Page:Our habitual criminals.pdf/4

 irreclaimability? And in this question there is undoubted weight: but justice shrinks from condemning five years of a young life to gloomy slavedom for two or three proven sins against society, each perhaps little in itself, even when the judge believes that course most needful; and yet I think there would be greater courage to do this oftener if we had greater faith in the power of long imprisonment to reform under existing conditions. Remember the instances I have cited in which the experiment has been tried—ten years in the reformatories and six convictions since; penal servitude on a lad's third conviction, and a second five years' penal servitude since, followed by the Prison's Office circular to me in January recommending a third more lengthened imprisonment then. It is plain that habitues in street crime cannot maintain reform in the streets. The most hopeful of them must take their place below the lowest of their reputable acquaintances, to be looked upon askance by these, but welcome at fifty street corners if they will join their degraded pot companions there—despised and suspected even by these, if they dare to struggle on in decency. Such overweighing would bear a noble nature down. How then with these moral weaklings of hereditary weakness, human still and so not independent of human sympathy? Many witnesses at the commission corroborate me in this, speaking of the "handicapping" of discharged convicts in the world of honest toil.

For in truth this which we are discussing is no mere Dublin problem. The habitual offender is, and has long been, the despair not simply of tho Dublin criminal courts, but of the gaols throughout the United Kingdom. Mr. Fagan, one of the Directors of Convict Prisons, having charge as such of Millbank, Wormwood-Scrubs, Brixton, and Portsmouth, and who had been for four years connected with convict service in Australia, says in Q. 8,872:—

"'The present class of criminals have materially fallen off in strength and robustness. I think we get the waste of all the large towns and of London particularly.'"

Both physically and morally he considers them a lower class of men. Mr. Clifton, Governor of Portland, says in Q. 2,315-16:—

"'The physique has totally changed; to look back fourteen years ago and think of the men that came then to Portland, and see the men now, there is a wonderful difference. Formerly you had a large number of mechanics; now you get thieves and the worst description of men from the large cities, broken down in constitution from vice and debauchery. Amongst 1,608 prisoners there are so few agricultural labourers that I have not a sufficient number to work the seventeen acres of ground.'"

And Dr. Askham, principal Surgeon at Portland, and who has been at Dartmoor and Woking, having stated the impracticability of at once sending the Portland prisoners to the Public Works, says (Q. 9,136-38):—

"'As a class they are greatly deteriorating; they are not nearly the vigorous set they where when I joined the service nineteen years ago. I do not know why—except it is from the degradation of the men of their class, that it descends from parent to child. They are smaller in stature, and you find a great deal of scrofula amongst them. I think it is very likely because the town criminal is very different from the rustic labourer criminal class.'"