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

by Arthur Griffiths

The excessive costliness of transportation was the principal demerit of this practice. A few figures will show this. As late as 1851, the gross cost for one year was £586,294 for passages out to the antipodes, establishments and staff, including the home depots, Bermuda and Gibraltar. There was a certain set-off in the value of the labour of the convicts, and when this had been credited, the net cost remained at £419,476. To arrive at any general estimate, this annual expenditure must be multiplied by the seventy years the system lasted. It cannot, of course, be denied that the product was Australia, a substantial section, no doubt, for the cash expended, but the evils entailed by the system must be taken into account, and modern feeling revolted from repeating the process even to gain such a large and prosperous dependency, provided additional territory was available. As we have seen, the territory did not exist. Thus the only alternative was to retain the convicts at home, to house and dispose of them as economically as possible, and at the same time utilise them effectively in such works and public undertakings as might reasonably be expected to bring in some adequate return.

The solution of the pressing problem was entrusted to Colonel, afterward Sir Joshua, Jebb, a distinguished officer of the Royal Engineers, who was already well known in connection with prison building and with penal legislation generally. He had for some years past been associated with the two official inspectors of prisons; after that he had assisted in the superintendence of Millbank, when constituting a convict depot, and he had been in reality the moving spirit of the commissioners who built the model prison at Pentonville. In those early years he gave undoubted earnest of his energetic character and great powers, a promise more than fulfilled. His proposal was to construct a great breakwater at Portland, largely assisted by the labour of convicts which was abundant and running to waste. He meant in the first instance to provide accommodation of some sort on the island of Portland wherein the convicts might be securely lodged immediately adjoining their works. He described, in a memorandum dated 1847, the style of place he proposed to build. Naturally, he said, when the works on which the prisoners were to be employed were likely to be completed within a limited time, something less costly than a substantial prison would suffice. Safe custody and the due enforcement of discipline must of course be secured; but these might be obtained without any very extravagant outlay. He suggested, therefore, buildings on wooden frames, with corrugated iron partitions; the whole so constructed as to be easily taken to pieces and removed to another site if required. In these buildings the convicts might be kept safe and separate, at the probable cost of little more than £34 per cell. Similar prisons might be run up anywhere, so that the entire number of convicts for whom accommodation was required might be housed for about two hundred thousand pounds. Colonel Jebb accompanied this proposal with certain figures as an off-set against this outlay. He assumed that the maintenance, including every item, would amount to £158,000, but their earnings would be £180,000. The balance was therefore a gain of £22,000—a sufficient interest on the original cost of the prison buildings. These figures were speculative, of course, nor were they found exactly accurate in practice; the cost of maintenance proved undoubtedly higher than thus estimated, but in return the earnings were also considerably more.

Three years later, in March, 1850, Colonel Jebb reported to the Secretary of State that he had provided room for eight hundred and forty prisoners at Portland. The main buildings consisted of four large open halls, eighty-eight feet long by twenty-one broad, having four tiers of cells on each side. The interiors of the halls were well ventilated and could be warmed; the cells were seven feet by four, and furnished with hammocks, tables and shelves for books. The cells were divided by partitions of corrugated iron, and were sufficient to secure the effectual separation of the men at night, and to admit of their taking their meals in them, and reading or otherwise occupying themselves after working hours, until they went to bed. In addition to the cell accommodation there was, of course, full provision for officers' quarters, chapel, kitchen, laundries and stores. Moreover, ample space was reserved "within the boundary wall for the erection of additional buildings, so as to increase the number of convicts to twelve or fifteen hundred, if it should be found necessary or desirable." Everything was now in fair working order. The foundation stone of the breakwater had been laid in July, 1849, by Prince Albert, who visited the prison and presented a Bible and prayer-book for use in its chapel; but till then, and during the first year of the occupation of a "bleak and barren rock" the convicts were chiefly employed in setting things straight within the prison walls. They had to level parade grounds, make roads and reservoirs, fit gates and doors, paint and clean up the whole establishment. As soon as practicable they were set to work on the breakwater. "The stone," says Colonel Jebb, "is to be removed from the quarries by means of several lines of railways, which are arranged in a series of inclined planes from the summit to the point where the breakwater joins the shore. The wagons will be raised and lowered by wire ropes, working on 'drums,' placed at the head of each 'incline,' the loaded train in its descent drawing up the empty one from the breakwater."

In the general detail of work, the share that fell upon the convicts was the plate-laying, levelling, forming embankments and excavations, getting out and stacking the stone, filling the wagons, sending them down and bringing them back from the incline. Some five hundred men were so employed during the first year, 1849, and their earnings were estimated at about fifteen thousand pounds.

Portland, when thus fairly launched, became the starting point for the new arrangements. Other prisons were needed, and they must be built like Portland. But time pressed, and anything actually available at the moment was eagerly pressed into the service. Down at Dartmoor, on the high lands above Tavistock, was a huge building which had been empty for five-and-thirty years. Its last occupants had been the French and American prisoners of war, who were confined there until the peace of 1814. Ten thousand, some said twelve thousand, had been accommodated within the walls—surely there must be room there for several hundred convicts? Colonel Jebb, hearing that Captain Groves, from Millbank, was staying at Plymouth, begged him to run over to inspect Dartmoor. The place was like a howling wilderness; the buildings in places were without roofs; the walls were full of holes, if not in ruins. But a few repairs would soon make the place habitable, said Captain Groves, and accordingly a gang of convicts, under Mr. Morrish, was sent down to begin operations. In a short time Dartmoor prison was opened. Then other receptacles were prepared. The hulks had been pressed into the service, and were employed at the various dockyards to house the convicts, but only as a temporary measure, until proper buildings on the new plan could be erected. There were ships at Woolwich, and others at Portsmouth. At the first station the old Warrior, and the Defence, took the able-bodied, while the Unité served as a hospital; at Portsmouth there were the York, Briton and Stirling Castle, until 1852, when the new convict prison was occupied. Soon after this, contracts were entered into for the erection of a large prison at Chatham, which was completed in 1858, and to which all those at the Woolwich hulks were in course of time transferred. The intention at both these stations was to devote a goodly portion of the convict labour to further the dockyard extensions. At Chatham the object in view was to construct, high up the tortuous Medway, a chain of artificial basins capable of containing a fleet. Hither beaten ships might retire to refit; while new ironclads, built in the dock close by, might issue thence to retrieve disaster. From the first the work was of an arduous character. The battle was against the tide and the treacherous mud. But all of St. Mary's Island has been reclaimed, and marsh has given place to solid ground. At Portsmouth a feat has been accomplished, not exactly similar, but wonderful also in its way.

So much for the framework—the bones, so to speak, of the new system; let us see, next, something of the living tissues with which it was filled up. Speaking broadly, it may be laid down that the plan of treatment inaugurated by Colonel Jebb and his colleagues, was based on persuasion rather than coercion. This, indeed, they openly admitted. They were not advocates for a "purely coercive and penal discipline." They conceived that there was sufficient punishment without that; the convicts suffered enough in the "long periods during which they remained under penal restraint," and there was further discomfort in "their eventual deportation to a distant colony, and the somewhat severe restrictions to which they are subjected when they gain the boon of a ticket-of-leave," these regulations being drawn up at a time when transportation was still practised, though only to a limited extent. The directors of convict prisons hoped, therefore, to accomplish their object by reward and encouragement rather than by strictness and terror. They desired to put it plainly before every convict that if he would but continue quiet and obedient, he would be sure to benefit in the long run. It was really worth his while to be good, they said, and they encouraged him by the statement: "It will convince us that you are on the high road to reform, and the sooner we are convinced you are reformed, the sooner you will be set at large." Everything was made to depend on conduct—good conduct—in other words, the mere formal observance of rules, a submissive demeanour, and a readiness to echo, even with hypocritical hearts, the lessons the chaplains taught. The word "industry" was tacked on to "conduct," but only in a subordinate sense, and so long as the convict was civil he might be as lazy as he liked.

Precise rules provided the machinery by which a due estimate of each man's conduct was to be obtained. Every governor of a prison kept a character-book, in which he was to enter concisely his observations upon the character and conduct of every prisoner, so as thus to be enabled to reward him by classification and good conduct badges, and more especially "to report with confidence whenever he may be called upon in conjunction with the chaplain to assist the authorities in determining the period of detention of the different prisoners." The same rule went on to say, "He (the governor) shall take every opportunity of impressing on the prisoners that the particulars of their conduct are thus noticed and recorded; and that while no effort at good conduct and industry on the part of a prisoner will be disregarded by the authorities of the prison, every act of wilful misconduct and punishment will be equally noted, and will tend to prolong the period of his detention under penal discipline." The governor's opinion was to be endorsed by that of the chaplain, and even the subordinate officers were called upon to record their views of the demeanour of the prisoners they especially controlled. The whole object of this classification and this supervision was to "produce on the minds of the prisoners a practical and habitual conviction of the effect which their own good conduct and industry will have on their welfare and future prospects."

These extracts from Colonel Jebb's earliest reports will be sufficient to indicate the bias of his mind. He too, like others who had gone before, was hopeful of reformation by purely moral means. As he has himself declared in one of his reports, he thought he might more surely gain the great end he had in view by leading than by driving. Upon this principle the whole system of management was based. There can be no question that those who were its authors took their stand upon the highest ground. They were called upon to inaugurate a new order of things, and they did so to the best of their ability, in the most straightforward, conscientious fashion. The glaring evils of transportation, as it had been administered, were then still staring them in the face. "Speaking humanly," says Colonel Jebb, "the demoralisation of every individual sentenced to transportation was certain. No matter what might have been his previous character, what the amount of his constitution, or what the sincerity of his efforts and resolutions to retrace his steps, he was placed within the influence of a moral pestilence, from which, like death itself, there was no escape." The necessity for great and radical changes was imperative; and these changes were carried out in the manner I have described. Great results were expected to follow from them.