The Nelson Evening Mail. THURSDAY, AUGUST 15, 1867.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume II, Issue 190, 15 August 1867, Page 2

The Nelson Evening Mail. THURSDAY, AUGUST 15, 1867.

Amongst the many important subjects which figured in the Ministerial programme embodied in the Speech delivered by the Governor at the opening of the present Session, was the recognition of the necessity for providing some more effectual means of restraint and discipline for the criminal population of the colony, a subject which has been repeatedly urged upou the attention of the Government. We have a large and, we regret to say, au increasing criminal population, requiring restraint and, if possible, reformation, and our means must keep pace with our requirements. Our gaols throughout the colony are overcrowded to an extent which is detrimental to the health, dangerous to the safe custody, and fatal to the improvement of their inmates. Classification of prisoners, beyond the two natural divisions of tried and untried, convicted and committed, is unknown, and under existing circumstances would probably be impossible. Want of system is the natural consequence of want of room, and where some show of system does exist, the system is a defective one. This is a state of things anything but creditable to a country which certaiuly ought to know somethiug by this time of the proper treatment of criminals. It is a state of things,moreover, which cannot be permitted to continue, unless indeed we are utterly indifferent to our character as a community. The increase of crime which has taken place of late years is of course attributable in the first place to the influx of a very omnigenous population to our gold-fieldsj but secondarily to the preseut state of our prison discipline; and there is only too much reason to anticipate that from our gaols will continue to go forth accomplished tyros in the art of villany, educated and trained there for a brilliant career of infamy, at the public expense, under the skilful tutorage of the notorious miscreants into whose society they have been thrown by the utter wanfc of anything approachiug to classification in the present system. We are in fact engaged at au enormous cost in the yearly manufacture of a certain number of thoroughly accomplished ruffians. The process is an expensive one, and one would think that the product was hardly worth the cost ; but there can he little doubt that we shall get the product, such as it is — so far the process will be at all events successful. Having caught our culprit, and agreed that it is desirable that his education should be completed, the first thing to be done is to make him as comfortable as possible, and his confinement as little irksome as possible. Tbe probabilities are that he never was so comfortable, so well fed and c^red for in his life before. Everything is done to make the contrast between past and present as little painful as the nature of so deplorable a case will permit. Beyond the mere loss of liberty, and even that is considerably alleviated by labor beyond the walls of the gaol, it is most probable that, if the prisoner refrains from breaking a turnkey's head or committing some other flagrant breach of rules, his punishment will amount to little more than the temporary deprivation of a few accustomed luxuries, and, in the one case, to no punishment at all. No work will be required from him more arduous that* is positively necessary to

give him an appetite for his plentiful supply of beef and vegetables, and zest for the large amount of sound sleep "he: will be expected to get through. At r all. .times lie. will enjoy, the congenial society of companions of JJiinUar tastes and habits, and if with all these palliatives he cannot reconcile himself pi-etty comfortably to tlie loss of a few mon tiis' or years' liberty, it' will not at all events, be the fault of a paternal aud indulgent Government. If this be a true picture of gaol life as it is, and uo one can question the fact, we shall have no right to wonder if our prison system results in the increase rather lhan the diminution of crime. "The real and ouly test," says a great writer, "of a good prison system is the diminution of offences by the terror of the punishment." We have deprived our prison system of its terrors hy reducing the punishment to a minimum, and are surprised that offences, instead bf diminishing, are multiplied. It is to be hoped that in any attempt whicli may be made by the Legislature to amend the present or introduce a better system of prison discipline, the great principle that underlies the whole question will be kept iri view. That principle is simply this — that anything that tends to lessen to the terrors of a gaol must tend also to lessen tbe only useful influence a gaol can exercise — the deterring of criminals from crime. No one of course would now-a-days think of defending the indiscriminate herding together of criminals of ali classes, all shades and degrees of guilt, such as is the case at present in the gaols of this colony, we believe, without exception ; but the system of so-called information which makes prison only less comfortable than an hotel, is scarcely less injurious. The only reliable reformation is the reformation that teaches men to look upon a gaol with horror and with dread. Hard work, hard fare, and a properly organised system of classification would do more to deter from crime than all the elaborate schemes of well-meaniug philanthropists, and whether the central penal establishment proposed in the Governor's speech be carried out, or the present provincial gaol system be perpetuated we trust that this principle will be acted upon. Severity in this case is really the truest kindness; the strictest justice is the tenderest mercy.