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

by Arthur Griffiths

The forçats are distributed all over the colony where there is work in progress, on farms and agricultural stations, clearing forest primeval and in mining operations of a very arduous character. The idle and ill-conducted, the incorrigible who will not labour and are in a chronic state of insubordination, are committed to disciplinary camps partly for punishment, partly for seclusion. Nowhere is the régime more severe, the daily rations less, the daily task harder. There are none of the small luxuries of wine and tobacco, and they sleep on guard beds with a leg in iron chained to a bar at the end. The penalty of solitary confinement on bread and water is promptly inflicted for any breach of discipline, and those who prove perfectly intractable are sent as hopeless to the cells of the central prison at the island of Nou. Henceforth there is no further change—they are deemed hopeless and incurable.

One form of punishment is peculiar to these camps. It might be called perpetual motion. A number of convicts, twenty or thirty, are ranged in single rank in a large shed, some sixty feet in length and forty in breadth, and set to march round and round incessantly, pausing only for a couple of minutes every half hour. Stone seats, each a kind of flat topped pyramid, are fixed at intervals around the shed and afford a brief rest from time to time, but the march is speedily resumed and continues from dawn to sunset of the nearly interminable day.

The tardy development of the colony has been shown as it was at an earlier date. Twenty years more and it still lags behind. After forty years of occupation, with an average total of from eight to ten thousand able-bodied criminals available, but little progress has been made. The colony is still but sparsely provided with roads. The internal communications are barely fifty miles in length; one road, fit only for two-wheeled traffic and thirty miles in length, connects Noumea with Bailoupari, and there are some short roads in the agricultural settlement of Bourail. There are as yet no railways and no network of telegraphic wires. All of the transit from point to point is performed by small coastwise steamers.

Bourail is the show place where the forçats blossom into the emancipists, and where penal labour is replaced by individual effort of the state-aided freedmen, the criminal who has expiated his offence and is now to make himself a new life. Liberal assistance is given to those who intend to do well. After fair assurance of amendment, the forger or assassin, the unfortunate felon who got into the clutches of the law, gets a new start, a concession of land with capital advanced to stock it, materials to build his home, tools and agricultural implements, six months' food, and seed to sow the first harvest. Some of them thrive and prosper exceedingly; it is much the same as in early Australian days, but no doubt to a lesser degree, for not a few fail and must return to servitude with more successful comrades or free settlers. There are those who champion the system as the best solution of the disposal of the worst offenders who cannot be rehabilitated under the conditions existing in a country long settled. The logic is a little weak perhaps, and it is difficult to concede that crime should be the official avenue to state assistance.

A good story is told of one reformed criminal who prospered exceedingly and was congratulated by the governor of the colony when he came up to receive the prize awarded for raising first-class stock. He was reminded how by the fostering care of a paternal government he had been transformed from the degraded forçat into an honest owner of property. The ex-convict was moved to tears, but his emotion was caused by his regretting the time he had lost before he came to benefit by the change. "Had I had any idea of the good fortune awaiting me," he whined, "I would have arrived here ten years sooner." In other words, he would have qualified ten years earlier by committing the deed which resulted in his transportation—cutting his wife's throat.

The boons extended to the reformed one are not limited to a life of ease and comfort in the colony. Rehabilitation may be earned, and with it permission to return to the mother country with the restoration of civil rights. Several have sold their farms and effects to the colony, and have gone home to France as rentiers. Their reappearance hardly tends to emphasise the deterrent effect of penal exile.

That the conditions in New Caledonia were until within the last few years in many respects more encouraging, and that the labour of the colonists was increasingly productive, may be gathered from the following extract from the London Times in 1890:

"The governor states that agriculture, which has hitherto been of only secondary importance, seems to be entering upon a period of rapid development under the influence of the fresh means of action afforded it by the immigration from the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia will produce this year 400 tons of coffee, while it is expected that in four years' time the production will exceed 1,000 tons. The cultivation of the sugar cane and of wheat is also making good progress.... The governor reports that what New Caledonia is most deficient in is labour, but he adds that the work done by the convicts, and especially at the Thio penitentiary, is much more satisfactory than that of the convicts in Guiana, while the men who have served their time and who choose can always find employment at wages from 4s. to 5s. a day, and at piece work they in many cases earn 10s. a day."

Some ten years later reports continued to be favourable as to the prosperity of New Caledonia. According to the governor, the population was steadily increasing and the demand for the minerals mined on the island was so great that it could not be satisfied. In 1903, however, the Times published a news item stating that "emigration from France has practically ceased and numbers of colonists have left," the cause of the exodus being the high taxation and great cost of living. In the same year, the agent-general for South Australia wrote to the French government pointing out how anxious Australia was to see the use of New Caledonia as a penal settlement abandoned, and a date fixed after which prisoners should not be sent to the Pacific.