Page:First Annual Report of the Woodbury Hill Reformatory.djvu/16

 went for and got without much difficulty, These were rural instances, but the towns, even Birmingham—do not serve us at least better. Five boys escaped in the spring—two or three of them well known to the police—one especially. I went—gave full particulars and felt sure of their capture—weeks elapsed and nothing could be heard of the boys. I felt sure three at least were in Birmingham. Mr. Griffiths very soon ferreted out two and the other was given up. All five had slept two or three nights in the tramp-room of the Union, and one entered his true name at the very time I gave notice. The superintendant of the rooms said, the policemen never came there, he only wished they did. One boy—the one known to every criminal officer in Birmingham—from the Stipendary Magistrate to the Detectives—was walking the streets daily. Another was the boy whose mother's letter is given before. We wrote to her and she attempted to put us off as that letter indicates. Not satisfied, Mr. Griffiths went to her house after that letter was received—made the woman confess its lie and give up her son. I had sent a policeman to this very woman's house at first, and the boy told us on his return—"I was at home when the policeman came and heard mother "stuffing the Bobby." I ought in fairness to add, I never have employed any of the Worcester City police in these matters.

With regard to the question of the relation between ignorance and crime—it was lately pointed out by Mr. Kingsmill, Chaplain of Pentonville Prison—that the general proportion of uneducated persons among criminals is about the same as that of the class of life to which they belong, and the ordinary result of education, is rather to change the quality, than affect the quantity of crime. In cases of summary conviction for petty offences, 95 in 100, are classed as having little or no education—and this number drops, in a regular ratio in proportion to heinousness of offence, to 54 in 100 in the case of those condemmed to penal servitude or transportation for life. Both these conclusions are doubtless truly drawn—though the second somewhat modifies the first, through this circumstance. The cases from which this intelligent observer derives these conclusions, need not be, and very often are not, different cases, but identically the same cases at different stages of their career. Our oft-convicted boys, quickened into an intelligence in crime, are found under the head of "fairly," or "well" in elementary education, though they may have been totally ignorant when first committed. Gaols have schools, and the sharpened faculty required for the perpetration of the higher offence, often is acquired in the prison instruction; and a juvenile thief put to school in gaol to quicken his intelligence, and in contact with the more knowing and older hand there to give that intelligence direction, results in that higher grade of crime under a more educated mind, which is here noticed.