THE ENGLISH CONVICT SYSTEM.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3589, 12 January 1883, Page 4

THE ENGLISH CONVICT SYSTEM.

[London Daily Telegraph.] It is probable that the shocking occurrence in which a man named Murray, an inmate of Dartmoor Convict Prison, has lost his life, will serve once more to revive the oft-discussed question of associated as against isolated labor in our great receptacles of criminals. The features of the Dartmoor catastrophe are terribly simple. On Wednesday a gang of convicts were engaged in raising- "sand for building purposes._ Murray, one of the men so told off to digj_ refused to work. A warder named Kelly remonstrated with the refractory prisoner, whereupon Kelly commenced throwing stones, wounded the warder, aud eventually overpowered him. While the two were stru-r-rling on the ground Murray attempted to snatch the officer's rifle from his hand. Other warders came to Kelly's assistance, and helped him to regain his feet, when he a "-am advised the convict to go to his work. He still defiantly refused, and threw more stones: and Warder Kelly warned him that, unless he desisted, lie should be compelled to fire upon him. The frantic desperado, armed with a spade, made a rush upon Kelly, saying that it was a question winch of them should die, and that he was resolved to kill him. The warder fired, aud the wretched convict fell, shot through the abdomen, and died five minutes afterwards. He was undergoing a sentence of five years' penal servitude, of" which he had served 12 months. His previous conduct iv prison is stated to have been bad. Now, putting aside the contingence of this unhappy man Murray having been able to look forward to some slight remission in his term of durance by his discharge on ticket-of-leave, he had at the very worst only four more years to serve, and"there must be among his fellowprisoners convicts doomed to slavery for 10, 15, 20 years, and even for life—whatever a "life"" sentence may, in the computation of convict prison chronology, precisely mean. Ostensibly, then, Murray may have had no cause for abandoning himself to utter despair. Into the constitution of his temperament we cannot have any insight : we are confronted by the fact that Murray's acts are simply desperate. He knew that the warder would report his mutinous conduct iv refusing to work and in throwing stones : aud that probably he would be put in irons, flogged, and made to wear a peculiar garb of infamy. Se he doggedly pitted his own life against that of the warder ; or rather, he ha< doggedly sacrificed his own in the hope of being able to murder Kelly, for he must have known that, even if he had succeeded in dashing out that officer's brains with the spade, the other warder and the two civil guards in charge of the gang would lodge the contents of their rifles in his body. "Whether Murray liad any particular spite against Kelly remains to be shown. During a period of nearly 150 years the outdoor associated labor of criminals was the rule in the convict prisons of France. Lord Macaulay has mentioned that actual galleys rowed by felons condemned to slavery at the oar fought against the fleet of Admiral Russell at the battle of La Hogue; but early in the eighteenth century the galleys were definitely laid up in ordinary, and the. '-forceps" were transferred to prisons on shore termed "bagncs" or "chiourmes," and made to labor in the dockyards. Their toil, however, was mainly limited to that of beasts of burden. They dragged huge wains laden with stone or timber, but they did not quarry the stone or hew the wood. They were never trusted with dangerous tools. The not only labored but slept in association, on plank beds in spacious dormitories. They were watched at their work by a. special military corps called " gardechiourmes," who were empowered not only to shout them or cut them down with their sabres if they showed signs of actual mutiny, but alsu. on every slight provocation, to drub them witli rattans. If a convict murdered a warder, he was forthwith tried by naval court-martial and guillotined within the precincts of the bagne. Minor offences were punished by the merciless infliction of the bastinado, not "a la Turpue."' but with ■a thick rope's end, well-tarred. It was found that assaults on the garde-chiourmes were not of very frequent occurrence, and this was attributed by the authorities to the fact that at all times the convicts, whatever their tenu of servitude might be, were not only securely chained, but coupled together; and even as, when the American civil war broke out, the Siamese twins differed diametrically in politics—one being a determined Northerner while his brother was a redhot Copperhead—so the Commissionnaires of the French bagncs noted from long experience that it scarcely ever happened that two "forcats" chained together were of the same mind as to the expediency of making an onslaught on a gaoler. If one of the twain was a ruffian there were a great many chances that his comrade was a rank poltroon. If the lefthand man was an ill-conditioned and morose villain, the right-hand man might be a good-natured simpleton ; and in this coupling together of opposite natures authority found safety. Still, within recent years the French Government have begun to recognise the evils of congregating hordes of more or less abandoned characters in association in prisons which might be termed less schools than universities of vice. The great convict establishments in France have been broken up, and in the prisons whioh, like those of Belleisle and St. Martin de Rhe, are only antechambers to transportation to Cayenne and New Caledonia, the cellular system has been adopted. Our own system, it is well known is strictly cellular —save at exercise time—in most convict prisons ; but at Dartmoor, Portland, Chatham, and Portsmouth it is only cellular as regards the meals and the sleeping of the convicts ; and on the public works the prisoners labor in associated gangs. This order of things has not been established without warm protests from those familar with prison life. The Blue Book tells us that in 1877 the Chaplain of Spike Iron Prison, near Cork—the chief convict establishment in Ireland—complained of " the most contaminating- influences resulting from having so many hundreds of persons, many of them previously habituated on the public works " ; while in 1875 the Chaplain of the new disestablished convict prison at Gibralter remarked, ' - In every prison we assume a great responsibility by shutting in the prisoner from all, or, more accurately, nearly all the good people that are outside. Here we go one step further. Wo not only prevent the access to him of the good, but we compel his association with the bad. Some really wish to reform, and some were never habitually criminal. To some of these a cell appears a comparative Paradise. If such a prisoner will not fall in with the prevailing current Ids life can be, and probably will be, embittered." A significant commentary on these remarks is the statement of a man who had been a convict, referred to by William Tallack, the Secretaiy of the Howard Association, in his e\4dence before the Penal Servitude Commission hi 1878. The man in question had been a letter-carrier, and for stealing some postage stamps had suffered five years' penal servitude, part of which ho underwent, of course, iv associated labour. Of that association he remarked, " When I was sent to penal servitude I knew- nothing about burglaiy, but now 7 can break into any houso in London. I know all the ways of going to work. I know all the places in Whitechapel and Old-street where to get the tools, and I know how to use tho tools. This was one of my prison lessons. To tho mind of the penal economist of a strictly martinet way of thinking, the beo.n ideal of a convict might be the galley-slaves f old. lie gave very little trouble, cost .scarcely anything to keep, and actually did the State some service. The strong aims of himself and his miserable companions were tho living marine engines of the days before the paddle aud the screw, and enabled a great warship to advance against wind and tide. He was chained, naked to the waist, to his bonch ; and if he did not row properly he ran a risk of having his neck broken by the percussion of the oar behind him, while all the time a stalwart boatswain's mate patrolled the gangway between the banks of rowers, impartially belaboring the shoulders of the slaves with a leathern thong. The prisoner was only unchained when it was deemed expedient to bastinado him with exceptional severity, and if the boatswain's mates beat him to death, which was frequently the case, his corpse was flung overboard, and there was an cud of him. It is impossible to revert.to this sternly simple mode of setting convicts to work and making some profit out of them. Mr Tallack himself, hi Ids evidence already alluded to, hastened to admit that, with regard to thehiunane treatment of prisoners, improvements in their condition and health, care for their religious and moral instruction, their employment in a manner which is at least meant to be unprofitable to the State, if it is not always actually so, and again, with reference to teaching them a largo number of useful

trades, with a view to their obtaining a livelihood ou their discharge, there is much that is very praiseworthy iv our modern system of convict prisons." Mr Tallack quoted the criticism of a Russian nobleman who, when the Prison Congress met in London in 1872, went down to Chatham to see a splendid dock covering 30 acres, which had been wholly constructed by convict labor, and who exclaimed, " C'est magnifquc !" But Mr Tallack and a large number of penal economists think that the moral results of cmplying gangs on convicts on public works are anything but "magnificent," and that the system leads to the prisoners plotting fresh villanie.s to be perpetrated when they regain their liberty, and to their chronic and incurable demoralisation while they are in prison. The State may point with pride to the docks which have been excavated, the breakwaters which have been constructed, the gaols and barracks which have been built" by convicts, even to the moulding of cornices and the carving of achievements ot the Royal arms ; but they can scarcely regard with gratification the palpable failure in tho existing system to reclaim even a tolerable proportion of the criminals sentenced to penal servitude. Associated labor on outdoor works seems to make the normally bad prisoner worse, whilst it makes the convict bad, in whom, on his arrival at Portland or Dartmoor, there have been some modicum of good remaining. " No man ever became a superlative villain all at once," the old Latin saw tells us. It is the opinion of a large body of thoughtful people than an almost infallible receipt for converting an errant but immature offender into a villain of the superlative degree is to transfer him from the quiet industry and the opportunities for reflection and repentance which the seclusion of his cell affords him to gregarious toils among hundreds of case-hardened miscreants who will do their best to make the new comer as irreclaimable as they are themselves.