MARRIAGE AMONG CRIMINALS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 17, 23 April 1892, Page 427

MARRIAGE AMONG CRIMINALS.

THE MOST HARDENED CRIMINALS PERMITTED TO WED. It is well known that the larger part of the criminal classes are unmarried people. Some philanthropists, particularly in Europe, have time and again reiterated their belief that matrimony, with the loving responsibilities that parents assume, would redeem from lives of crime many an outcast who is now regarded as wholly irreclaimable. There is reason to believe there is more sentiment than truth in this pleasant theory. In at least one country marriage is authorized by law between the most hardened criminals during the period of their punishment for hideous crimes. This country is the island of New Caledonia, in the Pacific Ocean, to which many hundreds of the worst offenders against society in France, including a great many women, are transported for life. It cannot be said that this matrimonial experiment is a great success. F. Ordinaire lias recently visited the convent of Bourail in New Caledonia. It is vulgarly called the • Paddock ’by the male convicts, because it is to this convent that they are permitted to go for the purpose of selecting wives from among the hundreds of Frenchwomen who are confined there. This privilege is given them only after some years of residence on the island, when the men who have obeyed the rules of prison life are permitted to build huts outside the prison walls, to choose wives from the convent, and to devote their future life to the care of their families.

Mr Ordinaire interviewed the Mother Superior on this matrimonial scheme, and learned that she regarded it as an utter failure so far as reformatory influences are concerned.

• Our duties here are very simple,’ she said. ‘We have the care of the unfortunate women who are sent to us from France until they are married. When a male convict desires to take a wife he comes here, informs me of the fact, and I call all the female convicts down into the court, where he surveys the crowd and chooses one who pleases him. Then they go with me into the parlour, where they tlka over the conditions of their union, and if the woman desires to wed the man the bans are proclaimed and the marriage takes place in church after the delay required by law. I have assisted at forty of these marriages in a single day.’ • Do these marriages turn out well ?’ ‘ Alas, they do not,’ said the Mother Superior. ‘ The women leave the church on the arms of their husbands and go to their new homes, but it is rare that they make these homes happy or in any way attractive. They are far more likely to descend to lower depths of depravity than to become self respecting women. The children of these unions are, if possible, more degraded than their parents. In my opinion the regeneration of criminals through the family life is a prodigious failure, and I believe that such marriages should not be countenanced, but should be prohibited by law.’