Prisons Over Seas / Deportation and Colonization; British and American Prisons of To-day

by Arthur Griffiths

Transportation was to continue in force, but it was to be governed by certain checks and safeguards which had been altogether absent before, through all the long years that convicts had been sent out to the antipodes. And now the whole stream was to be directed on Van Diemen's Land alone. This Van Diemen's Land, which was thenceforth to be only a colonial prison, had been settled some years later than Botany Bay, by a party under Colonel Collins from the parent settlement. It had struggled for life amid the same vicissitudes of famine and privation as New South Wales, and similarly some years had elapsed before its home products were sufficient for its own support. Up to the year 1821 it was solely a penal settlement for the transportation of convicts from Sydney; but after that date a few free settlers planted themselves in it, and by-and-by ships landed their living cargoes at Hobart Town direct from England, just as they did at Sydney in New South Wales. The system of assignment was practised precisely as in the senior settlement, with this difference, that the discipline was more perfect, and the machine worked with greater ease. Two thirds of the whole number there were thus in assigned service, the balance being employed as in New South Wales in chain-gangs, at penal settlements, or on the roads.

Colonel Arthur, who was for many years governor of the colony, and who was well known as a strenuous supporter of transportation, claimed, and with some show of right, that the management and treatment of convicts had been attended with a greater measure of success in Van Diemen's Land than elsewhere. This may have had some weight with the government; for the existence of a good system of administration was essential to the execution of the new project: but it is probable that Van Diemen's Land was chosen as the sole future receptacle of convicts because as yet it had had no thought of refusing to receive them. New South Wales had rebelled, but Van Diemen's Land was still obedient; and no time was lost in turning its willingness to good account.

Although for years it had been more or less a penal settlement, as now constituted it became essentially a colonial prison. Vast masses of convicts were to be congregated in its chief towns; its out-stations were to be overrun with convicts in various stages of emancipation; free convicts were to be the pioneers and settlers of its back lands: in a word, the whole colony was to be permeated, inundated, swamped with the criminal class. That I am using no figure of speech, and to give some idea of the amount of evil with which the small colony had now to deal, I will mention here that in four years no less than sixteen thousand convicts were sent out to Van Diemen's Land, and that the average annual number of transported convicts in the colony was nearly thirty thousand.

The new method came into force on the 20th May, 1840. It was christened the "Probation" system, because the progressive improvement of the convicts was intended to depend on their progress through certain periods of "probation." Every convict was to be subjected to certain punishments and restrictions peculiar to the stage in which he found himself; but these rigours were to diminish, step by step, till he had passed by many gradations from actual imprisonment to the delights of unshackled, unconditional freedom. The plan of procedure is fully detailed in a despatch addressed by Lord Stanley, on the 15th of November, 1842, to Sir John Franklin, then lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land. All convicts, with certain exceptions, were to be subjected to the new process. By it, as I have said, the convict was compelled to pass through certain stages, five in number; and his progress was to be regulated altogether by his good conduct in each stage. The rules were the same for boys and females, but their stations were, of course, different.

Stated briefly these five stages were: 1. Detention at a purely penal station in a state of real imprisonment; 2. Removal to gangs working in various parts of the colony for government, but still under restraint; 3. The first step towards freedom, in which the convict was granted a pass to be at large under certain conditions, and to seek work for himself; 4. The second step to freedom, when the convict gained his ticket-of-leave, and was free to come and go much as he pleased; 5. Absolute pardon.

Only the worst criminals entered the first stage, and for them (a) Norfolk Island and (b) Tasman's Peninsula were set apart. These were the colonial convicts, and men who had been sentenced at home to "life," or fifteen years for heinous offences. The term at Norfolk Island was to be not less than two years, and not more than four; but misconduct consigned an offender to an indefinite term within his sentence.

(a) First as to Norfolk Island.

Situated in semi-tropical latitudes, richly gifted by nature, picturesque, fertile, of fairly equable climate, this small spot seemed to contain within itself all the elements of a terrestrial paradise. It was finely timbered, chiefly with the graceful tree known as the Norfolk Island pine; limes, lemons, and guavas were indigenous; all manner of fruits—oranges, grapes, figs, loquats, bananas, peaches, pomegranates, pineapples, and melons—grew there in rare profusion. Flowers, wild or cultivated, throve everywhere. On all sides the eye rested on long fields of oats, or barley, or Indian maize. And yet the social condition of the island, as compared with its external aspect, was as the inner diseased core of an apple to its smooth and rosy skin. From the earliest days of the Australian colonies this bountifully gifted island had been made the sink of all the lees and dregs of mankind. Occupied in the first instance on account of its fertile aspect, it was soon afterwards abandoned for no sound or substantial reasons. By and by it was again re-occupied, but then only as a penal settlement. And as such it served New South Wales during all the years that transportation was in full swing. It was a prison, and nothing more; convicts and their keepers were its only population. The former at times varied in numbers: one year there were five hundred, another seven; but their lot and condition was always much the same. The worst wore chains. All worked, but not enough to hurt themselves; and the well-conducted were allowed, as their time dragged along, certain immunities from labour and a modicum of tobacco. Occasionally the gaol-gangs, the most depraved of this gathering of wickedness, broke loose, and attacked their guards with brutal desperation. Numbers were always shot down then and there, and of the balance, when overpowered, a fair proportion were forthwith hanged. Stated broadly, life in Norfolk Island was so bitter to the convict that many for choice sought death.

Thus was Norfolk Island constituted, and such the condition of its residents, when the home government, in working out its new penal scheme, resolved to increase the numbers on the island, by drafting to it the most flagrant offenders from home. We have come by this time to accept it as an axiom in prison affairs, that it is unwise to concentrate in one spot the pith and essence of rascality; preferring rather to subdivide and distribute the most dangerous elements at several points. But the statesmen who were then legislating on penal matters ignored this principle; they forgot that they were about to recruit the old gangs at Norfolk Island by the very men most predisposed to become as bad as those they found there. If the administration had been really anxious to perpetuate the leaven of wickedness already existent in the penal settlement, they could not have devised a plan more likely to attain that result.