Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/775

Rh PKISON DISCIPLINE 751 victs might be flogged for petty offences, for idleness, drunkenness, turbulence, absconding, and so forth. At the out-stations some show of decorum and regularity was observed, although the work done was generally scanty, and the convicts were secretly given to all manner of evil courses. The town convicts were worse, because they were far less under control. They were nominally under the surveillance and supervision of the police, which amounted to nothing at all. They came and went, and amused themselves after working hours, so that Sydney and all the large towns were hot-beds of vice and immorality. The masters as a rule made no attempt to watch over their charges ; many of them were absolutely unfitted to do so, being themselves of low character, &quot; emanci pists &quot; frequently, old convicts pardoned or who had finished their terms. No effort was made to prevent the assignment of convicts to improper persons ; every applicant got what he wanted, even though his own character would not bear inspection. All whom the masters could not manage -the incorrigiblos upon whom lash and bread and water had been tried in vain were returned to Government charge. These, in a word, comprised the whole of the refuse of colonial convictdom. Every man who could not agree with his master, or who was to undergo a penalty greater than ilogging or less than capital punishment, came back to Govern ment, and was disposed of in one of three ways the road parties, the chain gangs, or the penal settlements. The convicts in the first might be kept in the vicinity of the towns or marched about the country according to the work in hand ; the labour was irk some, but, owing to inefficient supervision, never intolerable; the diet was ample, and there was no great restraint upon independ ence within certain wide limits. To the slackness of control over the road parties was directly traceable the frequent escape of des peradoes, who, defying recapture, recruited the gangs of bush rangers, which were a constant terror to the whole country. In the chain or iron gangs, as they were sometimes styled, discipline was far more vigorous. It was maintained by the constant presence of a military guard, and, when most efficiently organized, was governed by a military officer who was ( also a magistrate. The work was really hard, the custody close in hulk, stockaded barrack, or caravan ; the first was at Sydney, the second in the interior, the last when the undertaking required constant change of place. All were locked up from sunset to sunrise ; all wore heavy leg irons ; and all were liable to immediate flagellation. The convict &quot;scourger&quot; was one of the regular officials attached to every chain gang. The third and ultimate receptacle was the penal settlement, to which no offenders were transferred till all other methods of treatment had failed. These were terrible cess pools of iniquity, so bad that it seemed, to use the words of one who knew them well, &quot; the heart of a man who went to them was taken from him and he was given that of a beast.&quot; The horrors accumulated at Norfolk Island, Moreton Bay, Port Arthur, and Tasman s Peninsula are almost beyond description. The convicts herded together in them grew utterly degraded and brutalized ; no wonder that reckless despair took possession of them, that death on the gallows for murder purposely committed, or the slow terror from starvation following escape into surrounding wilds, was often welcomed as a relief. The stage which transportation was now reaching, and the actual condition of affairs in the Australian colonies about this period, do not appear to have been much understood in England. Earnest and thoughtful men might busy themselves with prison discipline at home, and the legislature might watch with peculiar interest the results obtained from the special treatment of a limited number of selected offenders in Millbank penitentiary. But for the great mass of criminality deported to a distant shore no very active concern was shown. The country for a long time seemed satisfied with transportation. Portions of the system might be open to criticism. Thus the Commons committee of 1832 freely condemned the hulks at Woolwich and other arsenals in which a large number of convicts were kept while waiting embarka tion. The indiscriminate association of prisoners in them produced more vice, profaneness, and demoralization than in the ordinary prisons. After dark the wildest orgies went on in them dancing, lighting, gambling, singing, and so forth ; it was easy to get drink and tobacco, and see friends from outside. The labour hours were short, the tasks light ; &quot; altogether the situation of the convict&quot; in the hulks, says the report, &quot;cannot be considered penal ; it is a state of restriction, but hardly of punishment. &quot; But this same committee spoke well of transportation, considering it &quot;a most valuable expedient in the system of secondary punish ment.&quot; All that it felt necessary to suggest was that exile should be preceded by a period of severe probationary punishment in England, a proposal which was reiterated later on and actually adopted, as we shall see. It was in the country most closely affected that dissatisfaction first began to find voice. Already iu 1832 the most reputable sections of Australian society were beginning to find grave fault with transportation. It had fostered the growth of a strong party that representing convict views and these were advocated boldly in unprincipled prints. This party, constantly recruited from the emancipists and ticket-of- leave holders, gradually grew very numerous, and threatened soon to swamp the respectable and untainted parts of the community. As years passed the prevalence of crime, and the universally low tone of morality due to the convict element, became more and more noticeable, and created greater disgust. At length, in 1835, Judge Burton raised a loud protest, and in a charge to the grand jury of Sydney plainly intimated that transportation must cease. While it existed, he said, the colonies could never rise to their proper position ; they could not claim free institutions ; in a word, Australia suffered in its whole moral aspect. This bold but forcible language commanded attention. It was speedily echoed in England, and by none more eloquently than Archbishop Whately, who logically argued that transportation failed in all the leading requisites of any system of secondary punishment. It was not formidable criminals did not dread it ; it was not corrective, but tended obviously to produce further moral debasement ; it was not cheap on the contrary it entailed great outlay without bringing any adequate returns. In the first most important object it had certainly failed. Transportation exercised no salutary terror in offenders ; it was no longer exile to an unknown inhospitable region, but to one flowing with milk and honey, whither innumer able friends and associates had gone already. There was every chance of doing well in the new country. The most glowing de scriptions came back of the wealth which any clever fellow might easily amass ; stories were told and names mentioned of those who had made ample fortunes in Australia in a few years. As a matter of fact the convicts, or at least large numbers of them, had pro spered exceedingly. Some had incomes of twenty, thirty, even forty thousand pounds a year. They owned shops and farms and public houses and ships, drove in carriages, and kept up grand establishments. It could be no great punishment to be put within reach of such advantages. As regarded the deteriorating effects of the system, these were plainly manifest on the surface from the condition of the colony the profligacy of the towns, the leniency shown to crime s and those who had committed them. Down below, in the depths where the dregs rankled perpetually, in the openly sanctioned slavery called assignment, in the demoralizing chain gangs, and in the inexpressibly horrible penal settlements, were more abundant and more awful proofs of the general wick edness and corruption. Moreover, these appalling results were accompanied by a vast expenditure. The cost of the colonial con vict establishments, with the passages out, amounted annually to upwards of 300,000; another hundred thousand was expended on the military garrisons ; and various items brought the whole outlay to about half a million per annum. It may be argued that this was not a heavy price to pay for peopling a continent and laying the foundations of our vast Australasian empire. But that empire could never have expanded to its present dimensions if it had depended on convict immigration alone. There was a point, too, at which all development, all progress, would have come to a full stop had it not been relieved of its stigma as a penal colony. That point was reached between 1835 and 1840, when a powerful party came into existence in New South Wales, pledged to procure the abandonment of transportation. A strongly hostile feeling was ulso gaining ground in England. In 1837 a new committee of the House of Commons had made a patient arid searching investigation into the merits and demerits of the system, and freely condemned it. The Government had no choice but to give way ; it could not ignore the protest of the colonists backed up by such an authori tative expression of opinion. In 1840 orders were issued to suspend the deportation of criminals to New South Wales. But what was to become of the convicts ? It was impossible to keep them at home. The hulks, which might have served, had also failed ; the f aultiness of their internal management had been fully proved. The I committee last mentioned had recommended the erection of more i penitentiaries. But the costly experiment of Millbank had been barren of results. The model prison at Pentonville, now in process of construction under the pressure of a movement towards prison reform, could offer but limited accommodation. A proposal was put forward to construct convict barracks in the vicinity of the great arsenals ; but this, which contained really the germ of the present British penal system, was premature. The Government in this dilemma steered a middle course, and resolved to adhere to transportation, but under a greatly modified and, it was hoped, much improved form. The colony of Van Diemen s Land, younger and less self-reliant than its neighbour, had also endured convict immigration, but had made no protest. It was resolved to direct the whole stream of deportation upon Van Diemen s Land, which was thus constituted one vast colonial prison. The main principle of the new system was one of probation ; hence its name. All con victs were to pass through various stages and degrees of punishment according to their conduct and character. Some general depot was needed where the necessary observation could be made, and it was found at Millbank penitentiary. Thence boys were sent to the prison for juveniles at Parkhurst ; the most promising subjects