Such strong testimony to the efficiency and powerful reformatory influence of separation, is of great value.
Some interesting items are furnished on the extent and expenses of transportation. The number of convicts sent to the Australian colonies from Great Britain in 1847, was 938, in 1851, 1568. The average number transported annually from Great Britain, is given at 1750—1300 males, and 450 females.
The estimates for 1852-53 for services connected with the transportation of convicts amount to the gross sum of 101,041l., which provides for the removal of 3,100 males and 800 females from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia, and of 800 to Bermuda and Gibraltar.
Deducting the probable expense devoted to the latter service, there might remain about 95,000l., as the amount required for the removal of 3,900 convicts, or 24l. per head.
From various movements in the present parliament, we are led to infer that transportation will soon be abandoned. This event is more than intimated in the report before us. It is inferred from the tenor of a brief discussion of the scheme of the select committee of the House of Commons, announced two years since, in the form of three specific propositions, viz.:
I. That after prisoners under long sentences have undergone a period of separate confinement, the remainder of their sentences ought to be passed under a system of combined labor, with effectual precautions against intercourse.
II. That this object would be greatly facilitated by the erection of district prisons, at the national cost, for the reception of prisoners under long sentences after they have undergone such previous separate confinement.
III. That such district prisons should be maintained at the national cost, and the government of such prisons, and all appointments and salaries of officers, ought to be under the control of Her Majesty’s Government.
Col. Jebb regards these plans with unqualified favor. “If it were only to avoid the inconvenience and expense of transportation,” he says, “it is well deserving of attention, especially in an economical point of view.”
It seems that lengthened “periods of imprisonment have not hitherto been resorted to, partly from there being no existing prison where sentences exceeding twelve months could be properly carried into effect, and partly, from a sentence of transportation in former times affording so easy a solution of all difficulty both as regarded expense and final disposal.” And Col. Jebb expresses the opinion, that “if facilities existed for carrying into effect sentences of imprisonment extending from eighteen months to three years without expense to the counties and boroughs, a large proportion of the present sentences to seven years’ transportation would be changed to imprisonment.” Allowing the average sentences to be from two and a half to three years, nine months would be past under the discipline of separation, and from twenty-one to twenty-seven months in the district prison.