To one who is not a legislator it appears foolish to insist that offenders should be placed under conditions which do not fit them to live honestly outside prison, and that this process should be repeated until they have become habitual criminals, before it is ordered that steps shall be taken for their reform. What are the influences ordered by Parliament, and what is the work they have to be taught which will make them able and willing to earn an honest livelihood? Surely no Member of Parliament is credulous enough to believe that the influences and the work that will tend to make one man better will be suitable to all men. Even Members of Parliament do not all conform to the same rules, and there are as many differences among criminals as among legislators.

“The Secretary of State shall appoint for every such prison or part of a prison so set apart a board of visitors, of whom not less than two shall be justices of the peace, with such powers and duties as he may prescribe by such prison rules as aforesaid.”

“The Secretary of State shall, once at least in every three years during which a person is detained in custody under a sentence of preventive detention, take into consideration the condition, history, and circumstances of that person, with a view to determining whether he should be placed out on licence, and if so on what conditions.”

“The Secretary of State may at any time discharge on licence a person undergoing preventive detention if satisfied that there is a reasonable probability that he will abstain from crime and lead a useful and industrious life, or that he is no longer capable of engaging in crime, or that for any other reason it is desirable to release him from confinement in prison.

A person so discharged on licence may be discharged on probation, and on condition that he be placed under the supervision or authority of any society or person named in the licence who may be willing to take charge of the case, or of such other conditions as may be specified in the licence.

The Directors of Convict Prisons shall report periodically to the Secretary of State on the conduct and industry of persons undergoing preventive detention, and their prospects and probable behaviour on release, and for this purpose shall be assisted by a committee at each prison in which such persons are detained, consisting of such members of the board of visitors and such other persons of either sex as the Secretary of State may from time to time appoint.

Every such committee shall hold meetings at such intervals of not more than six months as may be prescribed, for the purpose of personally interviewing persons undergoing preventive detention in the prison, and preparing reports embodying such information respecting them as may be necessary for the assistance of the Directors, and may at any other time hold such other meetings and make such special reports respecting particular cases, as they may think necessary.”

A licence may be in such form, and may contain such conditions as may be prescribed by the Secretary of State.

The Secretary of State is the figure who has all power over the person sentenced to preventive detention; but the Act does not give him any power that he did not before possess. The Secretary of State has always held and used a dispensing power regarding the sentences passed on prisoners. He has not only remitted sentences, but he has imposed conditions while granting a remission. The Act does not even limit his power, for as the representative of the King he may liberate anybody if he sees fit. What the Act does is to set up machinery whereby the Secretary of State may be moved. Hitherto some personal interest must have been taken by him in a case before the exercise of the Royal prerogative would be recommended by him, for he would require to be prepared to justify his action if questioned in Parliament. The Act alters all that in so far as it applies and makes matter of routine what was exceptional.

The Secretary for Scotland is the head of all the departments of administration, and being the head of all, is not likely to know, intimately, much about any of them. He has his parliamentary duties to attend to, and the more they press on him the more administrative work must he leave to the permanent heads of the departments. One Secretary of State may obtain, and may deserve, a better reputation for administrative capacity than another; but it is absolutely impossible to expect any one man to know intimately the details of the work of all the departments. He is responsible for education, for instance, but what can he know personally of the educational needs of a boy in the east end of Glasgow? Yet he prescribes for the education of all boys, as though it were easier to know about thousands than about one. As head of the Local Government Board, he has to state what amount of relief should be given to poor people in different parts of Scotland, what amount in grant should be given to distress committees, and what kind of work the unemployed should do. He never is a man who has had any experimental acquaintance with poverty, or who knows by experience what distress is entailed in a working-class family by dull trade; and manual labour has not been his occupation. Yet it is not the representatives of these people who instruct him. It is the Board of which he is the head, and whose members, however able they may be, are less in contact with those for whom they prescribe than he is. He is head of the prisons department, and he may now and then visit a prison; but even a Secretary of State, one might go further and say, especially a Secretary of State, cannot gain much intimate knowledge of prisons and prisoners from a casual visit. He has too many things to do, and the man who has too many things to do seldom does anything. He leaves that to his assistants. If Solomon undertook and tried to do as many things as a Secretary of State is supposed to do, he would lose his reputation for wisdom in a week; but he wouldn’t be Solomon if he tried; and so the Secretary of State, on the advice he receives, has to determine the fate of the prisoner who is under sentence of preventive detention. Once in three years every such person has to come under his notice. This can only be done through reports.

These reports have to be made by the committee set up under the Act, which committee is appointed by the Secretary for Scotland. It would be too much to expect that he should know the local circumstances in every case, and the men appointed may only be those recommended to him by his officials. That these will be men of good repute there need be no doubt, but there is no reason to suppose that they will be the men best fitted to represent the public, or most likely to have an intimate acquaintance with the conditions under which the prisoners have lived. If the officials had themselves shown any aptitude for dealing with prisoners in a reformatory way, there might be some reason for assuming that their nominees would be persons whose experience of life and the character of whose abilities would be of such a nature as to fit them for the work they are supposed to undertake. Men of ideas, especially if the ideas are not officially approved, are not at all likely to find themselves nominated for such work. They would cause trouble, and it is better that things should not be done than that Israel should be disturbed.

The committee have to meet at intervals for the purpose of personally interviewing those who are under their care; and the value of their reports will depend on the intimacy of the knowledge they gain regarding the persons interviewed and on its accuracy. Apparently they need not meet more frequently than once in six months. Such a provision is too nakedly absurd to deserve discussion. Apparently they have to report to the Prison Commissioners, who report to the Secretary of State. The position is therefore something like this—that prisoners after they have served prolonged periods in prison may be transferred to another part of the establishment in order to be reformed. In their new quarters the treatment they receive is to be less rigorous than it has been. The influences under which they have to be brought are described but not defined. The officers may be the same as those who were called warders in the other part of the prison, but they may have a new name—perhaps a new uniform. If the person satisfies the Secretary of State, whom he will never see and who knows nothing about him personally, that he is a reformed character, he may be liberated on licence; and he may seek election to the ranks of the licensed once in three years. His conduct and record will then be considered. What will determine the character of the record obviously is the impression he makes on those who come into contact with him. That is to say, he will mainly depend on the report of the warder, for after all, does he not know most about the man? He certainly sees more of him than does any other body. A form will be devised which he will regularly fill in. Government institutions are notable for forms. It will provide for a record of the prisoner’s conduct, behaviour, intelligence, and all sorts of things, and will no doubt be as ingenious a production as any of the numerous specimens which result from our practice of government by clerk. The warder will report to the head warder, who will report to the Governor. The Medical Officer will report as to the health of the person, and all the reports will go on to the Prison Commissioners, and from them to some clerk in the Scottish Office, who has satisfactorily passed a Civil Service examination on the Boundaries of the Russian Empire, the death of Rizzio, or some such important educational subject, and who has never had any opportunity to know anything about prisoners save what can be learned from books, reports, and an occasional visit to prison. The reports will be carefully checked, weighed, and summarised, and the Secretary of State will sign the order made for him.

It is perfectly obvious that the higher up in the official scale one goes, the less intimate knowledge of the lives of prisoners, of the social conditions under which they lived outside, and of their needs, can you reasonably expect to find as things are at present arranged. The man who has the best chance to get a licence under the Act is the man who can dodge best. All our experience points to the fact; and it is not uncommon for the most objectionable character, by subservience and sycophancy, to impress favourably those who have the dispensing of privileges, and this is not confined to prisons or prisoners.

When a prisoner is liberated on licence from a place of preventive detention and placed under the supervision or authority of a society or person, the society or person has to report in accordance with regulations to be made to the Secretary of State, on the conduct and circumstances of the licensee. The licence may be revoked at any time by the Secretary of State, when the person licensed must return to prison. If the person under licence escapes from the supervision of those under whom he has been placed, or if he breaks any conditions of the licence, he forfeits it altogether, and may be brought before a court of summary jurisdiction and charged with breach of licence, and on proof be sent back to the place of preventive detention. The time during which a person is out on licence is treated as a part of the term of detention to which he has been sentenced; unless he has failed to return after his licence has been revoked, in which case the time during which he may have been said to have escaped does not count as reducing the term of his sentence. The conditions of licence may be withdrawn at any time by the Secretary of State, and the person licensed be set absolutely free; but in any case, after he has been out on licence for five years the power to detain him lapses, provided he has observed the conditions of his licence during that time.

In both the Borstal and the Preventive Detention Institution it is intended to teach the inmates habits and pursuits that will be useful to them in the world outside. What these are will altogether depend on what is to happen to them on liberation. No institution has yet been devised that even remotely resembles anything like the life that its inmates have to anticipate.

A great deal has been written about the advisability of teaching trades to persons in institutions, but the writers are never themselves artisans, and if they had any practical knowledge of the subject they would not write; there would be nothing to write about. More goes to the learning of a trade than the handling of the tools. Men have not merely to learn how to do a thing, but how to do it in association with other workers. They learn the trade not from the lectures of a teacher or the instructions of a foreman, but from watching the work of others, and imitating or avoiding their methods, as seems most suitable. Take the two best tradesmen in almost any workshop, and you will find that they set about their work each in a different way—each in the way he has found best suited to himself. The apprentices learn from them; and the lad or man who wants to learn a trade, is ill-advised indeed if he goes to a workshop where there are as many apprentices as journeymen.

It used to be said that the first year of a joiner’s apprenticeship was served in sweeping the shavings and in boiling men’s “cans”; and there was a good deal of truth in the statement. The best tradesmen I have known spent the first part of their apprenticeship knocking about the workshop, fetching and carrying for others, and unconsciously receiving impressions and gaining knowledge. The worst I have ever known were one or two whom the foreman thought, when they entered on their apprenticeship, to be too old for him to put to such work, and who were chained to the bench right away.In an institution where it is undertaken to teach lads or men trades, not only are the conditions less favourable than those outside, but they are actually opposed to them. In fact, you have a company composed almost entirely of apprentices. There are no journeymen. There is only a foreman in the shape of the instructor; and as the longer he is there the more out of touch he is with the changes in method that have taken place amongst his fellow-tradesmen outside, he is only capable of telling his apprentices how he would do the thing, which in a workshop they might do better by following a plan more suitable to them. If he has to overlook their work they cannot be overlooking his; and while he is criticising their efforts and keeping them in order he cannot be showing them an example.

Every tradesman and every employer knows that it is an important question, not only whether a man has served his apprenticeship, but where he has served it. Of course, under the most favourable conditions some men do not become good tradesmen; they may have gone to the wrong occupation for them; but there are conditions that are generally more favourable than others for the production of capable workmen, and these conditions cannot possibly exist in an institution. Exceptions trained there may turn out passable workmen and may find work outside, but the result of trying to teach trades in an institution will be that at considerable expense you will increase the number of bad tradesmen; and there are plenty.

I do not say that nothing can be taught in an institution. Many things are learned there. The whole point is that they are not the things that make for efficiency outside.

It is easily seen how a man who has not himself been trained in a handicraft may believe that it can be taught as well in one place as another, although if you consider his own occupation and suggest that his profession too might be taught anywhere, he will readily see objections. The people who are notably interested in prison reform are largely drawn from the professional classes and from the well-to-do. It may be quite possible to teach a prisoner or the inmate of a reformatory to acquire the habits and the manners of an independent gentleman. Of the feasibility of the proposal, were it ever made, I am not qualified to speak; but, as an observer, one cannot help seeing that many of them have already acquired the habit of doing as little useful work for themselves as possible, and of expending a good deal of energy in directions that are not socially productive. The clergyman would reject as impracticable any proposal to train the reformed in an institution for entry into his profession; and yet abundance of quiet and of time for study could be obtained there, and there does not seem to be anything to hinder the teaching of theology, of literature, or of philosophy, from taking place within its walls.

There is, of course, the question of brains. It is a great mistake to assume that brains are the monopoly of any class, or that they play a more prominent part in the work of professional men than in that of others. So far as the training is concerned, there is no ground for assuming that selected inmates of reformatory institutions could not be had who are as well qualified by natural endowments to receive instruction of an academic character, in as large numbers, as others who would be fitted to receive instruction in the working of wood or of metal. Of course there are other reasons why ministers should not be trained in prison. There is the question of moral character; and though reformed desperadoes have become noble beings before now, I do not think that even the most enthusiastic evangelist would consider it safe to assume that a man who has failed to conform to the laws of the community is a safe person to train for the ministry.

This question of character would not be so generally admitted against any proposal to train the inmates of a reformatory institution as lawyers; but although a man might acquire all the useful information and general knowledge that are required for examination as a preliminary to admit him to the study of the laws of his country; although he might master the text-books and become learned in the records of legal decisions quite as well in a prison as in a lodging outside; no lawyer would admit that thereby he could qualify to practise his profession. He would insist that there is something more required in his experience than the mere knowledge of the laws and of case-books. Being a lawyer, he could set out at length what that something is.

So there is something that marks off the man who has been trained under the artificial conditions which exist in an institution from the man who has been trained outside. I knew of a blacksmith who was a very useful tradesman while he remained in the institution where he had learned that trade. He obtained work outside on several occasions, but he lost it always, not through any misconduct on his part, but through sheer inefficiency. Some things he could do, but most things he could not do; and his employers found him an unprofitable servant, partly because of his limitations and partly because his methods impaired the efficiency of those with whom he worked. In my day I have served an apprenticeship both to a handicraft and to medicine, and I have no doubt whatever that it would have been as easy for me to train for my medical qualification in prison as to have qualified myself as an artisan in an institution.

It is assumed that what the offender needs is above all to be trained in habits of obedience, as though that were not what he has always been taught when in any prison; and much good our training has done him.

I know as little about military affairs as the military men who are appointed to manage prisons and prisoners know about the duties they undertake when they are appointed, but I do know something about the worship of discipline. Discipline means not knowing more than the man above you, no matter how difficult it may be to know less. There must always be twice as much wisdom and truth in anything the superior officer does or says as there is in the actions or words of his inferiors; and it is insubordination to behave in ignorance or in contempt of this great principle.

At school we were taught a story about a man named William Tell, regarding which the later critics dispute the accuracy. It seems that a high military personage called Gessler set his cap upon the top of a pole in the market-place and commanded the people to bow down to it. Tell refused to do so, and was seized and compelled to enter on a test of his skill in archery; and so on. Whether the story about Tell is true or not, there can be no doubt about the cap; in one form or other it is still a symbol of authority, to be saluted with respect by the common people. In Scotland we had a song about Rab Roryson’s Bonnet, but “It wasna the bonnet, but the heid that was in it,” that was the real subject of the ditty. Discipline pays no regard to the head that is in the cap. The cap is the thing, though it may be placed on a pole.

Everybody knows that the old cap of knowledge in fairy tales has no longer an existence, and that absence of what is called brains will not be compensated for by any covering of the skull, whatever pretence may be made to the contrary.

Of the virtue of obedience we hear a good deal, and if we look around us we will see evidences that it may be no virtue at all, but a vice. In one of the best known of his poems Tennyson describes the soldiers: “Theirs not to reason why: Theirs not to make reply”; and there are many who think it a noble thing to teach a man not to use the brains he has, and to die rather than show disrespect to his superior by questioning his competence. This may be a military virtue, but it is a civil vice. If it did not work outside so badly in practice, it might be allowed to pass unquestioned; but one has only to look around to see the result of its application. The men who come under its operation are not rendered more efficient citizens thereby, but are hindered by the training they have undergone from obtaining employment in industrial life.

Subordination there must be before there can be combined action on the part of men for any purposes, but there need not be senseless subordination. In any iron-work, for instance, where men work together, they each take their own and other men’s lives in their hands daily. When they are acting in concert a false step, a careless act, on the part of anyone, may bring injury or death on himself and others; and they know this and behave accordingly, or no work would be possible. For the inefficient person there is no room, and when serious work has to be done Gessler’s cap has no place; there is only room for William Tell.

Men discharged from the army find difficulty in obtaining employment. It is not that they are worse men than their neighbours. It is because they have received the wrong kind of training. Employers do not prefer others to them from any absence of patriotism, but from a desire for efficiency. They cannot afford in industrial occupations to have people about them who have learned that it is “theirs not to reason why.” They prefer those who have been taught to use all the sense they have in dealing with their work. In short, the person who during the most formative years of his life has been employed industrially, makes a better workman than the man who during these years has been taught to wait for the word of command before he does anything. Yet we have people going all over the country trying to convince their fellow-citizens that there is no salvation for us unless all young men are subjected to a period of military training, apparently in ignorance of the fact that those who have had that training have difficulty in competing industrially with those who have none. It may be true for other reasons, for purposes of defence, that we ought to learn to shoot, though for my part I believe that most men are more likely to be sick sometime in their lives than to be engaged in fighting with people of whom they know nothing. That would seem to be an argument for their being taught how to preserve and care for their own rather than how to destroy somebody else’s health; but Gessler’s cap is still in the market-place, and it is rude to say anything about it. Yet it is not the bonnet, but the head that is in it, that matters in the long run.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FAMILY AS MODEL

The basis of the family not necessarily a blood tie—Adoption—The head and the centre of the family—The feeling of joint responsibility—The black sheep—Companionship and sympathy necessities in life—Reform only possible when these are found—“Conversion” only temporary in default of force of new interests—The one way in which reform is made permanent.

One great mistake made by those who consider social problems is that they either regard man apart from his surroundings or as one of a mass, instead of as a member of a family or group. Family life is the common form of social life, and whatever its defects, it is the form that is likely to persist without very great modification. The family is based on marriage, and the parties married are not one in blood, though the children of the marriage are. The family tie, therefore, is not solely a blood tie. The members are brought up in a sense of mutual obligation and in the knowledge of their interdependence.

Occasionally adoption is a means of entering a family. When a person is adopted early in life, it is difficult to perceive any difference in the tie that binds him and the other members of the family. There is another and a temporary adoption which is much more frequent than is generally imagined, and the existence of which prevents a great many lads and more girls from becoming destitute and from drifting into evil courses. In Glasgow there are many young persons who, having no relatives of their own with whom they can live, or the relatives being unwilling to take them in, obtain lodgings and help from others. In the case of the girls, they pay a portion of their earnings to the common treasury and give their services in aid of the work of the household, being treated in all essential respects as members of the family. Many of them are not earning a wage sufficient to enable them to pay for lodgings at the ordinary rate; and it is this arrangement that explains why so many who are in receipt of small wages are able to live respectably, and do so. Attempts have been made to provide hostels for such wage-earners, on this very ground that their income is insufficient to enable them to hire a room with attendance; and the hostels are frankly admitted to require charitable aid for their upkeep, though they are in their management institutional; that is to say, they aim at economy by the subdivision of labour. It never seems to have occurred to those who appeal for funds to establish such places that the girls in the majority of cases have solved the problem for themselves, by what I have called, and what practically is, a kind of adoption; and that their solution is the correct one—that the minority who have failed to obtain adoption can be better helped by securing it for them, if necessary by subsidy, than by bringing them together in an institution.

A good many jokes have been made as to who is the head of a household—the man or the wife; and the question is occasionally a subject of dispute; but in the family authority tends to adjust itself. It can only exist when there is mutual toleration and respect. Each member may be acutely conscious of the shortcomings of the other and may discuss them freely, but they all tend to unite against outside criticism, and if they are aware of each other’s demerits, they are equally sharp to recognise qualities which help to their advancement. So that while one member may be the head of the family, another may be the centre of the family. It is not always either the father or the mother that exercises most influence in the family council. These matters are determined by circumstances, and when there is discord and disunion it is almost invariably due to a disregard of natural aptitudes and tendencies in the children, and to an insistence on parental rights in the narrow sense.

The enforcement of mutual responsibility implies the recognition of mutual power. The community in which we live is mainly made up of families. Yet men are considered as individuals, legislated for, and supervised as though this were not the case; and the authorities, instead of working through the family on the individual, contrive to raise the family feeling against them. The State is not an aggregation of men, but an aggregation of families; and when men are considered in the mass they are considered without relation to their usual surroundings. It has been pointed out that the crowd takes on characters different from the individuals composing it, but it is quite wrong to imagine that men have ordinarily to be regarded as units in a crowd. Attempts are made to supervise men in masses; that is what takes place in institutions. Individuals are supervised in certain circumstances outside, but they are best supervised in conjunction and in co-operation with the members of the family of which for a time they form a part.

If every family has not its black sheep, in most cases it has some one of its members whose capacity is not equal to that of the others. In some of the cases the direction in which the weakness is shown is one that leads to breaches of the law. There are many children in every city who are a great trial to their parents, and there are parents who sorely try the patience and resources of their children. There are families who spend care and effort to prevent one of their members from becoming worse than he is and in endeavouring to lead him into better courses; but the community does nothing to help them in their efforts until they drop their burden or are compelled to relinquish it, when the authorities promptly proceed to apply official methods of treatment. We have reached the point where it actually pays the family financially to disclaim responsibility, for the State will do all (even though it does it badly) or will do nothing. It would be cheaper in every sense to help those who are trying to bear their responsibility—who are willing, though their circumstances make them unable—than to do as we have done; and acting on the ignorant assumption of our own knowledge, wait until evil has developed so far as to be unbearable and then put the evil-doer through our machinery.

Unless the offender is brought into sympathetic contact with someone in the community, who will enable him to resist temptation and encourage him in welldoing, he never does reform. There are people who attribute the change in their conduct to a conversion, sudden or otherwise, towards religion. The more sudden the change in their mental outlook the greater danger they are in; for the severing of an evil connection, though a necessary step, is not all that is required. In a community such as ours a man cannot stand alone. He cannot forsake his company and his accustomed pursuits and become a hermit, living the life of an early Christian sent into the wilderness. He has to remain in the world and live out his life there. He must not only be converted from his former courses, but turned to better courses. He cannot get on without company. He cannot even earn his living alone; and the great advantage the convert has in our place and time is the assurance that he will be supported by others of like mind with him. They will find work for him and fellowship, and they fill his time very full; but only in so far as good comradeship is established between him and others is he likely to remain steadfast. Comradeship deeper than the sharing of a common theological dogma and a common emotionalism is the only security for his reformation.

To the man whose life has been passed in sordid surroundings, whose work has been monotonous and laborious, and whose pleasures have been gross, the more emotional the form in which the religious appeal is presented the greater its chance of success. He becomes filled with the spirit—a different kind of spirit from that which has hitherto influenced his actions—but the result is an excitement and an exaltation as pronounced as any he felt in the days of his iniquity. No one can listen to the convert at the street corner without being struck by the fact that while he is detailing and perhaps magnifying the nuisance he was before his regeneration, he is as much excited and makes as much noise as he did in those days. In some cases his public behaviour makes little difference to his neighbours, for he is no quieter than he was; though, instead of sending them to hell as he did in his wrath, he now tells them that they are going there. Of course there is a world of difference both to them and to him as a result of the change in his outlook. His conduct is improved, if his manner is not; but every period of exaltation is liable to be followed by one of depression, and this is the danger to which his emotionalism exposes him.

The best way to prevent a man from falling back into his old habits is to keep him too busy in the formation of new ones to have any time to turn his attention to the past. We hear it commonly said that the way to hell is paved with good intentions, but just as truly the way to heaven may be paved with bad. If men are distracted from doing the good they intend by something less worthy, they are as often prevented from doing the evil they had concerted through something interposing and claiming their interest. Religion, then, may be a very potent influence in starting a man on a new course of conduct, and its spirit may inspire him to continue in the way of welldoing; but his perseverance will depend far more than he thinks on his adaptation to the company of the religious, and his interest in their work and their lives. Almost as little will the love of good keep him from the world, the flesh, and the devil, as the love of evil will make him a criminal.

For the most part men are not wicked because they prefer evil to good, but because they have come under the influence of evil associations which appeal to something in them. The man at the street corner who speaks about serving God is, at any rate, logical when he talks about having served the devil; but in those old bad days he did not consider the devil at all. He did what pleased him best, quite apart from any desire to have the approval of the Prince of Darkness. It is only after his conversion that he discovers that all his life he had been serving Satan without recognising him, and it is equally possible, surely, for men to serve God without recognising the fact. It is just as possible for a man to do good and to live well, without thinking of anything beyond his pleasure in doing so, as to live wickedly from the same reason. In both cases the fellowship of others has a great deal to do with the matter.

There is only one method by which a prisoner is reformed, and that is through the sympathetic guidance and assistance of some person or persons between whom and him there is a common interest. An employer engages an ex-prisoner and shows that he really desires him to do well. He must not patronise him, but he has to impress in some way the person he would help with the idea that he believes in him. He has to revive in him a feeling of self-respect. How is this done? There is no convenient formula. The man whose manner attracts one may repel others. Religion, which most powerfully influences some, shows no power to attract many; and the man who will be deaf to one form of appeal may respond to another. It is simply foolish to assume that because our attempts to correct a man have failed he is incorrigible. All we can say is that we have failed because we have not been dealing with him in a way suited to him. Sometimes it is an old acquaintance or a fellow-workman that impresses him and leads him to a new interest in life. Whoever moves him, and however it may be done, it is only a new interest that will expel the old. It never is what a man is taught, but what he learns, that moves him.

CHAPTER IX

ALTERNATIVES TO IMPRISONMENT

If the present methods of treatment mainly result in the liberation of men and women from prison in a condition that makes it difficult for them to do well—sometimes more difficult than it was before they were sent there—it follows (1) that no one should be sent to prison if there is any other means to protect the public from him; and further (2) that no one should be liberated from prison unless the community has some guarantee that it will not suffer from him. In short, what happens to the prisoner in prison is of secondary importance to the public. Of primary importance is, what is likely to happen to them when he comes out. The first consideration should be: How can you deal with people who have offended so as to avoid making them worse and to ensure that they will behave better? Unfortunately, one main concern of many is how they can make the culprit suffer. One of the effects of retributive punishment is to make those who undergo it less fit, physically or mentally, than they were before its infliction. We must make up our minds whether we really desire to correct the offender or not, and if we seek his correction we must be prepared to throw overboard theories and practices which obstruct that end, whether they are old or new.

An examination of the reports of the Prison Commissioners for Scotland will suggest to anyone that a good deal might be done to diminish the number of committals to prison. According to the last report published (1910), there were 46,466 receptions of prisoners under sentence. As some were in prison more than once during the year, the number of individuals represented is probably about 23,000, and of these 9775 were in for the first time. Their sentences ranged from under one day to two years. There were 39,036 sentences of a month or less, and of these 22,696 were seven days or less; 7949 of that number being of three days or less. These people have not much time to get accustomed to their quarters before they are liberated; and if there were the means, there is neither the time nor the opportunity to make any thorough enquiry into their dispositions and way of living, with a view to help them.

As for the nature of their offences, there were 14,644 committals for breach of peace, disorderly conduct, etc.; 12,274 for drunkenness; 1982 for obscene language, etc.; and nearly all these are offences inferring drunkenness. Where did they get the drink? Apparently it was not from the public-houses, for from the tables it does not appear that anyone was sent to prison for breach of certificate. If the source of supply could be discovered and cut off, or at any rate made to flow less freely, it seems obvious that there would be a much smaller prison population. But is there any good purpose served by sending people to prison for a few days? It is true the streets are rid of them, but such as are habituals go out simply revived by the rest and keen as ever for drink. I say the habituals, for time and again these return with sentences of two, three, five, or seven days. As for the casual offender, it would be far better to let him off, when he cannot pay a fine, than to send him to prison, thereby causing him to lose his employment and bringing him to bad company. In 1909 over 40,000 were sent to prison in default of paying a fine. Time to pay fines benefits many, but there are those who are too poor to be helped by it. At present a fine is imposed as an alternative to imprisonment; and as the public is only assured of the culprit’s behaviour for so many days, positive gain, financially and otherwise, would result from placing him in bond outside a prison. At present, if the fine is not paid, the absurd condition of affairs is this: that a person fined in, say, twenty shillings or twenty days may disappear and not pay the fine in the time allowed him; three months after he may be found, arrested, and sent to prison for this failure to pay. The sentence of the court amounted to this: that if he paid twenty shillings he would be at liberty to do as he pleased, but if he failed to pay he would have his liberty restricted for twenty days at the public expense; they to be secure from misconduct on his part during that time. He has behaved for three times that period at no expense to the public; why, then, should their hospitality be forced on him? As long as people will behave outside prison there is no sense in sending them inside. Whether they are likely to behave can only be discovered after a more exhaustive and a different kind of enquiry than has hitherto been made in each case.

Minor offences form the great majority of our committals, and drunkenness is an element in most of the cases. If a man does not get drink to excess he will not become drunk. Persons and premises are licensed for the convenience of the public, and it is not for the public convenience that anyone should be allowed to have a practically unlimited supply of liquor. One of the troubles of the man that takes drink is that he is not in a state to appreciate his own condition, and he is apt to imagine that he is much more sober than he is. No respectable publican wants to make men drunk; but he wants to make money out of his business, and beyond certain limits he cannot be more particular than his neighbours. It is sometimes very difficult to say when a man is drunk, but it is easy to tell when he is not sober, and he is not entitled to the benefit of any doubt that may exist. It ought to be the business of the vendor to refuse drink to a man who has evidently had as much as is good for him. He may make mistakes, but they will be on the right side if he has to pay for them.

The very desire to prevent men being supplied with drink to excess has resulted in making the law, with regard to the supply of drink to intoxicated persons, something very like a dead letter. I have known a man to be convicted for being drunk and incapable at a police court, and though it was shown that he left a public-house in that condition after having had several drinks there, when the publican was brought to the same court on a subsequent date, to answer a charge of breach of certificate in respect that he had supplied drink to a man who was drunk, the charge was found not proven. The fine for such a breach of certificate would not have been nearly so great as the cost of defending the charge; but a conviction would have resulted in the endorsement of the licence, and might have caused its withdrawal. Now as the man depended on the licence for his livelihood, this was practically a sentence of death. In these cases the magistrates are exceedingly unwilling to convict and in consequence charges are seldom made.

If the penalty inflicted in the police court did not result in a larger penalty imposed by the licensing court, there would be less difficulty in dealing with the licence holders; and if drunkenness is to be prevented they must be dealt with. Of course a man may get drunk in a private house or in a club; making it more difficult for him to become intoxicated in a public-house would not prevent that; but even so, it would tend to keep the streets free from disorder; and if a man will take more drink than he can carry, it is alike better for his own health and for the public convenience that he should do it in private. There have been many complaints about clubs during recent years, and that some of them are vile places there can be no question. The evidence given in the court as to how these objectionable places have been conducted shows their character quite clearly, but in the worst cases the very fact that such evidence was in possession of the authorities is a grave reflection on their competence to suppress disorder. In some cases the clubs were little better than dens of thieves, to which half-intoxicated persons were lured to be robbed by people whose character was well known to the police. Raiding them avails little, but warning off those who would enter might avail much. Men in uniform placed at the doors would act as a sign to warn the unwary. The knave preys on the fool. Warn off his prey and he will starve.

If through a subsidence or otherwise there is a hole in a street into which a man might stumble and break his leg, the place is barricaded off and a watchman placed there to warn the careless. Nobody would think of leaving the trap open, even though a sufficient ambulance service were provided to carry off the injured. When a place that is known to be a trap for the foolish is discovered, on the same principle it might be profitable to warn those who would enter it, rather than to wait until they had suffered loss and then seek to seize and convict those who had robbed them. There are more ways of closing an ill-conducted club than by withdrawing its licence; but after all has been said, most of the drunkenness that disgraces our streets has not resulted from the consumption of drink either in private houses or in clubs, in spite of what the trade may say to the contrary. Indignation against clubs on the part of liquor-sellers is not due to zeal for temperance, but springs from jealousy of their own monopoly. They seem to think that men should not take drink unless they are permitted to make a profit in the process; and it is just this question of profit that lies at the root of any effective dealing with the matter.

Our attempts to punish the drunkards are often ludicrous. It might not be so ridiculous to try to get at those who make a profit off the drunkard. He makes a loss; we make a loss; someone has profited. We punish him; we punish ourselves; neither of us are profited at all. There is surely something wrong here. Those who are incapable of taking care of themselves, or who are disorderly in their conduct through drink, when taken into custody by the police, might quite profitably be permitted to go home when they are sober, unless their conduct is becoming a habit; in which case some other method of dealing with them requires to be considered. The disgrace of arrest will appeal as effectively to any person with a sense of shame as proceedings before a magistrate would do. When a fine—the cost of the trouble he has caused—has been inflicted on such an offender, time for payment should always be allowed. A man will never earn money in prison to pay the costs of his prosecution, but if allowed to go about his business he may do so. Even if he can only earn his living without paying a fine, behaving himself the while, he has done more than it would have been possible for him to do in prison.

There has been a strong tendency of late years to deal with persons coming before the courts for the first time, even when the charge is regarded as a serious one, in some other way than by sending them to prison. They are put on probation for a period, and if nothing is known against them for that time they are discharged. Probation rightly managed would solve the problem of their treatment in the great majority of cases. Imperfect as the method employed at present is, many have been benefited because under it they have escaped imprisonment. It is most commonly adopted in the case of those who have committed offences against property; yet if the principle on which it can be justified—the principle of substituting correction for punishment—were intelligently recognised, it would be applied in all cases, no matter what the offence; provided the offender was regarded as a suitable subject on consideration of his history and character. At present the offence more than the offender determines the sentence; and there is a greater likelihood of a person who has committed a petty offence being put on probation, than there would be if in the eye of the law the offence he had committed were regarded more seriously.The process is popularly described as giving the offender another chance. It is a loose expression, which may mean anything. It sometimes does mean giving him another chance to offend, and that is all. It is intended to give him another chance to behave; and this assumes that he has already had the chance; an assumption that is not always warranted if the facts were considered. Clearly it is of no advantage to the public that an offender should have a chance of again committing a breach of the law; and if he is to be liberated from custody, it would be a reasonable proceeding to see that he is placed under such conditions as would make it easier for him to obey than to break the law. Putting him on probation ought not to mean returning him to the conditions under which he failed to resist temptation. Rather should it imply placing him under less unfavourable conditions of life. What is actually done amounts to this, that the offender, instead of being sentenced, on conviction, to imprisonment, is ordered to appear in court after so many months, in order that his case may be disposed of; and is allowed to be at liberty provided he consents to live under certain conditions prescribed by the court, his conduct to be reported on by a probation officer, whose duty it is to give him such counsel and aid as is possible without expense to the rates.

The probation officer may be a police official; not necessarily a police officer, but under the control of the police. Now if there is one thing that is more clear than another in Glasgow and other urban areas in the West of Scotland, it is that the poorer classes are suspicious of the police and the machinery of the law that masquerades in the name of justice—for it is a burlesque of justice to examine only one side of a case; to decide how far the individual is to blame for offending against the laws of the community, without making any enquiry into the question how far the community is to blame for inducing the offence; and this is felt, if it is not clearly expressed, by all who are liable to transgress. A tacit conspiracy against the officers of the law is not only apparent in the case of the poorer classes, but in the case of all classes, when they are brought into conflict with it. The old Roman father who sacrificed his son to the laws, and whom we were asked to admire for his heroism when we were at school, is not a common phenomenon. He has left few descendants, which is probably a good thing. Now the father strives to shield his son; the sister puts the best face on her brother’s conduct; and the neighbours would far rather condone the fault of the culprit than expose his misdeeds. They feel that our methods are wrong whenever they come intimately in contact with them, and they obey their instincts and feelings; that is all. They can see that it is wrong, that it is foolish, to interfere with a man to make him worse, no matter under what pretence, when they know the man; although they will readily admit that you must punish the offender whom they do not know. So the probation officer may be misled into a wrong report regarding the person under his charge when that person behaves pretty much the same as he did before he was first arrested, the conditions under which he is living not having undergone any material change. The probation officer has his hands full, having quite a number of people to visit and report upon daily. These people being widely separated from one another geographically, he is merely discharging the duties of an inspector; and he cannot give individuals the attention their cases may require in order to their improvement.

Before a prisoner is discharged from the criminal lunatic department, the authorities see that an approved guardian is provided for him outside. The conditions on which he is allowed to be free are distinctly laid down, and the guardian is given the same authority over him outside as the attendants had when he was inside. If he breaks through any of the conditions imposed on him the guardian may report his misconduct, when he is liable to be brought back within the walls of the department. The same thing may happen if complaints of his behaviour are made by neighbours or associates. He has to be visited at intervals by some citizen of known character and integrity, whose duty it is to certify that the patient is fit to be free; and at unexpected times a medical officer from the department may call and see him, his guardian, and others, in order that there may be a reasonable security for the public.

It has been said that there is too much fuss made over these cases, but I doubt it. The public security is the first consideration, and there has seldom been any cause given for complaint on the part of the prisoner so liberated. He is not set free and left to return to the associations to which he has reacted badly in the past. He is not left to struggle for existence and probably to fall under the struggle. He is placed under conditions which make it easier for him to do well than to do ill; and if he will not conform, his rebellion is checked at the beginning.

It is not the duty of his guardians and visitors merely to look for evidences of his evil tendency. They have to help him to do well. These guardians are usually people who, for some reason, have a friendly interest in the man whose care they undertake. They are not paid for their work—though they should be, if necessary, as it costs less to keep a man outside than to keep him inside a lunatic asylum, and it is better to pay people who have a personal interest in the subject of their care than to pay those who have only an official interest in the persons with whom they deal.

Contrast this state of affairs with probation as it is worked. In the one case the guardian is carefully selected and is not appointed to act, however willing he may be, if there is not ground for assuming that he is also able. In the other case it is assumed that the guardians who have failed to exercise supervision over the offender will be better able to do so when the culprit has appeared before a magistrate. In both cases there are official visits to the prisoner discharged on licence, and in the case of the offender on probation these visits are more frequent.

In so far as the officer can do so, he tries to help the wrongdoer; but if he has many under his charge the best will in the world cannot enable him to do more than a little for each. This little is as much as is required in many cases; and, imperfect as it is, the practice of the probation system has been justified by a certain amount of success. Where it has failed has been in those cases where the conditions laid down have been of such a character that the offender is morally unable to conform to them. I do not suggest that the conditions were in themselves unreasonable, or that the standard of behaviour demanded has been too high judged by the needs of the community, but only that the demand made on the offender was greater than his circumstances permitted him to meet.

X 32 was a girl under fifteen years of age, rather big for her years, judged by the standard of the district in which she was brought up. She was employed as a message-girl and stole money from her employers. In the aggregate she appropriated a considerable sum before she was found out. She was put on probation, broke her bond, and was sent to a reformatory. Two questions arose from her conduct. (1) Why did she steal? and (2) Why did she break her bond? As to the first question, the answer was quite apparent. She wanted little things which she could not get and she took the money to get them. Her peculations were not observed and they increased. Indeed, on one occasion she spent such a large sum of money in treating a party of school friends, that it is difficult to understand why the tradesman who executed her order did so at all, seeing what she was. It is one of the commonest things for young people to help themselves to things that are not their own. It is rarely considered thieving except they take money, or goods to sell; but dishonest appropriation of property is so common, not as a continued practice, but as an incident in the lives of young people, that I question if one of those who read this has not at some time or another in his or her life been guilty of it. This is too frequently forgotten, and if it were remembered as it ought to be children would be treated more wisely than hitherto has been done.

The girl in question was the eldest daughter of respectable working people. Her conduct shocked them; but they were unfit to direct her, for during the day her father was out working, and her mother had as much as she could do to attend to her household and to care for her younger children. The girl was sent back on probation to this home; a respectable home, but a home where, in the nature of things, she could not receive the care and guidance she required, having developed this propensity; and she broke her bond simply because she was placed under conditions where there was no reasonable probability of her keeping it. Accordingly she was sent to a reformatory, at a cost to the community much greater than would have been incurred had she been boarded out with the consent of her parents under the care of some respectable person in the country, where she could have been freed from the associations that had proved unsuitable to her.

Money may be had, through channels provided by Parliament, for placing people in institutions, reformatory and otherwise; while the statutes do not provide for expenditure in the way suggested. Accordingly the reason assigned for not doing things which obviously might be done with profit is, that there are no powers, enabling them to act in the way suggested, in the hands of the officials. This, if it is an excuse for inaction, is not a valid one everywhere. When the parents of a child are willing to surrender their rights as guardians on cause being shown, and to allow the young person who has offended to be placed under control of some suitable person, all the power required is in the hands of the judge.

It is recognised that parents, however respectable, may not be able to give their children such attention as they may require should they contract certain diseases; and there is seldom any difficulty in inducing them to have their ailing child removed to an infirmary for treatment. On the contrary, there are more who seek such treatment for their children than can be accommodated. For want of a better term, what we may call a moral ailment in a young person may as readily defy the resources of the parents as any physical ailment could do; and there are many parents who recognise the fact and would welcome assistance; but instead of helping them we are content to wait until the offender gets worse, and then to free the parent from all sense of responsibility and to make his position more painful than it need be by placing the culprit in one of our institutions. We may hope our action will do good, but the hope is not founded on experience.

There is no law that hinders the community from assisting the needy among its numbers, although there may be no provision of funds specifically for this purpose. Whatever may be the case elsewhere, in Glasgow want of money is not the reason why things are not done. We have a large fund called the Common Good of the Corporation. Of late years it has been swollen by profits on the city’s tramways to such an extent that a bonus, under the name of a reduction of rates, amounting to some £40,000 in one year, has been divided among the ratepayers. From this same fund banquets are provided; receptions are paid for; medals are supplied to magistrates; and all sorts of expenditure are defrayed for which there is no authority to rate. A small sum relatively is granted in aid of scientific and charitable organisations, and about £500 is contributed to assist discharged prisoners. If money can be had to defray the cost of food, drinks, and cigars, for those who are quite able to pay for them themselves, and that without any special Act of Parliament, surely it could also be had to prevent offenders becoming hardened in their offences, and to assist those who are willing to undertake the work of guiding and training them in right ways of living. Doubtless the money will be found when it is realised that it is at least as important to the city that people should be kept out of prison and helped to do well, as it is that the eminent and notable among the citizens should occasionally be treated from the corporation funds.

How many could be assisted in this manner it is impossible to say, but so far as can be judged a large proportion of those dealt with might be so assisted at comparatively little cost. Whether the number be large or small, however, it should be clearly understood that, the money being there, if they are not helped, it is not for want of power nor for want of means, but for some other reason. There are many things which the law does not enjoin on the corporation; but there are many others that are worthy which it does not prohibit those who are willing from doing; and if our officials are to be encouraged to believe that they must do nothing to help those who need assistance unless they get an Act of Parliament authorising them to do it, we need not wonder if our rate of progress is slow. The safe rule is to do the thing that needs doing, so long as there is not a positive injunction against doing it. This will cause trouble, no doubt, to the person who follows such a course of action; but I do not believe that any public official who acts on this principle will fail to receive public support and encouragement so long as he seeks to help people to help themselves, whatever view those in authority may take of his actions.

We are too much bound by precedent. Appropriate action is sometimes checked by the consideration that the thing proposed has never been done before. Of course that is no reason for not doing it now; but it takes the place of a reason in far too many cases.

More interest is taken in proposals for dealing with the habitual offender than in any others, although nobody is a habitual to begin with. He is supposed to be the dangerous person. He is a professional plunderer; the villain of the piece. But habitual offenders are not all great criminals. There are those who live by stealing, having become more or less expert at the business; but there are many offenders who, having become careless and drunken, or who, being physically or mentally a little below the ordinary standard of their class, are incapable of keeping a job even if they got it. They are more a nuisance than a danger to their fellow-citizens. This army of destitute persons should be dealt with by the destitution authorities. Taken singly they are not difficult to control and direct, and it would be cheaper and more profitable to have them planted out in the country than to allow them to herd together in the cities, to be successful neither in honest nor dishonest work, and serving as tools and touts for the more skilful rogues.

The most helpless among them are the aged and infirm, some of whom have only become submerged late in life, and all of whom are quite unable to extricate themselves from the morass into which they have fallen. Now they are in the prison; now in the poorhouse. When they can avoid either of these institutions they live in lodging-houses or on the streets, where their misery is a reproach to our civilisation. They are not interesting; they are only disgusting; and it has been proposed to shut them up in the poorhouse, because they go in and out too frequently.

Yet something might be learned from their point of view. They are sent to prison because they commit petty offences. They are quite unfit to conform to the rules of that institution and are not improved by residence there. For a few days they are kept off the streets, but nobody pretends that this could not be done more effectively and at less cost. If they prefer the prison to the poorhouse, as is sometimes alleged, they do not prefer the prison to the miserable and haphazard existence they drag out when free; and as a matter of fact, when the weather becomes suddenly severe or their ailments become more insistent, it is the parish, not the police, to which they apply. They hope to be sent to a hospital. When they recover sufficiently they are out again. May this not afford a presumption that there is something wrong with the poorhouse? Is it reasonable to assume that, having experienced all the bitterness and hardship due to their poverty and destitution—that knowing they will be subjected to hunger, rough usage, and exposure—they prefer to suffer these rather than trust to the tender mercy officially meted out to them, and that they do this through sheer cussedness? For my part, I do not believe that they are such fools. If they prefer to forage for themselves, knowing the difficulty of doing so, rather than live in the poorhouse, it is because, after balancing the advantage and disadvantage, they have found that anything is better for them than life in that glorious institution. To anyone who has lived there, there is no ground for surprise that they should adopt this conclusion.

In the prison a man may have too much privacy. In the poorhouse there is none at all. The inmates having nothing in common but their misfortune, poverty, and destitution, are housed together and live a barrack life. Some attempt is made to classify them, as though you could sort out people, in ignorance of their temperaments and tastes, by their record as disclosed to an inspector. In our own experience people sort out themselves. In any church or club you get people of the same age and of similar good character. They can all be civil to one another if they meet occasionally, but set any half-dozen of them to live together with no relief from each other’s company, and there will be rebellion inside a week.

In the poorhouse the inmates have to suffer one another during the whole time of their stay. Some of them rebel and leave the place, even though they know that they will be more uncomfortable outside. They at least have a change of discomfort. Surely the money spent in chasing them and in keeping them would yield a better return if they were boarded out in comfortable surroundings, where during the few remaining years of their pilgrimage they might get fresh air and some space to move about in. Their very feebleness makes their custody less difficult, and it is no profit to them or to us to make it more arduous than it need be. If it be objected that this would be treating them better than the “deserving poor,” that is only to remind us of the shameful way in which we have neglected those to whom we give that name. The “deserving poor” are the uncomplaining poor; and so long as they do not complain their deserts are likely to be disregarded, even when quoted as a reproach to those whose behaviour has attracted our censure.

CHAPTER X

THE BETTER WAY

If our courts of first instance were places where more exhaustive enquiries took place and greater consideration were given to the needs of the cases coming before them; if the aged and destitute were cared for and prevented from offending; if minor offenders were either liberated on their own promise of good behaviour or that of their friends; if people were put on probation under conditions that gave them a favourable chance of conforming to the laws; there would still be a number to whom such treatment could not be applied.

There are some people who are not fit to be at liberty. They are so reckless of their own interests and the interests of others that, when uncontrolled, they become a danger. Some of them are insane, and the lunacy authority should attend to them. Others, through indulging their temper, are in the way of becoming insane; but their mental unsoundness is not so marked as to cause the lunacy specialists to certify them. That is no reason why it should not be recognised. At present they annoy those around them with more or less impunity until they attain to the ideal standard of insanity, in the process of their graduation paying visits to the prison. There is no reason why they should not be dealt with from the beginning. There is only precedent taking the place of reason.

They are unfit to be at liberty without supervision, because they are not capable of self-control; but many of them could be trained in the habit. At present they are allowed to run wild for a time and then severely put down. Their life alternates between periods of riot and periods of repression, and their natural unsteadiness is intensified. If they knew that the period of riot had definitely ceased—that they were not again to be allowed to do what they liked if it implied harm to others—they would set about to control the temper that is in danger of finally controlling them.

They boast of being able to stand our punishments, and even invite them; they might as easily be trained to qualify for our rewards had we any to offer. They may be brutal and sometimes are, though brutality is no longer a common characteristic of prisoners in prison; but it does not follow that, bad as some of them may appear, they are incorrigible. Their conduct and reputation make it difficult to obtain guardianship for them. What can be done with them? If they are liberated at any time they are a menace to the safety and the comfort of the citizens. It is because some writers have recognised this that they suggest the lethal chamber as a suitable place for them. It is a bold thing to propose the wholesale killing of other people except in name of war, and if there were any danger of the proposal being adopted it is not at all likely that it would be made. It is designed to shock us, and it fails to do so because we think we know that it will not bear discussion. As a matter of fact, at present we destroy the lives of these people in another way. Instead of curing them of their evil propensities we twist them still further, and kill any sense of public spirit in them as effectively in the process as we could do if we suffocated them. If they were put in the lethal chamber that would be an end to them. As it is, we have to set apart respectable citizens, not to make them better, but simply to watch them marking time before engaging in another period of disturbance.

If they are not killed they must be kept. We have got past the killing stage. It is time we adopted a more rational way of keeping them. Either they have to get out some day, or they have to be imprisoned till their death. In the latter case we need not trouble about them beyond seeing that they are not harshly treated, and that those over them do not develop in some degree the qualities condemned in the prisoner; but if they have to come out again it behooves us to see that they are not set free in a condition that makes them less able to conform to our laws than they were when we took them in hand. Otherwise all we have gained by their incarceration is the privilege of keeping them at our expense.

As all institutions have this in common, that the longer a man lives in them the less he is fitted to live outside, it follows that the shorter time a prisoner is cut off from the ordinary life in the community the less chance there is of his developing habits which will be useless to him on his return. The system of shutting people up for longer or shorter periods, and then turning them loose without supervision of a helpful kind and without provision for their living a decent life outside, is quite indefensible and has utterly failed in practice.

A prison ought merely to be a place of detention, in which offenders are placed till some proper provision is made for their supervision and means of livelihood in the community. If this were recognised existing institutions would be transformed. Those who refuse by their actions to obey the law of the community, and to live therein without danger to their neighbours, would as at present be put in prison; but they would not be let out except on promise to remain on probation under the supervision of some person or persons until they had satisfied, not an institution official, but the public opinion of the district in which they were placed, that the restrictions put on their liberty could safely be withdrawn. The prison in which they would be placed would not be a reformatory institution where all sorts of futile experiments might be made, but simply a place of detention in which they would be required each to attend on himself until he made up his mind to accept the greater degree of liberty implied in life outside. The door of his cell would be opened to let him out when he reached this conclusion; but it would not be opened to let him out, as at present, to play a game of hare and hounds with the police. Alike in the case of the young offender and the old, the only safety for the citizens and the only chance of reformation for the culprit lie in his being boarded out under proper care and guardianship in the community. The proper guardian for one person would not be proper for another. At present the same set of guardians—the prison officials—look after all kinds of people who have offended.

The first objection which proposals such as these meet is that it cannot be done. There are a great many people who use this expression when their meaning really is that they cannot do it. There is a difference. Not only can offenders be boarded out, but they are and always have been boarded out. Whenever a man leaves prison he has to board himself out. I do not propose to let loose on the community any more offenders than are let loose at present. Indeed, I do not propose to let any of them loose at all, but simply to do for them, in their own interest and that of their neighbours, what they are doing for themselves to the great loss of us all. When any one of them does reform at present it is only by one way; either he has the necessary supervision from the friends religion has brought him, or an employer has taken an interest in him, or a fellow-workman has given him help, or some friendly hand has guided him. In no case do we give the guardian any control over him; in no case do we pay the guardian for time and work spent. I propose that we should give the power and the pay which are at present given to official persons in prison to unofficial persons outside prisons; in the reasonable hope that the money would be better expended, and in the full assurance that the results would not be worse.

Where are the guardians to be found? They are to be found in all parts of the country when search is made for them. The thing cannot be done wholesale. I do not suggest that the prisons should be emptied in a day. I merely indicate a mark to be aimed at and plead for an effective interference in place of the present ineffective interference. Putting it another way, are there no cases in which this procedure could be adopted? There are many; there are no cases in which it could not be adopted if you had the guardians looked out, but that takes time. It would be foolish, even if it were possible, to wait until you could treat every offender before treating any. It would be wise to begin and treat as many as possible in this way at once. It is not a question of finding so many thousand men to look after so many thousand; it is merely the question of finding one man to guide and supervise another man, the people in the district being the critics and the judges of his success.

At one time, in this part of Scotland, the children of paupers and of criminals, and the orphans of the poor, were brought up in numbers in the poorhouse. They acquired characters in common that marked them off from children outside. When they grew out of childhood, and were turned out in the world to work and to live, many of them gravitated back to the institution or to the prison. It occurred to someone that what these children required was proper parents; and one was boarded out with a family here, and another with a family there, at less cost to the parish than had been incurred in keeping them in the poorhouse. Thousands of children during the last generation have been boarded out in this fashion to their great advantage in every respect; and their after-conduct has been as good—they have been as decent and law-abiding citizens—as the children of any other class in the community. This moral and social gain has been accomplished at less financial cost than that incurred by bringing them up in institutions. It was said that the institution child had been handicapped because of the stigma of pauperism, but the boarded-out child is equally a pauper in respect that he is supported by the rates. The fact is that the stigma from which the poorhouse child suffered was not the stigma of pauperism, but the stigma of institutionalism.

When the public conscience was stirred regarding the treatment of the insane, great buildings were erected and lavish provision was made for the lunatic. To these places thousands were sent for treatment. By and by it became manifest that in many cases their latter condition was worse than their first. They were better housed, better fed, better clothed, and better cared for; they were protected from the cruelty of the wicked and the neglect of the thoughtless; but they acquired evil habits from each other, and they infected some of their attendants with their vices. Here and there suitable guardians were found for one and another of those whose insanity was not of such a kind as to make it necessary in the public interest that they should be confined to an institution; and now, in Scotland, between five and six thousand are boarded out. That in some cases mistakes are made no one denies; but the cases are few, and on the balance there has been an enormous advantage to everyone concerned.

It has become apparent that not only the inmates of institutions acquire peculiarities which mark them off from persons living outside, but the officials who live in these places also tend to develop eccentricities, and there are proposals made with the object of preventing them from living in; the idea being that the more they are brought in contact with life outside the less they are likely to become narrowed in their views and their habits, and the better they will be able to do their work in such a way as would commend itself to the public whom they serve.

If people can be had who are willing for a consideration to take charge of lunatics, and to fulfil their charge to the satisfaction of the public, it is not unreasonable to suppose that on suitable terms guardians could be found for persons who have offended against the laws, and who cannot be expected to refrain from offending if returned to the surroundings which have contributed to their wrongdoing. The criminal may be presumed to have a greater sense of responsibility than the insane person, and to be more able to take a rational view of his position. In any case, it should never be forgotten that so far as the public is concerned there are only two ways of it; unless, indeed, we are prepared to kill the criminals or to immure them for life. They must either be liberated, as at present, without provision being made for their welldoing, and without guarantees being taken for their good behaviour, even if opportunities were provided; or they must be liberated on condition that they remain under some form of supervision and guardianship.

Unconditional liberation has ended in disaster to all concerned. Conditional liberation can only be expected to produce good results if the conditions are reasonable. They must confer in every case the maximum amount of liberty consistent with the security of the public; and the final judges must be the public themselves. The offender should work out his own salvation, and show that he deserves to have all restrictions removed before they are removed. If he is merely required to do so under highly artificial conditions within the walls of an institution, he will soon learn how to get round the officials there. His conduct in the institution can afford no means for judging what his behaviour will be outside under entirely different conditions. Inside he has no choice but to obey. Outside he has to think and act for himself, and has opportunities of acquiring new interests and of learning habits which are likely to persist because they are those of his fellow-citizens who are free.

All sorts of systems have had their trial in dealing with the offender. It has always been recognised that it was necessary to remove him from the place where he had offended. He has been transported to other lands, there to begin a new life; but the conditions under which the operation was carried out were appalling. He has been placed in association with other offenders, and left, with very little supervision, to become worse or make others worse. He has been placed in solitary confinement; cut off from company of any sort; with the result of wrecking his mind as well as his body. At present he is separated from his fellows, but he has no opportunity to come in contact with healthy social life. One system has broken down after another. All systems have failed to deal with him satisfactorily.

There can be no system, but only a method; and that, the method adopted by the physician in dealing with his patient. When he has satisfied himself that the man who comes to him for advice is suffering from a certain disease, he enquires into the past history, the habits and pursuits, and the social condition of the patient; and on the information gained considers his treatment. The course of conduct prescribed for one person may be quite unsuitable for another, although both suffer from the same complaint; and the wise physician knows that he cannot leave out of account the opinion of the patient himself as to what should be done. It is just so with the offender. In many cases he is best able to tell what should be done for him; and provided it is not something that would result in harm to the community there is no reason why his opinion should not be considered, but every reason why it should. The expert may know a good deal about the offender, but it has been proved over and over again that he does not know how to reform him; for he has been given ample opportunity, and his prescriptions have ended in failure. The official person is apt to imagine that he and his methods should be above criticism. His office has been magnified for so long that he honestly believes it is necessary that it should be maintained in the interests of the public. No institution can be created which will not result in the formation of vested interests in its continuance; and yet every institution must be judged by its results, and not by the opinions of those who are set to manage it.

With the improvement in the social condition of the people; with an increase in the minimum standard of living; with the abolition, or even the mitigation, of destitution, the whole complexion of things would be altered. That changes in these directions will occur there is every reason to suppose, but meanwhile many fall by the way and many take the opportunity to grasp an advantage to the loss of their neighbours. Under any social condition offences may occur. Whatever laws we make there may always be law-breakers. A man may become possessed by jealousy or wrath and injure his neighbour, or from envy or greed may rob him, but he can only acquire the habit of doing so with our permission. If he is checked at the beginning and placed under control, he will not acquire that habit.

Our present methods have not prevented the growth of the habitual offender, and they have not been designed to help those who have gone wrong to reform. The great defect in all our systems is that they are not based on a recognition of social conditions as they exist. Most men can and do behave under supervision, and that supervision in many cases could be made as effective outside an institution as inside one. Men prefer a greater to a lesser degree of liberty. At present they have more than one choice. They may conform to our laws and go free; or they may break our laws in the knowledge that if they are caught, on payment of a penalty either in money or in time, they may resume their wrongdoing once more. The habitual offender continues to offend because he prefers to risk imprisonment and live in his own way rather than accept the humdrum, peaceful life of his law-abiding neighbour. When he finds that there is no question of pay in the matter, but that he is simply offered the choice of good behaviour outside of prison, or incarceration within a prison, he will begin to review his position.

There is only one principle in penology that is worth any consideration; it is to find out why a man does wrong, and make it not worth his while. There is nothing to be gained by assuming that individual peculiarities may be disregarded, and there is everything to be lost thereby. If we would make the best of him we should restrict the liberty of the offender as little as possible consistent with the well-being of the community, and enlarge it gradually as reason is shown for doing so. We cannot injure him without injuring ourselves, and we ought to set about to make the best rather than the worst of him.

THE END