COLOMBO PRISON GATE HOME.
Picturesquely situated among palm trees in one of the most beautiful suburbs of Colombo, within easy reach of the principal city jail, is our Sinhalese Prisoners' Home. Cinnamon Gardens, as the district is called, forms one of the attractions of Colombo, which every passing visitor is bound to go and see. The beauty of the surroundings must be a pleasant contrast to those dull prison walls from which the inmates have just escaped. Still more blessed and cheering must be the change from the Warder's stern commands to the affectionate welcome and kindly attentions of the red-jacketed Salvationists, who have the management of the Home.
A bright lad who is on duty in the guard-room opens the gates and introduces you to the grounds in which the quarters are situated. There are groups of huts with mud walls and palm-leaf thatching, which have a thoroughly Indian and yet home like appearance. The first few of these are occupied as workshops or carpentry for the manufacture of tea boxes, and here from early to late the men may be seen busily employed, sawing, planing, measuring, bevelling, hammering and working with such a will that you might imagine their very lives depended on it, or at least that they must be making their fortunes out of it, whereas they are not being paid at all, and all the profits of the manufactory go towards the support of the Home!
"What I admire about your work," observed Sir Athur Gordon, the late Governor of Ceylon, "is the way in which your Officers identify themselves with these convicts, and live among them on terms of perfect equality."
But I was describing the little colony. On the left of this group of workshops is a neat little hut where Captain Dev Kumar and his young bride, Captain Deva Priti, reside. What a change for them form the English Homes to which they have been accustomed, to this little jungle hut, surrounded as they are continually by a band of ex-convicts, and criminals. Yet it would be hard to find a happier couple in the island,—in fact, quite impossible outside the Salvation Army.
"It is all our own work," explains the Captain. "Our men built the hut, and the materials only cost about Rs. 25!" Certainly this is the perfection of cheapness in the way of house building! A little further inside the enclosure you come to more huts, in some of which the men live, while others serve for quarters for the native officers who assist in the superintendence of the Home, and to whose noble efforts so much of its success is due. Then there is the kitchen, and a dining-room, and a stable for the bullock trap, in which the released prisoners are brought to the Home, to avoid the risk of a foot journey when their old associates might hinder them on the way.
The spare bits of ground are all laid out in little plots of garden, where plantains and vegetables are grown, and in front of the Captain's quarters is a dainty little scrap of a flower garden. The entire enclosure forms really a portion of the garden of a neighbouring house, the property of the late Mr. Ginger, who took a warm interest in our work, and leased the grounds to us at a nominal rent.
The following are the statistics of the work during the past year:—
Total number of admissions, …………………….. 230
Found Situations, …………………………….. 115
Left, the Home and lost sight, of, ……………… 103
Total number of sentences of imprisonment,………… 459
Number of juvenile convicts under 16 years of age, … 40
Number of meals given,………………………… 15,774
Number of tea-boxes made, …………………….. 2,880
Profits on same,…………………………… Rs. 350
The accompanying is the official report form sent in by us to
Government every month showing the results of the work—