The seven curses of London

by James Greenwood

Alluding to the Habitual Criminals Bill, Colonel Fraser says:—

“Parts 1 and 2 of the Bill are chiefly designed to ensure a clearer police supervision than now exists over convicts at large on licence, and to extend it to persons who have been, or may be convicted of felony; but all the pains and penalties to which such persons are liable are made to depend absolutely on proof being forthcoming that the alleged offenders are actual licence holders, or convicted felons, and the great difficulty which so frequently occurs in obtaining this proof will present serious obstacles to a satisfactory working of the statute.

“Organized as the English police forces are, it will be most difficult for them, notwithstanding the contemplated system of registration, to account satisfactorily for the movements of licence holders, or to obtain an effective supervision over them, if they are determined to evade it. But the number of these convicts at large is insignificant compared with the swarms of repeatedly-convicted thieves, who give infinitely greater trouble to the police than licence-holders, and who constantly escape with a light sentence, from the impossibility of obtaining ready proof of their former convictions.”

Now comes the remedy for this unsatisfactory state of affairs!

“As a remedy for this, I would suggest that every convict, on being liberated on licence, and every person after a second conviction of felony, should be marked in prison, on being set free, in such manner as the Secretary of State might direct—as has been the practice in the case of deserters, and men dismissed for misconduct from the army: such marking to be accepted as sufficient proof of former convictions.

“The precise mode in which this should be effected is matter of detail; but, by a simple combination of alphabetical letters, similar to that employed in distinguishing postage-stamps, no two persons need bear precisely the same mark, and the arrangement of letters might be such as to show at a glance, not only the particular prison in which the offender had been last confined, but also the date of his last conviction. Copies of these marks, transmitted to the Central Office of Registration in London, would form an invaluable record of the history of habitual criminals, and enable the police to obtain that reliable information as to their antecedents, the want of which now so commonly enables practised offenders to escape the consequences of their misdeeds.

“Attempts might, and probably would, be made to alter the appearance of the tell-tale imprints; but it would be impossible to efface them, and any artificial discoloration of the skin appearing on the particular part of the arm, or body, fixed upon for the prison mark, should be considered as affording sufficient proof of former convictions; unless the person charged could show—to the satisfaction of the justice before whom he might be brought—that it was produced by legitimate means.”

I have ventured to transcribe, in its integrity, the main portion of Colonel Fraser’s “new idea,” thinking that its importance demanded it. It is significant of much that is to be regretted, coming from such a source. It is somewhat excusable, maybe, in a common policeman—who yesterday may have been an agricultural labourer, or a member of a community of which no more in the way of education is expected—if he exhibits a kind of unreasoning, watch-dog antagonism towards the criminal classes. He is instructed in all sorts of manœuvres, and paid a guinea a week to act against them—to oppose the weight of his officially-striped arm, and the full force of his handy staff against them, whenever he finds plausible excuse for doing so. And, possibly, this is a condition of affairs one should not be over eager to reform. The policeman, “too clever by half,” is generally an instrument of injustice, and an impediment in the way of the law’s impartial acting. So long as the common constable remains a well-regulated machine, and fulfils his functions without jarring or unnecessary noise, we will ask no more; but without doubt we expect, and we have a right to expect, some display of intelligence and humanity on the part of the chief engineer who directs and controls these machines. An official of polite education, and possessed of a thorough knowledge of the ways and means and the various resources of the enemy it is his duty to provide against, should be actuated by some more generous sentiment than that which points towards uncompromising extermination. Colonel Fraser should bear in mind that an act of criminality does not altogether change a man’s nature. He is a human creature in which, perhaps through accident, perhaps through desperate, and to some extent deliberate culture, certain growths, injurious to the welfare of the commonwealth, have growth; but to brand, and destroy, and crush under the heel the said creature because of his objectionable affections, is much like smashing a set of valuable vases because stagnant water has been permitted to accumulate in them. It may be urged that if the said vases or men have secreted criminal vice and fouling until their whole substance has become saturated beyond possibility of cleansing, then the sooner they are utterly abolished the better. To this I answer that until the best known methods of cleansing have been tried on the foul vessels we are not in a position to say that they are irreclaimable; and again, even provided that you might discover certain such vessels fit for nothing but destruction, it would be a monstrous absurdity to issue an edict ordering the annihilation of every pot of a like pattern. And this is pretty much as Colonel Fraser would act.

Let the reader for a moment consider what would be the effect if such a law as that proposed by the Commissioner of Police for the City of London were passed. In the first place it would, in its immediate operation, prove immensely unjust to the milder sort of criminal. If we started anew with our army of twenty thousand to-morrow morning, and every member of it had been convicted but once, there would be fairness (admitting just for argument sake only that there is any fairness at all about it) in holding out the threat that the next man who committed himself should be branded. But, as the case stands, before a month had elapsed we should have hundreds of unlucky wretches against whose names but two felonious commitments stood, bearing the hateful brand, while thousands of the old and wary of the tribe acquainted with the interior of every prison in England would, as far as the tell-tale mark is concerned, appear as innocent as you or I. Nor would any “alphabetical postal system,” however ingenious and cold-blooded, avoid this difficulty. The only way of doing full justice to the entire body of felons—the young beginners and the old practitioners—would be, whenever the latter were next taken to search all the prison records for convictions against them, and score them in regular order on the delinquents’ writhing flesh. To do this, however, Colonel Fraser would have to abandon his idea of branding on the arm. That member would in many cases afford inadequate space, even if you brought the chronicle from the shoulder to the finger tips, and “turned over” and continued the length of the criminal’s palm. As the newspaper reports frequently show, there are evil doers whose catalogues of crimes may scarcely be expressed in a century.

But these are the bad ones already so branded and seared in heart and mind that to prick and scorch an inch of their outward skin would be but to tickle their vanity, and give them to brag of another scar, got in their life-long war against society. Short of torturing them or killing them, it matters little what measures are provided against these case-hardened villains. But there are scores and hundreds who though they have earned for themselves the names of criminals, whom to class and force to herd with the before-mentioned set would be to incur the greatest responsibility, and one that under existing circumstances it would be utterly short of wanton brutality to engage in.

As regards the class last mentioned, that is to say, those members who have at present made no very desperate acquaintance with crime and its punishment, I believe that if they were but judiciously dealt with a very large number would be but too glad to escape from their present life of misery. “Many a thief,” says a writer, whose able remarks are the more valuable, because they are founded on actual experience and conversation with the people he treats of; “many a thief is kept in reluctant bondage to crime from the difficulties he finds in obtaining honest employment, and earning honest bread. Many thieves are fond of their criminal calling. They will tell you plainly that they do not intend to work hard for a pound a week, when they can easily earn five times as much by thieving in less time and live like gentlemen. But others of them are utterly weary of the hazard, disgrace, and suffering attaching to their mode of life. Some of them were once pure, honest, and industrious, and when they are sick, or in prison, they are frequently filled with bitter remorse, and make the strongest vows to have done with a guilty life.

“Suppose a man of this sort in prison. His eyes are opened, and he sees before him the gulf of remediless ruin into which he will soon be plunged. He knows well enough that the money earned by thieving goes as fast as it comes, and that there is no prospect of his ever being able to retire on his ill-gotten gains. He comes out of prison, determined to reform. But where is he to go? What is he to do? How is he to live? Whatever may have been done for him in prison, is of little or no avail, if as soon as he leaves the gaol he must go into the world branded with crime, unprotected and unhelped. The discharged prisoner must be friendly with some one, and he must live. His criminal friends will entertain him on the understood condition that they are repaid from the booty of his next depredation. Thus the first food he eats, and the first friendly chat he has, becomes the half necessitating initiative of future crime. Frequently the newly discharged prisoner passes through a round of riot and drunkenness immediately on his release from a long incarceration, as any other man would do in similar circumstances, and who has no fixed principles to sustain him. And so by reason of the rebound of newly acquired liberty, and the influence of the old set, the man is again demoralized. The discharged prisoner leaves gaol with good resolves, but the moment he enters the world, there rises before him the dark and spectral danger of being hunted down by the police, and being recognised and insulted, of being shunned and despised by his fellow workmen, of being everywhere contemned and forsaken.”

There can be no doubt that to this utter want of friends of the right sort at the moment of leaving prison, may be attributed a very large percentage of the persistence in a career of crime by those who have once made a false step. In this respect we treat our criminals of comparatively a mild character with greater harshness and severity than those whose repeated offences have led to their receiving the severest sentences of the law. The convict who is discharged after serving a term of five years at Portland, receives ere he quits the gates of Millbank prison a money gratuity, varying in amount according to the character that was returned with him from the convict establishment. Nor do the chances that are afforded him of quitting his old course of life and becoming an honest man end here. There is the Prisoner’s Aid Society, where he may obtain a little more money and a suit of working clothes, and if he really shows an inclination to reform, he may be even recommended to a situation. Put for the poor wretch who has given society much less offence, who has become a petty thief, probably not from choice, but from hard necessity, and who bitterly repents of his offences, there is no one to take him by the hand and give or lend him so much as an honest half-crown to make a fair start with. It may be said that the convict is most in want of help because he is a convict, because he is a man with whom robberies and violence have become so familiar, that it is needful to provide him with some substantial encouragement lest he slide back into the old groove. Further, because he is a man so plainly branded that the most inexperienced policeman may know at a glance what he is; whereas, the man who has been but once convicted may, if he have the inclination, push his way amongst honest men, and not one of them be the wiser as to the slip he has made. And that would be all very well if he were assisted in rejoining the ranks of honest bread-winners, but what is his plight when the prison door shuts behind him? It was his poverty that urged him to commit the theft that consigned him to gaol, and now he is turned out of it poorer than ever, crushed and spirit-broken, and with all his manliness withered within him. He feels ashamed and disgraced, and for the first few hours of his liberty he would willingly shrink back for hiding, even to his prison, because, as he thinks, people look at him so. A little timely help would save him, but nothing is so likely as desperate “don’t care” to spring out of this consciousness of guilt, and the suspicion of being shunned and avoided; and the army of twenty thousand gains another recruit.