By another article of the same code (the 67th), all children found by the authorities who have neither parents nor homes are taken to the House of Correction: nor is this plan confined to France. The boldly-benevolent sheriff of Aberdeen, imitating this law, formed his most efficient school, by causing all the destitute and friendless children in the bounds of his jurisdiction to be 'taken up' and housed in his miscellaneous but admirable academy. The law of France, by this sort of procedure, exercises a protective influence over the friendless and forlorn. The law of England, on the contrary, only condescends to notice children when they have become criminals. Here the 'eye of the law' is shut against neglected and wretched outcasts from tainted homes, or the offspring of vicious parents; but opens them wide, and darts its fiery glare, to bring these young victims to punishment, when they have committed crimes for which, as we shall presently prove, they ought scarcely to be held accountable. The sternest moralist will not deny that in a majority of cases offenders under, say fourteen years of age, ought not to be deemed criminals in the ordinary sense of the term—that is to say, as offenders who, having acquired a knowledge of the duties of civilised life, have violated them: the fact being, that the very possibility of acquiring such knowledge the law denies; whilst, on the other hand, every incentive and temptation to dishonesty is working within them. These wretched young creatures are either homeless orphans, committing petty thefts to keep life in them, or the offspring of infamous parents, who urge them to pilfer, as a means of support in their own profligacy, or are hired and taught by practised ruffian employers to plunder for their benefit. How, then, can a child of tender years, for whom the legislature has provided no means of instruction, religious or moral, who has been sent out by his parents to beg or steal—caressed when successful, and punished when unlucky; or, more frequently, a being who has been cast loose upon the world, without a friend in it—form any just notion of his duties to society? Yet, because he has not done so, the law, when it detects him in the consequences of such ignorance, sends him to the treadmill or to jail. And even there our criminal code affords no means of reformation, nor always of employment;[1] while, on the contrary, every sort of instruction in depravity, and every means of acquiring proficiency in thieving, are supplied by his prison associates. 'Prisons,' says the chaplain of the Pentonville Prison in the last report from that establishment, 'as they are throughout the country, generally speaking, are schools in which everything wicked, deceitful, impious, and abominable is practised, taught, and propagated at a great expense of public money and public morals.'
To illustrate vividly the condition of the juvenile criminal, the bearing the law has upon his career and ultimate destiny, and, finally, to render intelligible the best remedies it is in the power of the country to apply to this worst of social diseases, it is only necessary to trace the private history of at least one-half of the unfortunate young beings who now infest our streets.
Before us lie two documents, from which it is easy to glean the birth and parentage of a vast number of these wretched young creatures. The first is the Report of the Parkhurst Prison, and the second that of the Philanthropic Institution for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders; both for the year 1848. Against the lists of 'admissions' into the latter establishment are placed short notes of the antecedents of the boys admitted during the year. The most frequently-recurring entries against the initials of those inmates who have been convicted more than once are such as:—'Father dead; mother remarried; deserted by his friends.' 'Turned out of doors by a stepfather.' 'Illegitimate; father unknown.' 'Father of dissolute habits; deserted his wife.' 'An orphan, both parents dead;' or 'Parents unknown,' occurs frequently. 'Mother dead, father remarried, and turned out of doors,' and 'Utterly friendless,' are also repeated in several instances. 'Mother separated from her husband: she is of drunken habits: the boy led into evil by discomforts of home:' 'Father of drunken habits,' are occasional entries. Those boys who were admitted into the school upon one conviction only, seem, in a majority of instances, to have been led away by evil companions. We select the following from this category as examples:—'The parents poor; father in bad health.' 'Father dead; mother respectable.' 'Enticed to theft by bad companions,' &c.
Imagine the life of a young outcast belonging to the first class of the cases above cited. His earliest endeavours may be towards honest employment. This he seeks far and near—day after day—till, worn out with fruitless solicitation, and nearly starved, he takes to begging. With any charity-money he may obtain he abates the pangs of hunger. In the casual wards of workhouses, to which the young wanderer is often driven for a night's rest, he has to associate with practised depredators;[2] but when more successful, his sleeping companions in the low lodging-houses we have previously adverted to in this Journal are chiefly young thieves, whose occasional affluence he envies. He does not see their more frequent privations, because at these places of meeting no one can appear who has not been able to get money, the prompt payment of the admission fee being indispensable. He has no moral principles to fortify him against the jaunty, clever, convincing persuasions of his new friends. They seem, so far as he can judge, happy, and even joyous, which, to his perceptions, speak not only of sufficient for subsistence, but of superfluity. He contrasts his own condition and hopeless despondency with their evanescent happiness, and longs to acquire such depraved knowledge as will enable him to increase his quantum of food, and put him on a par with his neighbours. In short, he soon becomes a thief—not an occasional depredator, driven to dishonesty by the urgent demands of nature, but a regular, practised, professional pilferer. Fraud is his trade; and as it is by no means an easy one, he takes very great pains, and runs great risks, to learn it. When he has been 'lucky,' his gains are to him great, and he spends them in a way which debauches him still more, but which, for the time, affords him a sort of enjoyment. There are, however, long intervals between these saturnalia; and the want and misery he experiences meantime are sharp and severe. But they teach him no lesson, for with him it is 'either a hunger or a burst;' and when plenty comes, past privation is drowned in present enjoyment.
But this is a bright view of a juvenile outcast's career. A specimen of the miseries he has to endure was afforded by Lord Ashley in his speech on the reformation of juvenile offenders in the House of Commons towards the end of last session. His lordship was anxious to ascertain from personal inspection what was the actual condition of those persons; and he therefore, in company with two or three others, perambulated the city of London. He found these persons lying under dry arches, on the steps of doors, and in outhouses; but by far the majority of them lying in the dry arches of houses in course of erection. Those arches were quite inaccessible in any ordinary way, being blocked up with masonry; and the only mode of ascertaining whether any one was inside, was by thrusting in a lantern. When lanterns were thrust in, however, a great many were discovered, of whom he caused 33 to undergo an examination. Their ages varied from twelve to eighteen. Of those, 24 had no parents, 6 had one parent, and 3 had stepmothers; 9 had no shoes; 12 had been once in prison, 3 four times, 1 eight times; and 1, only fourteen years of age, had been twelve times in prison! The physical condition of those children was melancholy beyond belief. The whole of them, without exception, were the prey of vermin, a large proportion were covered with itch, a few of them were suffering sickness, and in two or three days afterwards died from exhaustion. Of these 33 he had himself privately examined some eight or ten; and from the way in which their answers were given, he was certain that they told the truth. He asked them how often they had slept in a bed during the last three years. One of them said, 'Perhaps as many as twelve times in the three years;' another, three times; and another said that he could not remember that he had ever slept in a bed. He then asked them how they passed the time in winter, and whether they did not suffer from the cold. They replied that they lay eight or ten together in these cellars, in order to keep themselves warm. They fairly confessed that they had no other means of subsistence than begging or stealing, and that the only mode by which they could 'turn a penny,' as they termed it, in a legitimate way, was by picking up bones, and selling them to marine-store dealers. Let it be observed that a large proportion of those young persons were at the most dangerous age for society; many of them were from sixteen to two or three-and-twenty, which was by far the most perilous age for every purpose of fraud, and certainly of violence.
A well-authenticated anecdote gives an even more powerful illustration of the excessive wretchedness to which young persons without friends or protectors are, in thousands and tens of thousands, reduced. The master of a Ragged School having occasion to lecture a boy of this class, pointed out to him the consequences of a perseverance in the career of crime he was pursuing; and to enforce his precepts the stronger, painted in strong colours the punishments he was earning in this life, and the torments in that to come. 'Well,' said the boy, 'I don't think it can be worse than the torments in this life.'
It is melancholy to know that it is chiefly the novices in crime who have to endure the sharpest privations and miseries. As youths grow more dexterous in their illicit calling, they have, as a matter of course, better success. In lodging-houses and casual wards they learn the elements of their illicit vocation; and it is not till they have passed a few months in one of our prisons that their education in crime is complete. Despite the 'silent-system,' and the palatial accommodation of our modern prisons, detention in them is still productive of the worst results. Although, by a recent act, the power of summary conviction has been much extended to police magistrates, so as to obviate the evil of long detention, other and greater evils, which need not be specified here, have sprung up. To show what efficient instruction in infamy those already prepared to receive its lessons is afforded in prisons, we need only instance a fact, related in the Pentonville Prison Report by the chaplain, relative to a child of decent parentage, and not, as one may suppose, so open as many to bad impressions:—'A very young boy, seven years of age, was brought in, charged, in company with other two boys somewhat older, with stealing some iron-piping from the street. The little fellow—it was the first time he had ever been in such a place—cried bitterly all the afternoon of the Saturday; but by the Monday morning, the exhortations of his companions, and their sneers at his softness, had reconciled him to his situation; and the eldest of the three was teaching him to pick pockets, practising his skill on almost all the other prisoners. His mother came to see him in the forenoon, and the boy was again overwhelmed with grief. Again his companions jeered him, calling him by certain opprobrious epithets in use amongst such characters, and in a short time the boy was pacified, and romping merrily with his associates.'
In the same report we find the following account given by a thoroughly-reformed prisoner, who spoke from what he had himself witnessed:—'In the assize-yard there was a considerable number of what are called first-offenders, nine or ten including myself, the remainder forming an overwhelming majority; two of them murderers, both of whom were subsequently condemned to death. I cannot reflect without pain on the reckless conduct of these two unhappy men during the few weeks I was with them. As regarded themselves, they appeared indifferent to the probable result of their coming trial. They even went so far as to have a mock trial in the day-room, when, one of the prisoners sitting as judge, some others acting as witnesses, and others as counsel, all the proceedings of the court of justice were gone through, the sentence pronounced, and mockingly carried into execution. I shall not soon forget that day when one of these murderers was placed in the cell amongst us, beneath the assize-court, a few moments after the doom of death had been passed upon him. Prisoners on these occasions eagerly inquire, "What is the sentence?" Coolly pointing the forefinger of his right hand to his neck, he said, "I am to hang." He then broke into a fit of cursing the judge, and mimicked the manner in which he had delivered the sentence. The length of his trial was then discussed: all the circumstances that had been elicited during its progress were detailed and dwelt upon: the crowded state of the court, the eagerness of the individuals present to get a sight of him, the grand speech of his counsel—all were elements that seemed to have greatly gratified his vanity, and to have drugged him into a forgetfulness of the bitterness of his doom. He then dwelt upon the speech he should make on the scaffold; was sure there would be an immense concourse of people at his execution, as it was a holiday-week; and from these and numerous other considerations, drew nourishment to that vanity and love of distinction which had in no small degree determined perhaps the commission of his crime. To minds in the depths of ignorance, and already contaminated by vicious and criminal courses of life, such a man becomes an object of admiration. They obtain from him some slight memorial—such as a lock of his hair, or some small part of his dress—which they cherish with a sentiment for which veneration is the most appropriate term; while the notoriety he has obtained may incite them to the perpetration of some act equally atrocious.'
Mr Cloy of the Manchester Jail also reports that there the prisoners form themselves into regular judge-and-jury societies, and go through the whole form of a trial and conviction. They also practise stealing from one another—less for the misappropriation of the articles stolen, than for acquiring proficiency in the art of picking pockets, and other degrading and immoral arts.
A constant supply of masters in the arts of dishonesty is kept up by the system of short imprisonment. The author of 'Old-Bailey Experience' says that thieves regard not imprisonment if it be only for a short time. Indeed, in the winter-time, they rather prefer it to liberty; for in jail they can insure protection from the inclemencies of that season: but even at other times, so ductile is nature to circumstances, that these men think themselves fortunate if, out of twelve, they can have four mouths' 'run,' as they call it. 'I have no hesitation in affirming,' says the above-quoted author, 'that they would continue to go the same round of imprisonment and crime for an unlimited period if the duration of life and their sentences afforded them the opportunity. I knew one man who was allowed a course of seventeen imprisonments and other punishments before his career of crime was stopped by transportation.' In each of these imprisonments, this practised ruffian mixed with the youngest prisoners, and doubtless imparted to them lessons in crime which made them ten times worse after they had left than before they entered the prison.