I have shown in the Chapter on Discharged Prisoners the indispensability of a good system of 'Patronage' or aid-on-discharge. Much has been done in this respect in recent years. The action of the Government in 1911 in recognizing the supreme importance of regulating the discharge of persons from penal servitude by the establishment of a State Association for this purpose, was a great step forward. To the Central Association for the aid of discharged convicts, then created, may be attributed a large and an honourable share in that remarkable decrease of recidivism which prison statistics illustrate, and to which reference is made in my Chapter on "Patronage, or Aid-on-discharge." It is also a remarkable example of the value of a co-operation by which the resources of the State, and the enthusiasm and freedom of action possessed by a voluntary association, can contribute to the diminution of crime.
The retrospective study of crime in this country since the London Congress, 1872 (Chapter XVII.), must suggest many reflections, both concerning its treatment in the past, and its prospect for the future. If we eliminate the period of War, 1914-18, the special conditions of which I have already referred to, the broad deduction may be made that so long as the classical conception of punishment remained, i.e., the mechanical application of the letter of the law to an abstract type of offender, no great impression was being made either in the number or character of offences. Statistics varied from year to year under the influence of special circumstances; but the great stage army of offenders in all the categories continued its unbroken array, with a monotonous regularity, and it seemed almost a mockery to talk of social progress, when, in the background was the silent, ceaseless tramp of this multitude of men, women, and children, finding no rest but behind prison walls, and only issuing thence to re-enter again.
In Chapter VII. (The Inquiry of 1894), I have shown how the public conscience awoke at the end of the last century. It declared in a voice that could be heard that a determined effort must be made to grapple with this problem, and in two ways in particular, (a) It asserted the new policy of Prevention, not Prevention in the sense of the old penal servitude Acts, by which a criminal was prevented after a series of offences by strict supervision of Police from repeating his crimes, but Prevention which would strike at the sources of crime, by cutting off the supply by concentration of effort on the young offender; and (b) by the organization of such a system of Patronage, or Aid-on-discharge, that no prisoner could say with truth that he had fallen again from want of a helping hand. Prevention, in this sense, has been the watch-word of the Prison System since that time, and its effect is distinctly traceable in the statistics of crime since the beginning of the century.
Enough has been said to show that the future of crime is with the statesmen and men of science. The prison administrator plays only a small and obscure executive part—but from his experience and observation of the causes that make for crime, he may be able to denote the direction in which its gradual solution may be found. A quarter of a century spent by the Author in directing the prison administration of this country is his excuse for offering his humble contribution to this absorbing and all-important theme—
"Enough if something from our hands gives power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour."
E.R.B.
December, 1920.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Although the greater part of this work was prepared in 1915, where it has been possible, the statistics furnished are of a more recent date.
THE ENGLISH PRISON SYSTEM.