It will hardly be denied after an impartial consideration of all the facts I shall herein set forth, that the British prison system can challenge comparison with any in the world. It may be no more perfect than other human institutions, but its administrators have laboured long and steadfastly to approximate perfection. Many countries have already paid it the compliment of imitation. In most of the British colonies, the prison system so nearly resembles the system of the mother country, that I have not given their institutions any separate and distinct description.

No doubt different methods are employed in the great Empire of India; but they also are the outcome of experience, and follow lines most suited to the climate and character of the people for whom they are intended. Cellular imprisonment would be impossible in India. Association is inevitable in the Indian prison system. Again, it is the failure to find suitable European subordinate officers that has brought about the employment of the best-behaved prisoners in the discipline of their comrades: a system, as I have been at some pains to point out, quite abhorrent to modern ideas of prison management. As for the retention of transportation by the Indian government, when so clearly condemned at home, it is defensible on the grounds that the penalty of crossing the sea, the "Black Water," possesses peculiar terrors to the Oriental mind; and the Andaman Islands are, moreover, within such easy distance as to ensure their effective supervision and control.

Nearer home, we may see Austria adopting an English method,—the "movable" or temporary prison, by the use of which such works as changing the courses of rivers have been rendered possible and the prison edifices of Lepoglava, Aszod and Kolosvar erected, in imitation of Chattenden, Borstal and Wormwood Scrubs. France has also constructed in the outskirts of Paris a new prison for the department of the Seine, and she may yet find that the British progressive system is more effective for controlling habitual crime than transportation to New Caledonia. In a country where every individual is ticketed and labelled from birth, where police methods are quite despotic, and the law claims the right, in the interests of the larger number, to override the liberty of the subject, the professional criminal might be held at a tremendous disadvantage. It is true that the same result might be expected from the Belgian plan of prolonged cellular confinement; but, as I shall point out, this system is more costly, and can only be enforced with greater or less, but always possible, risks to health and reason.

But prisons are only one part, and perhaps not the most important part of a penal system. It is obviously right that they should be humanely and judiciously administered, but they exist only to give effect to the fiats of the law, which, for the protection of society, is entrusted with power to punish and prevent crime. How far these two great aims are effected, what should be the quality and quantity of the punishment inflicted, what the amount, if any, of the prevention secured, are moot points which are engaging more and more attention. Although great inequalities in sentences exist in Great Britain, as in every country, dependent as each must be upon the ever varying dispositions of the courts and those who preside over them, the general tendency is towards leniency. Imprisonment is imposed less and less frequently and the terms are growing shorter. The strongest advocates of this growing leniency claim for it that it has helped to diminish crime, and it is certainly contemporaneous with the marked reduction in offences in the last few years. In other words, crime has been least when punishment was least severe. Whether this diminution is not more directly traceable to other causes, and notably to the better care of juveniles and better measures to rescue and reform adult criminals, it is impossible as yet to determine. But it is beyond question that imprisonment, almost the only form of punishment now known to the law, is just as effective as the older and severer measures, if not more so. An ever increasing number of judges adhere to the axiom laid down by Mr. C. H. Hopwood, Q. C., one of the most distinguished of their number, "never to send a man to gaol if you can keep him out of it." The wisest of modern laws dealing with the prevention and punishment of crime is based upon it as a principle. Such acts as the British "First Offender's Act" and "Summary Jurisdiction Act" have done more to keep down the English prison population than all other measures combined.

The whole subject is one of the greatest importance and interest, and I have endeavoured to treat it adequately in the following pages.