Page:Our habitual criminals.pdf/9

 corrupting the less criminal. Many officials indeed think this evil much exaggerated; but enough was said to hint a doubt as to the value of a system so little effective towards its aim.

Rev. Mr. Lyons, of Spike, both at the Commission and in his last report to the Irish Prisons' Board, goes so far as to condemn associated labour altogether, and to recommend separate confinement for the whole period of sentence: but one of the chief needs in any prison system is preparation for a better life when discharged, and hereto isolation has little potency. One of the printed questions for discussion at the last Social Science Congress was "whether it is expedient to confine prisoners until they are reformed;" but there is no true test of reformation save amid the trials and temptations of freedom. The question reminded me of a boy at school whose mother forbade him to go into the water until he had learned to swim. We have in effect, in this controversy, a renewal of the old one about the relative merits of public schools and home education, as preparation for the wide, wide world.

The evidence as to contamination issued in the first recommendation of the Royal Commissioners, viz., that, subject to specified exceptions, first convicted prisoners should be formed into a separate class apart from the habitual offender. This classification, sound in principle, and especially as protecting rural prisoners, would yet seem to need much discretionary modification in realizing it. And so indeed the Commissioners would seem themselves to have thought. Otherwise it is open to the criticism, that whilst it certainly tends to render the difficulties of labour organization more complex, it affords no sure guarantee against corruption, as the first convicted urban prisoners have nothing to learn and everything to teach in the vocabularies of vice; moreover in withdrawing the better from the evil influences of the bad, it withdraws the worse from the good influences of the better, and so tends to make them worse. The urban habituals are, as we have seen, those we have chief need to deal with, and there may be great danger in condemning them to a pessimist isolation.

And here I refer to a fact of seemingly very high significance. The prisoners abruptly removed to Lusk Intermediate Prison are per saltum and at once freed from the severe and silent discipline of Spike, and with no restraint as to speech, and few as to liberty, are allowed free intercourse with each other and the agricultural warders who instruct them; there has been wonderfully little abuse of these relaxations. Similarly the women removed straight from the strict systems of Millbank and Mountjoy to such refuges as Winchester and Golden Bridge, for some sixteen months of their term live with almost the freedom of household servants without locks to their doors. This phenonemon [sic] cannot be wholly explained away by saying they are picked prisoners near the term of their sentences and working for their gratuities; they are the very persons for whom before removal the most rigid discipline is theoretically held essential, and many of these, as a matter of fact, relapse when remitted to the streets. The fuller and deeper reason lies in this, that they are here subjected to higher influences than fear; hope enters the daily life, and, treated more as human beings, they begin to be more human.