Page:Our habitual criminals.pdf/3

 segregated outlawry like London pickpockets, would be hunted by the verdict of the alley; but as the sons and brothers of working neighbours, and nominally in work themselves, their crimes and convictions are looked on as part of their life's routine—those occasional "gettings into trouble" which diversify the weeks of one or two days work for four or five in the public houses and at the street corners, and the balance redressed after dark by lead thefts from the roofs, burglaries in night-deserted stores, and violent garrotings of the semi-drunken home-bounds. Thus their lives are divided between the time passed in prison and the time passed in the streets, as those of other men, by day and night, or town or country, till all prison terrors are completely gone—alas! not alone from them, but from their kinsfolk and acquaintance—gone for ever all family shame at the prison stain, even from the women-kind and the children; and so the elder brothers graduate to penal servitude, and the younger grow and tread in their steps, till the city masses are leavened by a class dead to the bans of disgrace or degradation—for they have no grace to lose or grade to fall from. The crime of Dublin, as I have often said, is the index, not of its criminality, but of the general low level of the under population.

I have seen the criminal judges blamed for not utilizing more the 8th clause of the Prevention of Crimes' Act, 1871, which provides that defined habitual offenders may be subjected at sentence to as many as seven years' police supervision after their discharge; but one hesitates to apply a system of surveillance only partially developed and of doubtful utility. The weight of evidence at the Royal Commission went very much to prove that supervision in cities has hitherto been only effective when least needed; the more hopeful supervisees do report themselves as required, and there have been serious complaints of situations lost by reason of the surveillance. The section only requires a monthly report by the ex-criminal of his whereabouts to be made to the police authority of the district in which he sojourns—and this the hardened offenders evade and avoid. The highest authority on this subject, Sir Walter Crofton, to whom the country is indebted, I believe, for the reforms contained in the Act of 1871, says he had always contemplated in the system of supervision an united action between benevolent agency and the police. In Q. 12,731 of the Blue Book he adds:—

"'I am satisfied the strong feeling against police supervision, which existed at one time, was owing principally from people not realizing that the Prisoners' Aid Societies would co-operate with them in this way, so that it should not be merely a penal measure, but reformatory also; I think that character is entirely gone if the Prisoners' Aid Societies have nothing to do with these men.'"

And in Q. 12,734 he continues:—

"'The great difficulty in Ireland is in not having Prisoners' Aid Societies to co-operate with the police.'"

Surely the judges cannot blindly adopt a machinery wanting in what its inventor deemed essential to its efficacy. I revert to this subject anon. Then, it is said, why not send these people at once to the long imprisonment terms before they have become hardened to