THE TRANSPORTATION QUESTION

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume XII, Issue 1229, 13 May 1857, Page 4

THE TRANSPORTATION QUESTION

[From the Times, January 9,1857. J We have recently published two fresh contributions towards the literature of the transportation question. The first proposes to place our convicts round the coast in gangs, to labour at public works, such as harbours of refuge and fortifications. The second correspondent casts his eyes on the Hebrides, the decline of which may date from the days when they ceased to be the haunts cl Norwegian pirates, and the revival of which is to commence from the time they are once more made the abode of crime and violence. Seeing them to possess a climate so humid, so misty, and so variable that it is only occasionally it brings the produce of the earth to perfection, and that the only profitable industry of which they are susceptible, since barilla drove kelp out of the market, is the pastute of sheep and cattle, our correspondent proposes to sow them thick with felons, destined to live on corn brought from Canada, to cut and stack peat, and to grow, when they can persuade the weather to let them, grainless oats ard slimy potatoes. In this Hebridean pandemonium there are to be, as in the Inferno of Dante, different circles for dif-

ferent offences; —hard rocks for stony-hearted burglars, green meadows for sentimental pickpockets, and sandy beaches on which the detected forger may trace with a etick the too-well-remem-bered outline of a counterfeit note of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. From Ossian to the Newgale Calendar the transition is rather abrupt; but we will make a sacrifice of the sentimentalities, endeavour to divest the scheme of those associations, and look at the deportation to the Hebrides ns a matter of business, just as the devout Lord of Session did who deported his termagant wife, little mors than a hundred years ago, to perish on the remote rock of St. Kilda. The scheme appears to us to labour under the capital defect that the convict colony would have nothing to do, would be ut--1 terly unable to support itself, and would necessarily be employed in works of the very slightest 1 utility. Far preferable would be the scheme of

“A Practical Man,” who would employ convicts in England in doing work that was actually wanted. The objection to his system of working in gangs, however, has always been found to be, that the whole gang sinks down to the level of the very worst man in it, and that, so far from being a means of reformation—of which among criminals once hardened there is, in our opinion, little hope,—the gang is sure to dismiss the criminal a very much worse man than it found him.

But, after all, neither of these plans alludes to the real difficulty that lies at the bottom of every proposal for secondary punishment. The difficulty is not what to do with a criminal while he is undergoing his sentence, but what to do with him when that sentence has been fulfilled. Both plans seem to contemplate that the prisoner, having fulfilled the labour demanded of him by the State as an expiation of bis crime, and having enjoyed during the period of involuntary seclusion the society of those most capable of supplying defects in his felonious education, should be turned adrift in this wealthy and populous country, without character, without honest occupation, but with insatiable desires, and the vile dexterity, cunning, and ferocity required to minister to their gratification. Penal servitude may deter others, may terrify the criminal himself, but it has seldom made a wiser, and never a better man. The answer to the proposition to let loose upon this country such pests as convicts who have served their sentence is, that we cannot and will not endure it. Society exists for the honest and the virtuous, and it would be utterly to invert her purpose were she to suffer tie community to be made the prey of men whose subsistence depends on the habitual violation of her laws. No plan of secondary punishment can be considered as even plausible which

loes not provide for the expatriation of the criminal for the whole remainder of his life. The oh! system of transportation did this effectually. Whatever the sentence, —7, 10, 14, or 21 years, —it was virtually a sentence of banishment for life. The number of years prescribed regulated the period of forced labour and prison Jiscipline in the penal colonies, but •when the period bad expired there was no inducement to return to England, and every temptation for the criminal to remain where he was. The emancipated convict found himself on the expiration of his sentence in a highly advantageous position. He was a member of a thriving and advancing community, where wage? were high, and the acquisition of properly by honest means easy. The presence of a large number of bis own class mitigated the feeling of shame and relieved the consciousness of degradation, and the criminal became if not an honest man, at any rate one whose sympathies were enlisted by the acquisition of wealth in favour of the proprietor and against the thief.

This was one solution of the problem bow to deal with an expiree convict, but it is one no longer open to us to adopt. The Antipodes are no longer unknown and unexplored regions, aud the fact that such a destiny awaited the criminal would now become notorious and rob transportation of its salutary terrors. Besides, we cannot ' afford to be always founding new penal colonies, ' which are to attract to them free emigrants, sbo i will soon learn in the midst of a rapidly-acquired ' prosperity to look with disgust on its origin, and insist on banishing from among them that crimi- | nal element which want and necessity made endurable, but which abundance and prosperity have rendered intolerable. The principles of demand and supply will easily absorb our expiree crimi- ’ nals in the first instance, but the free development of the community in which they prevail , will soon end by expelling them altogether. The result is that we cannot trust to the free action .of , the laws of political economy to preserve to us ' our penal settlements. Nor is this wonderful. Tbe law of the development of communities is ' freedom, while tbe very nature of a penal colony implies constant interference, repression aud coercion. If, theo, we are to found penal colonies, we must preserve and stereotype their harsher and more repulsive features. They must be places of punishment and places of abode for persons who Lave undergone punishment,—not for free settlers untainted with crime. Wherever we fix our penal colony, it is absolutely necessary that that place should be the home of the criminal for the rest of bis life. If the situation be in Australia, the colonies would never endure, nor ought they to endure, the infiltration of tbe crime of Great Britain in tbe shape of felons who had served their sentences in another part of the continent. If any portion of America be selected, the same observation would apply with equal force to Canada and the United States. Where the convict is sent be must remain ; we cannot, without danger of dismembering the empire, or involving it in serious wars, suffer him to leave tbe place of his punishment for a colony or tbe territory of any friendly nation. The period of penal servitude may be short or long, but the residence in the penal colony must be for life. The tie that binds the expiree to the soil should be, not, as heretofore in zlustralia, bis own preference, but a power he cannot resist. In softening the hardship of bis lot, in holding out incentives to good conduct, in allowing the acquisition by honest labour of a certain amount of competence and comfort, yet without permitting those scandalous acquisitions of enormous wealth (he occurrence of which in Australia did so much to neutralize tbe terrors of transportation, will be shown the foresight of the legislator and the tact of the disciplinarian. Such a society will be, of necessity, highly artificial, supplying by positive rules many of those things which in ordinary communities are wisely left to ' provide for themselves; but it ia, after all, uoth--1 ing more than extending to a large and isolated 1 district the same method and order as are applied . to a prison, the inmates of which are subject to every degree of punishment, from simple deten- ( tion to the severe labour exacted from hardened offenders. There Is no reason why such a community, separated from the rest of the world, aud forbidden to free cettlers, should not continue to • absorb for ages the crime which is intolerable to tbig country, striking a salutary terror into the evil-disposed here, and saving the criminals as much ac pocsible from mutual contamination by scattering them thinly over the surface of a large ’ and isolated region.