THE PRISONS REPORT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 429, 1 July 1881, Page 7

THE PRISONS REPORT.

An article in the Edinburgh Review on one of the earlier works of Goethe was, many years ago, translated into German and published in Germany, with this curt comment appended. " This is what, in Englard, they call reviewing." Not another word was added. The criticism of the Inspector of Prisons on the colonial gaols au^ their officers stands in quite as little need of refutation. The mixture of self-conceit and ignorance (or, if not ignorance, then something less respectable), embodied in the report, can only draw a smile from any one but moderately acquainted with what has been written and published on this subject by the Governors of the Gaols annually for many years to the Provincial Governments. Caricature could "no further go ;" " Random talker " was an epithet applied by " the wisest of the Greeks "to Thersytes. If what has been cited from the Inspector's report be a fair specimen of his ordinary discourse, the Inspector may be fairly classed as belonging to the genus " Random talker." But his criticisms on the officers and gaols ate as extraordinary as his consistency. The Hon. Edward Livings+on, the greatest and wisest American writer upon penal legislation, the Hon. Charles Sumner and General Pilsbury, a gaol officer of 50 years standing, ably supported in their views by the Right Hon. Sir John Pakington, Sir John Bowring, fc>ir Harry Verney, Bart., Right Hon. R. Gurney, M.P., Mr. Samuel Morley, M.P., Mr. Beresford Hope, M.P., Sir Charles Addesley, M.P., Baron Mackay, Herr Ploos Von Amstel, from Holland ; Mr. Loyson, Mr. Bowrnatt, M. E. Robin, and Mr. Jallant, from France ; Count Foresta, and M. Beltram Scalia, from Italy ; also the well-known prison reformer Captain Maconochie, who had himself been a Jsoldier, state " the military type now followed in our prisons should be abolished. The objects of military and prison discipline are directly opposed, and they cannot, therefore, be advantageously pursued by the same means. The one is meant to train men together, the other should be to prepare them safely and advantageously to separate. The one is, further, the type of force, which never created virtue yet, and against which a brave spirit, even instinctively, lebels ; the other should image persuasion and exhortation, the approved method in every case of obtaining an end sought. A necessary object in the one i<? to subdue individual character, and reduce all to parts of a compact machine, while that of the other should be specially to strengthen individual character, and, instilling right principles into it, encourage and enable it to act on those independently, of minor incidents in our existing gaol practice, accordingly, none appears to us much more pernicious than the endeavour to ape military demeanour in it." Livingston, alluding to America, said : "It is well to bear this thought in mind when considering the present condition of our American prisons. Many of their warders and superintendents were soldiers in the war, and were appointed with no very clear notion on the part of the appointing powers as to what prison discipline is, and how it differs from military discipline, with which it is often confounded. This is

an important point, because we have a natural prepossession, since the war, in favour of appointing soldiers to office. A. B. was a good soldier, and a meritorious officer, it is, therefore, inferred that he would make a good prison officer And, up to a certain point, a good soldier is likely to prove at least a tolerable wonder. The extremes of discipline will ho maintained, the convict will probably be well fed and clothed ; bin along with tbesr obvious and acceptable merits will go, in most iustxncos,"th« soldiei's foibles. He will fret at the restraints of law, over estimate hia own wisdom and the virtue of force and arms, rely too rcuch upon drill, pipe-clay and the pistol, aud will cherish an open or ill-disguised contempt for plodding method, humane effort, school instruction, and religious devotion. What the poets have pointed out, long ago, as the scholar's character, will be his ; whether in the field, the civil service, or the prison, he will be ' jealous of honour, sudden and quick to quarrel.' — Acer et indomitus, quo apes quoque ira vocnsset Ferre maunm ; pt nunquam temerando parcrce ferro * ♦ « • * Jura ncget sibi nata, nihil nou arroget armis Ten chances to one he will think there is nothing which brusque courage and a Colt's revolver cannot do ; he will arm himself and oblige his officers to carry deadly weapons ; he will construe remonstrance from a convict as insolence, to be punished in the guard room or with the ball and chain ; he will chafe at authority over him, over that of the law ; he will resent the verdict of public opinion, even while yielding to it ; he will exact punishment and neglect reformation and instruction." These faults were conspicuous even in Captain Elam Lynds, the founder of the Auburn system of prison discipline, who was praised by the Hon. Charles Sumner for his moderation and knowledge of human nature, qualities by no means common in the military type of prison officers, though Captain Maconochie and Colonel Montesinos of Spain, both military officers, seem to have been free from such faults, and both these very successful prison officers dispensed wholly with the use of deadly weapons in guarding and controlling convicts. Let it be understood and accepted, once for all, that a prison officer's life, at least in a congregate prison, is always at the mercy of the convicts. A whole arsenal of weapons, a whole regiment o£ soldiers, will not protect him from assassination if his prisoners are determined to murder him. Hib life is in their hands just as the life of the sailor is at the mercy of winds and waves ; just as that of the soldier in battle is at the mercy of shot and stab, from which no armament of pistols can certainly defend him. Having once calmly accepted this truth, for it is true, the good prison officer will walk among his men as fearless as the sailor walks the deck ; he would no more think of charging his pistol to protect himself than the mariner thinks of shooting at the hurricane or the breakers. We merely throw out these observations, but we are deeply convinced that they point to the innermost secret of success in prison discipline. A French traveller, imaginative and brave, has discovered the gorilla in our time ; for years he was thought to have invented that creature. Recent reports speak of the dodo and moa as still existent, Wonders will never cease, we live in hope that somebody in New Zealand will either discover or invent that almost unheard-of being the prison schoolmaster. He is found in Ireland and Australia, and in most parts of Europe, but his appearance in the New Zealand prisons would excite as much surprise as to see the great Irish elk striding about the corridors or stretching his horns up for exhibition amongst the muskets and manacles in the guard-room. The Earl of Derby states that the reformation of criminals is a duty which of late years the Government has assumed with more or less loud-voiced pretensions. No man will deny that reformation, if it is to be real and practical, must have its root in religious influence. A criminal is not reformed by mere process of physical discipline, by cutting off his tobacco, by making him clean, by making him work, rise early, lie down late, and eat the bread of carefulness. A criminal might be perfectly amenable to such system and yet ret/iain a hardened, brutalised, desperate man, and he said that upwards of 30 years experience as a magistrate of Lancashire, had convinced him that ninety-nine prisoners out of every hundred leave the gaols and convict establishments worse than they enter them. Another magistrate of much experience, Mr. Angus Croll, recently Sheriff of London and Middlesex, states, for one prisoner reformed hundreds are corrupted. Further, it is found that in many of the British gaols a number of their inmates are committed not dozens, but scoreß, and even hundreds of times in succession ; that reformatory prison discipline is a delusion, and those who seek to inaugurate it are chasing a bubble.