The Criminal & the Community

by James Devon

A person so discharged on licence may be discharged on probation, and on condition that he be placed under the supervision or authority of any society or person named in the licence who may be willing to take charge of the case, or of such other conditions as may be specified in the licence.

The Directors of Convict Prisons shall report periodically to the Secretary of State on the conduct and industry of persons undergoing preventive detention, and their prospects and probable behaviour on release, and for this purpose shall be assisted by a committee at each prison in which such persons are detained, consisting of such members of the board of visitors and such other persons of either sex as the Secretary of State may from time to time appoint.

Every such committee shall hold meetings at such intervals of not more than six months as may be prescribed, for the purpose of personally interviewing persons undergoing preventive detention in the prison, and preparing reports embodying such information respecting them as may be necessary for the assistance of the Directors, and may at any other time hold such other meetings and make such special reports respecting particular cases, as they may think necessary.”

A licence may be in such form, and may contain such conditions as may be prescribed by the Secretary of State.

The Secretary of State is the figure who has all power over the person sentenced to preventive detention; but the Act does not give him any power that he did not before possess. The Secretary of State has always held and used a dispensing power regarding the sentences passed on prisoners. He has not only remitted sentences, but he has imposed conditions while granting a remission. The Act does not even limit his power, for as the representative of the King he may liberate anybody if he sees fit. What the Act does is to set up machinery whereby the Secretary of State may be moved. Hitherto some personal interest must have been taken by him in a case before the exercise of the Royal prerogative would be recommended by him, for he would require to be prepared to justify his action if questioned in Parliament. The Act alters all that in so far as it applies and makes matter of routine what was exceptional.

The Secretary for Scotland is the head of all the departments of administration, and being the head of all, is not likely to know, intimately, much about any of them. He has his parliamentary duties to attend to, and the more they press on him the more administrative work must he leave to the permanent heads of the departments. One Secretary of State may obtain, and may deserve, a better reputation for administrative capacity than another; but it is absolutely impossible to expect any one man to know intimately the details of the work of all the departments. He is responsible for education, for instance, but what can he know personally of the educational needs of a boy in the east end of Glasgow? Yet he prescribes for the education of all boys, as though it were easier to know about thousands than about one. As head of the Local Government Board, he has to state what amount of relief should be given to poor people in different parts of Scotland, what amount in grant should be given to distress committees, and what kind of work the unemployed should do. He never is a man who has had any experimental acquaintance with poverty, or who knows by experience what distress is entailed in a working-class family by dull trade; and manual labour has not been his occupation. Yet it is not the representatives of these people who instruct him. It is the Board of which he is the head, and whose members, however able they may be, are less in contact with those for whom they prescribe than he is. He is head of the prisons department, and he may now and then visit a prison; but even a Secretary of State, one might go further and say, especially a Secretary of State, cannot gain much intimate knowledge of prisons and prisoners from a casual visit. He has too many things to do, and the man who has too many things to do seldom does anything. He leaves that to his assistants. If Solomon undertook and tried to do as many things as a Secretary of State is supposed to do, he would lose his reputation for wisdom in a week; but he wouldn’t be Solomon if he tried; and so the Secretary of State, on the advice he receives, has to determine the fate of the prisoner who is under sentence of preventive detention. Once in three years every such person has to come under his notice. This can only be done through reports.

These reports have to be made by the committee set up under the Act, which committee is appointed by the Secretary for Scotland. It would be too much to expect that he should know the local circumstances in every case, and the men appointed may only be those recommended to him by his officials. That these will be men of good repute there need be no doubt, but there is no reason to suppose that they will be the men best fitted to represent the public, or most likely to have an intimate acquaintance with the conditions under which the prisoners have lived. If the officials had themselves shown any aptitude for dealing with prisoners in a reformatory way, there might be some reason for assuming that their nominees would be persons whose experience of life and the character of whose abilities would be of such a nature as to fit them for the work they are supposed to undertake. Men of ideas, especially if the ideas are not officially approved, are not at all likely to find themselves nominated for such work. They would cause trouble, and it is better that things should not be done than that Israel should be disturbed.

The committee have to meet at intervals for the purpose of personally interviewing those who are under their care; and the value of their reports will depend on the intimacy of the knowledge they gain regarding the persons interviewed and on its accuracy. Apparently they need not meet more frequently than once in six months. Such a provision is too nakedly absurd to deserve discussion. Apparently they have to report to the Prison Commissioners, who report to the Secretary of State. The position is therefore something like this—that prisoners after they have served prolonged periods in prison may be transferred to another part of the establishment in order to be reformed. In their new quarters the treatment they receive is to be less rigorous than it has been. The influences under which they have to be brought are described but not defined. The officers may be the same as those who were called warders in the other part of the prison, but they may have a new name—perhaps a new uniform. If the person satisfies the Secretary of State, whom he will never see and who knows nothing about him personally, that he is a reformed character, he may be liberated on licence; and he may seek election to the ranks of the licensed once in three years. His conduct and record will then be considered. What will determine the character of the record obviously is the impression he makes on those who come into contact with him. That is to say, he will mainly depend on the report of the warder, for after all, does he not know most about the man? He certainly sees more of him than does any other body. A form will be devised which he will regularly fill in. Government institutions are notable for forms. It will provide for a record of the prisoner’s conduct, behaviour, intelligence, and all sorts of things, and will no doubt be as ingenious a production as any of the numerous specimens which result from our practice of government by clerk. The warder will report to the head warder, who will report to the Governor. The Medical Officer will report as to the health of the person, and all the reports will go on to the Prison Commissioners, and from them to some clerk in the Scottish Office, who has satisfactorily passed a Civil Service examination on the Boundaries of the Russian Empire, the death of Rizzio, or some such important educational subject, and who has never had any opportunity to know anything about prisoners save what can be learned from books, reports, and an occasional visit to prison. The reports will be carefully checked, weighed, and summarised, and the Secretary of State will sign the order made for him.

It is perfectly obvious that the higher up in the official scale one goes, the less intimate knowledge of the lives of prisoners, of the social conditions under which they lived outside, and of their needs, can you reasonably expect to find as things are at present arranged. The man who has the best chance to get a licence under the Act is the man who can dodge best. All our experience points to the fact; and it is not uncommon for the most objectionable character, by subservience and sycophancy, to impress favourably those who have the dispensing of privileges, and this is not confined to prisons or prisoners.

When a prisoner is liberated on licence from a place of preventive detention and placed under the supervision or authority of a society or person, the society or person has to report in accordance with regulations to be made to the Secretary of State, on the conduct and circumstances of the licensee. The licence may be revoked at any time by the Secretary of State, when the person licensed must return to prison. If the person under licence escapes from the supervision of those under whom he has been placed, or if he breaks any conditions of the licence, he forfeits it altogether, and may be brought before a court of summary jurisdiction and charged with breach of licence, and on proof be sent back to the place of preventive detention. The time during which a person is out on licence is treated as a part of the term of detention to which he has been sentenced; unless he has failed to return after his licence has been revoked, in which case the time during which he may have been said to have escaped does not count as reducing the term of his sentence. The conditions of licence may be withdrawn at any time by the Secretary of State, and the person licensed be set absolutely free; but in any case, after he has been out on licence for five years the power to detain him lapses, provided he has observed the conditions of his licence during that time.