REFORMED CRIMINALS.
The French government is considering a proposition to restore the custom of deporting criminals. It is remarkable that the practical argument on this subject is decidedly favorable to this system. The argument against it is a sentimental one. The unsettled question about punishments for other than capital offenses is, how to secure the reform of criminals. Under the best managed prisons, reform of a lasting kind is rare. The best management seems to succeed until the prisoner is set at liberty. Then the reformed man finds himself an object of suspicion to orderly people and of special interest and sympathy to the criminal classes. The former will not employ him and the latter will. The result is, in most cases, that he relapses into crime. Perhaps there is some hope that the better classes may improve in their habits; but unless they do, it is well nigh useless to reform criminals in prison. The poor men who come out into an unsympathetic world which does not believe in their reformation, and in which unreformed ex-convicts are numerous enough to keep the general distrust of their class alive, have nothing like a fair chance to begin the world over again. If there were any hope that prisons could be perfected so as to reform all convicts, public prejudice could be broken down; but it is too much to expect that the general public will acquire a habit of distinguishing between good and bad ex-convicts. This is the difficulty for which no device has yet been found which will take it out of the path of humanitarian prison discipline. No faith is more stable than that which, among the public at large, affirms the total depravity of some men; especially of ex-convicts.
Turning to penal colonies, experience is most favorable to the belief that it opens the road to reform. The reports on the British penal colonies are especially cheerful from this point of view. The majority of the criminals sent abroad during three centuries reformed their lives. Australia ought to be the most disorderly country on the globe, if deporting criminals to a colony could produce a bad society. But notwithstanding the fact that England sent a large criminal population to that colony, Australia is one of the most orderly and respectable of the English dependencies. The only possible explanation is that the official reports are true, and that the convicts did actually reform. If Botany Bay did not reform them, the honest opportunities of that vast island did coöperate with their good purpose and promote their reform. England deported criminals from 1597 to 1867—a period of 270 years. During the War of Independence she suspended deportation and enrolled her convicts in the armies sent to subjugate us. In 1838 more than 100,000 criminals had been sent to Australia. An official report sets forth that in 1850 an enumeration of ex-convicts in Australia accounted for 48,600, and that all of them except an insignificant fraction were living honestly. But it will be said that Australia protested against the continuance of the system. This is not the exact fact. In dealing with the question, the English government threw upon the Australians all the expense of the surveillance of the deported criminals. The colonial government demanded, most righteously that England should pay this bill of expense; but rather than pay it the English Parliament chose to abolish the system of deportation. The colonists did make sentimental objections to receiving convicts, but they did so on the ground that the cost of watching the criminals of England was unjustly thrown upon them. A French writer remarks that in this case, as in the quarrel with us, the money question was allowed to prevail over statesmanship. The British ex-convict is worse off than our own because there are fewer opportunities for men under the reproach of prison service.
The French proposition to resort again to penal colonies, or rather to dumping ship-loads of criminals on new and undeveloped countries, suggests the seriousness of the question. Every French colony will object to receiving the vicious cargoes of humanity; but the objections will lose their violence if the home government shall send a proper proportion of French gold with each cargo. The testimony on the subject seems to show that if the transported men are such as to give signs of real reform, ninety-five per cent. of them will make good citizens. The open country, the new moral scenery, the necessities of that new world, conspire with good resolutions to maintain reformed habits. What shall we do with our reformed prisoners? It is not improbable that in a few years England will imitate France and restore the system of deportation. Why should not we make an experiment? Alaska, at least, might safely be used for the purpose. It would not be difficult to devise a system under which the best class of reformed men should be offered land and a small outfit in some remote corner of our country. By selecting the best, and making their removal voluntary, we might save to society the larger part of the men whom our prisons reform. We do not wish to disguise the fact that, however remote the place, the men who have lived by crime and escaped punishment would endanger the virtue of the ex-convict. But the criminal classes do not flow to the farthest frontiers except in scanty streams; and the Alaskan territory is as yet as safe as a wilderness can be. Some scheme of the sort is worth the devising. We are making little headway under our present best systems, simply because the ex-convict has no chance. Can he be given a fair chance?