Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/778

754 PRISON DISCIPLINE entrust full powers to some central authority who would exact adherence to the rules laid down. Thirteen more years elapsed and still no such steps had been taken. A new committee sat in 18G3, and in its report again re marked, and in no measured terms, upon the many and wide differences that still existed in the jails of Great Britain as regards construction, diet, labour, and general discipline, "leading to an inequality, uncertainty, and inefficiency of punishment productive of the most pre judicial results." Even yet separation was not univer sal ; labour, dietaries, education everything varied still. Matters could only be mended by the exercise of legisla tive 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. It promulgated minute and precise regula tions on every item of prison management, and backed them up with pains and penalties that ought to have ensured attention. 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. Great varieties of practice still obtained. The number of feet ascended at hard labour on the treadwheel differed in different districts ; each jurisdiction still pleased itself as to dietaries ; and it was still, as of old, a mere accident of locality whether imprisonment was light or heavy. The legislature had tried its best, but its best had failed. It had exercised some supervision through its inspectors, had forbidden cells to be used until duly certi fied as fit, had threatened to withhold exchequer contri butions from prisons of which unfavourable reports were re ceived. 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. In one district there might be too many, in another not enough ; one prison was empty and its neighbour full to overflowing ; yet there was no power to make transfers and equalize accommodation. All this produced excessive, even wasteful, expenditure. Xor was its incidence, under altered conditions, exactly fair. 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 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, and which is the last Act passed for the regulation of prisons. By the Act of 1877 the control of all jails was vested in a body of prison commissioners appointed by, and responsible to, the home secretary. These commis sioners had power to consolidate by closing superfluous prisons, to establish one system of discipline, and gene rally 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 had passed from their hands into that of the commissioners of prisons. The system established by the Act of 1877 is that now in force, and we shall recur to it directly, in recapitulating the whole of our present method of secondary punishment. Meanwhile considerable changes had been introduced into penal servitude, the punishment reserved for the gravest offences. We left this branch of the subject at a date (18G3) when its efficiency was about to be tested by 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 exces sive, so that convicts often left prison 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 recommendations put forward to mend the system comprised lengthening of all sentences, a diminution in the dietaries, the abolition of large gratuities, and, speak ing 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 punish ment inflicted upon criminals should be measured, not by time, but by the amount of labour actually performed. In 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. The 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 from the extraordinary success which seemed to follow it. There had been a very marked diminution in crime, attributable it was supposed to the 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 superinduced 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 has evinced no transcendent merits, and it is now (1885) moribund. 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 recon ciled 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 industrj^. 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 sentences, " without disguise to a thinly peopled colony," to work out their time and their own rehabilitation. The committee, it will be seen, 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 ; a readiness