labour in silence, was still preferred; and there might be prisons
within a short distance of each other at which two entirely
different systems of discipline were in force.. In 1849 Mr
Charles Pearson, M.P., moved for a select committee to report
upon the best means of securing some uniform system which
should be at once punitive, reformatory and self-supporting.
He urged that all existing plans were inefiicacious, and he
advocated a new scheme by which the labour of all prisoners
should be applied to agriculture in district prisons. The result
of a full inquiry was the reiteration of views already accepted
in theory but not yet generally adopted in practice. Thirteen
more years elapsed and still no such steps had been taken. A
new committee sat in 1863, and in its report again remarked in
no measured terms upon the many and wide differences that
still existed in the gaols of Great Britain as regards construction,
diet, labour and general discipline, “leading to an inequality,
uncertainty and inefficiency of punishment productive of the
most prejudicial results.” Matters could only be mended by
the exercise of legislative authority, and this came in the Prison
Act of 1865, an act which consolidated all previous statutes on
the subject of prison discipline, many of its provisions being still
in force. Yet the years passed and uniformity was still far
from secured; it was impossible indeed while prison administration
was still left to a number of local authorities, no two of
which were often of the same mind. The legislature had tried
its best, but had failed. It had exercised some supervision
through its inspectors, had forbidden cells to be used until duly
certified as fit, and had threatened to withhold exchequer
contributions from prisons of which unfavourable reports were
received. Such penalties had exercised no sufficient terrors.
It began to be understood, moreover, that the prisons under
local jurisdictions were not always conveniently and economically
situated. Crime, with the many facilities offered for rapid
locomotion to those who committed it, had ceased to be merely
local, and the whole state rather than individual communities
ought. to be taxed; prison charges should be borne by the public
exchequer and not by local rates. These considerations gained
strength and led at length to the introduction of the Prison Bill
which became law in 1877, by which the control of all gaols
was vested in a body of prison commissioners appointed by and
responsible to the home secretary. These commissioners had
power to consolidate by closing superfluous prisons, to establish
one system of discipline, and generally by watchful supervision,
aided by the experience of specialists, to maintain that much desired
uniformity which had been so long and unsuccessfully
sought. At the same time the co-operation of the local
magistrates was invited so far as advice and assistance were
concerned; but all real power and control has passed from their
hands into that of the commissioners of prisons. The system
established by the act of 1877 is that now in force.
As for penal servitude, the punishment reserved for the
gravest offences, great changes had been introduced. We left
this branch of the subject at a parliamentary inquiry. The
verdict given was in the main satisfactory; but doubts were
expressed as to the severity of the discipline inflicted, the principal
features of which were moderate labour, ample diet and
substantial gratuities. The first was far less than the work free
men did for a livelihood, the second larger, the third excessive,
so that convicts often left prisons with thirty, forty, , even
eighty pounds in their pockets. Penal servitude, to use the
words of the lord chief justice Sir Alexander Cockburn, one of
the members of the committee, “ was hardly calculated to produce
on the mind of the criminal that salutary dread of the
recurrence of the punishment which may be the means of
deterring him and, through his example, others from the commission
of crime.” The chief recommendation put forward to mend
the system comprised lengthening of all sentences, a diminution
in the dietaries, the abolition of large gratuities, and, speaking
broadly, a general tightening of the reins. The most notable
change however was in regard to labour, the quantity and
value of which was to be regulated in future by the so-called
“mark-system.” This plan had originated with Captain
Maconochie, at one time superintendent in Norfolk Island,
who had recommended that the punishment inflicted upon
criminals should be measured, not by time, but by the amount
of labour actually performed. Int support of his theory he
devised an ingenious system of recording the convicts’ daily
industry by marks, which on reaching a given total would
entitle them to their release. This mark system had already
been tried with good results in Ireland, where the Irish system,
as it was called, introduced by Sir Walter Crofton, had attracted
widespread attention. There had been a very marked diminution
in crime, attributable it was supposed to this system,
which was in almost all respects the same as the English, although
the Irish authorities had invented an “intermediate stage”
in which convicts worked in a state of semi-freedom and thus
practised the self-reliance which in many produced reform.
As a matter of fact the diminution in crime was traceable to
general causes, such as a general exodus by emigration, the
introduction of a poor law and an increase in the facilities for
earning an honest livelihood. It may be added here that judged
by later experience the Irish system had no transcendent merits,
and it is now extinct. But we owe something to the Irish practice
which first popularized the idea of maintaining a strict
supervision over convicts in a state of conditional release, and it
reconciled us to a system which was long wrongfully stigmatized
as espionage. The mark system, as recommended by the committee
of 1863 and as subsequently introduced, had however
little in common with either Maconochie’s or the Irish plan.
It was similar in principle and that was all. According to the
committee, every convict should have it in his power to earn
a remission—in other words, to shorten his sentence by his industry.
This industry was to be measured by marks earned by
hard labour at the public works, after a short probational term
of close “ separate ” confinement. But the remission gained
did not mean absolute release. All males were to be sent, during
the latter part of their sentence, “ without disguise to a thinly
peopled colony, ” to work out their time and their own rehabilitation.
The committee still clung to the old theory of
transportation, and this in spite of the lively protests of some
of its members. The one outlet remaining, however, that of
Western Australia, was soon afterwards (1867) closed to convict
emigrants; and this part of the committee’s recommendations
became a dead letter. Not so the mark system, or the
plan of earning remission by steady industry. This was carried
out on a broad and intelligent basis by officials prompt to avail
themselves of the advantages it offered. Thus in 1877–1878
efforts were made to minimize contamination by segregating
the worst criminals and restricting conversation at exercise.
A special class was formed in 1880, in which all convicts “not
versed in crime,” first offenders and comparatively innocent
men, are now kept apart from the older and more hardened
criminals. The committee last quoted gave it as their opinion
that “penal servitude as at present administered is on the
whole satisfactory; it is effective as a punishment and free from
serious abuses . . . a sentence of penal servitude is now
generally an object of dread to the criminal population.”
Since then, steps have been taken in the classification of
convicts when undergoing sentence with a view to dealing more
effectually with habitual criminals.
Having thus traced the history of secondary punishments and prison discipline in England, it will be well to describe the system now actually in force. This will best understood if we follow those who break the law through all the stages from that of arrest, conviction, to release, conditional or Latest Measures for Enforcing Penal Discipline in England. complete.
After a short detention in a police cell, an offender, unless disposed of summarily, passes into one of His Majesty’s prisons, there to await his trial at sessions or assizes. The period thus spent in the provinces will never exceed three months; in London, with the frequent sitting at Clerkenwell and of the Central Criminal Court, it is seldom more than one month. While awaiting trial the prisoner may wear his own clothes, provide
