Known to the Police

by Thomas Holmes

I ask my readers to ponder this decision: Bound over! I ask them to ponder this sentence: Fourteen years' penal servitude! There is an eternity between the two sentences; the one is permitted to go on her guileless way. The other is sent to confinement, monotony, and degradation for fourteen years. The latter was at the worst a foolish, clumsy rogue; the other was a consummate and accomplished artist in deception.

Whether the old women would have received any benefit from the imprisonment of the younger woman is beside the question. I am sure they will receive no benefit from her liberty, though she says she will work hard and repay them!

On what principle can she be called a first offender? If rogues are to be imprisoned at all, by what process of reasoning can it be argued that she ought to go free?

Surely the time is come when other people as well as prisoners must be considered. What will be the effect of a judgment like this? It can have but one effect: it will encourage similar young women in their lives of deception and fraud.

I may here stop to ask whether a young man charged with similar offence would have been dealt with at Tower Bridge Police-Court, or at any other court, in a similar way. My own conviction is that he would not have been so dealt with.

This raises the question whether there is or ought to be equality, or something approximating to equality, of punishment for the sexes.

This being the day of women's rights, I would say that certainly there ought to be something like equality even in the imposition of sentences; but the law and its administrators do not hold this view. I do not remember any case of a man and woman being jointly charged, both being jointly and equally guilty, in which the man did not receive much the heavier sentence.

I can understand it in the case of husband and wife, for the law considers husband and wife as one; but, unfortunately for the husband, it considers the male person as that particular one. But, with regard to unmarried couples, I can see no general reason for severity to the man and leniency to the woman.

At the risk of appearing ferocious, I must say that I was taken aback at the Tower Bridge Police-Court decision, for I confess that I would have preferred the magistrate giving the prisoner six months' hard labour, or sending her for trial before judge and jury. Not that I want either men or women to be detained in prison—I hate the thought of it—but I happen to hate something else much more, and that is the idea that plausible and crafty young women can rob and ruin decent old women with impunity.