"As to altering my conduct, I tell you that when I was in the separate cells, I did resolve on it, and began to pray and read good books, but after I got among the other prisoners I gave it all up again; I should like to go abroad well enough, but I shall not have funds for it, so I must stop at home."
"Then do you intend to go thieving and robbing again?"
"Well, I shall never go another day without food, that's certain. If I can get it honestly, good and well; if not I'll steal: why should a man starve in a Christian country?"
"You have the workhouse to go to."
"The workhouse! it's a second jail: I would nearly as soon be in prison, and when you have a chance of getting off without being caught, it's better to run the risk and chance it, for all the difference there is or ever can be between the workhouse and the prison. They can't make a man work unless they feed and clothe him, any more than they can make a steam engine go without fuel. Well, give me food and I'll work; work is no punishment to me, if I can get meat to support it, and if I don't I can't, that's all about it. But what's the good of making me work for years, at work that will not be of any use to me when I get out? I have only learnt one trade, there are only a very few men in that trade, they won't employ me; then what am I to do? Starve in a Christian country? It isn't likely; and as for the workhouse, I shall never go to it as long as I can be fed in prison, with the chance always of keeping out of both?"
"Suppose they should flog you next time?"
"In the first place, I have a disease on me now that would prevent me from being flogged, so that I have no fear of flogging. But, even if I was able to stand flogging, all the difference it would make to me, would be to make me keep a sharper eye after the 'coppers.' Small game would not then tempt me so much. I should look after larger stakes, go in at heavier jobs, and calculate well my chances of escape before going to work. Once I had made up my mind to commit a crime, and saw the coast clear, the chance of all the floggings in the world would not deter me. I'll find you fellows in the prison to-day who will take a good round flogging for a pound of tobacco! now do you think that the mere chance of the lash would hinder these men from attempting to get hold of a few hundred pounds' worth of jewellery? It's not likely. Thieves weren't frightened into honesty by the gallows, nor would they be now, if they were to be cut into mince-meat. Thousands might be led into honest ways if suitable work was found for them, but it would require to be very different work from that of the 'navvy,' and then many of them have to be learned to work before they could make a living at all."
"Then you don't think flogging did you any good at all?"
"Certainly it did not; and what's more, you will never find a man doing much good after being flogged. It either makes him an invalid, or a desperado. It may make him quiet under authority, but it ensures the very opposite when he is free."
This prisoner was a more than usually clever and intelligent type of a numerous class of convicts—not the most difficult class to cure, but the next to it, perhaps. Unlike the city-bred professional thief, he had been taught to work, and such work as he could perform was no punishment to him. Unlike the professional, he goes out of the prison hesitating, wavering, as to his future course: willing to take work if suitable; determined to avoid the workhouse; easily tempted to steal, resolved to do so rather than starve; but, on the whole, anxious to make a comfortable livelihood. He had one son, and I remember well how glad he was when some benevolent person wrote to him to say that he had been bound an apprentice to a respectable trade. He is now dead. Another of my companions was of a somewhat different class, and a much more difficult subject to deal with. He told me that he was fifty-seven years of age. I asked him how long he had been a prisoner, not adding his sentences together, but how long he had actually been in prison.