More interest is taken in proposals for dealing with the habitual offender than in any others, although nobody is a habitual to begin with. He is supposed to be the dangerous person. He is a professional plunderer; the villain of the piece. But habitual offenders are not all great criminals. There are those who live by stealing, having become more or less expert at the business; but there are many offenders who, having become careless and drunken, or who, being physically or mentally a little below the ordinary standard of their class, are incapable of keeping a job even if they got it. They are more a nuisance than a danger to their fellow-citizens. This army of destitute persons should be dealt with by the destitution authorities. Taken singly they are not difficult to control and direct, and it would be cheaper and more profitable to have them planted out in the country than to allow them to herd together in the cities, to be successful neither in honest nor dishonest work, and serving as tools and touts for the more skilful rogues.
The most helpless among them are the aged and infirm, some of whom have only become submerged late in life, and all of whom are quite unable to extricate themselves from the morass into which they have fallen. Now they are in the prison; now in the poorhouse. When they can avoid either of these institutions they live in lodging-houses or on the streets, where their misery is a reproach to our civilisation. They are not interesting; they are only disgusting; and it has been proposed to shut them up in the poorhouse, because they go in and out too frequently.
Yet something might be learned from their point of view. They are sent to prison because they commit petty offences. They are quite unfit to conform to the rules of that institution and are not improved by residence there. For a few days they are kept off the streets, but nobody pretends that this could not be done more effectively and at less cost. If they prefer the prison to the poorhouse, as is sometimes alleged, they do not prefer the prison to the miserable and haphazard existence they drag out when free; and as a matter of fact, when the weather becomes suddenly severe or their ailments become more insistent, it is the parish, not the police, to which they apply. They hope to be sent to a hospital. When they recover sufficiently they are out again. May this not afford a presumption that there is something wrong with the poorhouse? Is it reasonable to assume that, having experienced all the bitterness and hardship due to their poverty and destitution—that knowing they will be subjected to hunger, rough usage, and exposure—they prefer to suffer these rather than trust to the tender mercy officially meted out to them, and that they do this through sheer cussedness? For my part, I do not believe that they are such fools. If they prefer to forage for themselves, knowing the difficulty of doing so, rather than live in the poorhouse, it is because, after balancing the advantage and disadvantage, they have found that anything is better for them than life in that glorious institution. To anyone who has lived there, there is no ground for surprise that they should adopt this conclusion.
In the prison a man may have too much privacy. In the poorhouse there is none at all. The inmates having nothing in common but their misfortune, poverty, and destitution, are housed together and live a barrack life. Some attempt is made to classify them, as though you could sort out people, in ignorance of their temperaments and tastes, by their record as disclosed to an inspector. In our own experience people sort out themselves. In any church or club you get people of the same age and of similar good character. They can all be civil to one another if they meet occasionally, but set any half-dozen of them to live together with no relief from each other’s company, and there will be rebellion inside a week.
In the poorhouse the inmates have to suffer one another during the whole time of their stay. Some of them rebel and leave the place, even though they know that they will be more uncomfortable outside. They at least have a change of discomfort. Surely the money spent in chasing them and in keeping them would yield a better return if they were boarded out in comfortable surroundings, where during the few remaining years of their pilgrimage they might get fresh air and some space to move about in. Their very feebleness makes their custody less difficult, and it is no profit to them or to us to make it more arduous than it need be. If it be objected that this would be treating them better than the “deserving poor,” that is only to remind us of the shameful way in which we have neglected those to whom we give that name. The “deserving poor” are the uncomplaining poor; and so long as they do not complain their deserts are likely to be disregarded, even when quoted as a reproach to those whose behaviour has attracted our censure.
CHAPTER X
THE BETTER WAY
The offender who has become reckless—If not killed they must be kept—The failure of the institution—Boarding out—At present they are boarded out on liberation, but without supervision—Guardians may be found when they are sought for—The result of boarding out children—The insane boarded out—Unconditional liberation has failed—Conditional liberation with suitable provision has not been tried—No system of dealing with men, but only a method—No necessity for the formation of the habitual offender—The one principle in penology.