LIFETIME IN GAOL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18294, 10 January 1923, Page 9

LIFETIME IN GAOL.

LONG CRIMINAL CAREER.

INCORRIGIBLE OFFENDER.

LAST DAYS SPENT, IN PRISON.

[fbom our own

!NDKNT.]

SYDNEY, Jan. 5.

A career of crime, commenced at the age of 14, a lifetime in gaols all over the world, and death at 82 in the degradation of prison, was the remarkable career of John Dawson, who has just died at the Yatala Stockade, near Adelaide.

Dawson had spent nearly the whole of his lifetime in gaols in different parts of the world. An incurable offender, he was no'sooner free from one. prison than his footsteps led —via some, misdeed into another. Crime to him became a profession. His remarkable record showed that the terms of imprisonment imposed upon him aggregated more than the number of years that he has been alive.

Dawson was born in England in 1840. At the age of 14 he began his criminal career by committing a theft at Hull. Six years later he was sentenced to 20 years' penal servitude for robbery with violence. That term having been served, he turned his attention to other countries. His trail led by devious routes half across the world to Western Australia, when in 1885 he was imprisoned for seven years for larceny and receiving., in 1911, in the same State, he was sentenced to six months for larceny. Since then there have been 92 other convictions against him, including a. large number in Sydney and Victoria, among others for larceny, assault, and breaking gaol. In 1913 he was sent to gaol for unlawful possession and larceny in South Australia, and was ordered two months' imprisonment on each charge. Dawson by this time was an old man, and his hand had lost much ,of its cunning." He had the English trail of tenacity in his ways of crime. Scorning the shelter and food which he could have received for the rest of his life at an institution for . the aged and helpless, he pursued his nefarious trade, made desperate/ apparently, by the thought of increasing feebleness and declining years. He was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for attempted pocket-picking. Probably on account of his age, however, he was freed before the expiration of that period. A few days after his liberation he snatched a purse from a- basket carried by a young girl. - The sentence on that occasion, of 12 months, was the final one for the sad, old vagabond. He returned to the stockade that day, and never again saw the world beyond the prison walls. *