In view of these eminently satisfactory figures, it may well be asked how it came about that those persons, who most firmly believed that security was only to be attained through police instrumentality, were so grievously disappointed at the imaginary failure of their pet scheme. In order to find the answer to this question it will be necessary to probe a little deeper into the statistics, and to do so by the light of contemporary events. In the first place it is to be remarked that a closer inspection of the Commitment Returns reveals the fact that a reaction took place between 1860 and 1863, the figures for those years reading as follows:
| 1860 | 15,999 |
| 1861 | 18,326 |
| 1862 | 20,001 |
| 1863 | 20,818 |
This result was due, no doubt, to the combined effects of two distinct causes, one of which produced an actual growth of crime, whilst the other accounted for what was but an apparent increase of delinquency. If it is true that crime was more common than before, it is no less true that offences were more commonly detected, the apparent increase being the necessary result of the efficient action of the newly organized Constabularies, which, naturally enough, did not take full effect until the whole machine was in proper working order. Before preventive police can develop its maximum deterrent energy, it has to prove its title to respect by its success in the detection of crime; criminals do not search the Statutes at Large, nor judge of the efficiency of a policeman from government statistics.[223] They take him as they find him, and learn to fear him only after they have acquired a practical familiarity with his activity, either by personal contact, or vicariously, through the misfortunes of acquaintances. The significance of the heavy Calendars in the early sixties, therefore, is largely discounted by the fact, that the accumulations of former years had to be dispersed, before entire responsibility for the amount of crime prevailing could be laid at the door of the new régime. With regard to the second reason for the despondency above referred to, it must be remembered that offences against property so outnumber other offences, that they entirely dominate all criminal statistics; whilst the public alarm occasioned by a single case of robbery involving personal injury to an individual, is infinitely greater than that caused by a whole series of depredations on property if unaccompanied by violence. In the quinquennial period (1857-1861), the number of persons for trial at Assizes and Quarter Sessions, charged with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, felonious wounding, malicious wounding and assault, amounted to 1451; whilst in the next quinquennial period (1862-1867), the number of commitments for these offences had risen to 1712; and herein lay the raison d'etre for the widespread alarm which, in 1862 and 1863 especially, may be said to have amounted to panic. Not only were such crimes more frequent than had formerly been the case, but they began to be marked by a degree of violence[224] which argued that a peculiarly desperate class of criminal was abroad; and such indeed was the actual state of affairs, occasioned by the temporary breakdown of the penal system and consequent upon the discontinuance of the practice of shipping the most dangerous criminals across the seas.
Before the abolition of transportation, the career of the criminal was generally brief unless he confined his attention to petty depredations, or unless he was particularly skilful in avoiding capture; a felon once caught was given little chance of repeating his offence. If he escaped the gallows he was as a rule removed from the scene of his temptations, never to return; and the labours of the police were far less arduous as long as distant colonies were content to absorb the dregs of our population, and as long as the press-gang claimed a large proportion of our vagabonds and neer-do-weels. Impressment, however, practically ceased in 1835; and Australasia soon grew weary of the refuse which we were yearly depositing on her shores. Between 1840 and 1845 as many as seventeen thousand convicts were sent to Van Diemen's Land alone, and in one year more than four thousand felons were transported to Australia: the result was that the supply exceeded the demand, and the colonists, though not blind to the advantages of a moderate supply of free labour, began to protest warmly against the wholesale importation of such eminently undesirable neighbours. A large public meeting was held at Sydney in 1850, at which it was unanimously decided to petition Her Majesty to procure the immediate discontinuance of transportation; the British Government at once consented, and after 1852 no more convicts were sent to New South Wales, Tasmania, or South Australia.[225] Morally bound, as it was, to comply with the request of the Colonists, the government found itself impaled on the horns of a dilemma: about nine thousand persons actually under sentence of transportation lay awaiting disposal in the Hulks, and the number was steadily increasing. It was impossible to set them at liberty; there was no room in the English prisons; and there was nowhere to send them to except Western Australia, which, though still willing to annually receive a certain proportion, was unable to digest such an accumulation. The demoralization which infected the ordinary gaols was as nothing compared to that which pervaded the Hulks,—filthy derelict vessels crowded with unclean and abandoned mortals who were allowed absolutely free intercourse with each other, and who were subjected to no supervision beyond that exercised by a sentry or two with loaded muskets.
In this emergency extra prison accommodation was hurriedly provided. Portsmouth prison was opened in 1852; Dartmoor (originally designed for the detention of French prisoners-of-war, but long disused) was converted into a convict establishment in 1855, and a new prison at Chatham was made ready in the year following. In this way the immediate necessity was partially relieved; but for the complete solution of the difficulty, a radical reform of the whole penal system had to be devised. Convicts who had been sentenced to transportation could not in common fairness be detained in English prisons for the whole period of their sentences, and there was no law which authorized any remission. Prisoners felt that they had a grievance, and mutinous outbreaks occurred at Dartmoor, Portland and Chatham.[226] Under these circumstances a "Penal Servitude Act"[227] was introduced, which provided that henceforward penal servitude was to be substituted for transportation as the punishment for all offences too serious to be met by simple imprisonment, yet not of sufficient enormity to deserve a sentence of fourteen years; at the same time it was notified that those persons, then in confinement, who had been condemned to transportation were to be released with a free pardon after the expiration of from half to two-thirds of their original sentence. In 1857 another act was passed, authorizing the Secretary of State conditionally to discharge convicts undergoing penal servitude in England, before they had served their full term. This system, popularly known as the Ticket-of-leave system, was sound in theory, and whenever properly administered has proved both beneficial to prisoners and harmless to society. But when first inaugurated it produced the most disastrous consequences. Under present conditions a convict can only earn remission by good behaviour and constant industry, generally leaving the prison a better man than when he entered it, even if he is not entirely reformed; whilst under the old conditions, incarceration corrupted the novice in crime, and still further hardened the habitual offender. The last hulk was closed in 1857, and a few years afterwards the effect of the unavoidable policy of turning loose unreformed gaol-birds was fully experienced, and the sequel made apparent in the criminal statistics of the period.
According to the intention of its authors, adequate police supervision over those who had been conditionally liberated on license was an essential feature of the Ticket-of leave system, but this was not the interpretation adopted by the Home Office, for on behalf of that Department, evidence was given before the Select Committee of 1856 to the effect that "it was thought far better to give no directions whatever to the police on the subject, but to leave them (i.e. the license-holders) precisely in the situation of men who had served out the whole period of their sentence." On every ticket-of-leave issued, the following conditions were endorsed:—"Notice—(1)—The power of revoking or altering the license of a convict will most certainly be exercised in case of his misconduct. (2)—If, therefore, he wishes to retain the privilege, which by his good behaviour under penal discipline he has obtained, he must prove by his subsequent conduct that he is really worthy of Her Majesty's clemency. (3)—To produce a forfeiture of the license, it is by no means necessary that the holder should be convicted of any new offence. If he associates with notoriously bad characters, leads an idle or dissolute life, or has no visible means of obtaining an honest livelihood, &c.—it will be assumed that he is about to relapse into crime, and he will be at once apprehended, and recommitted to prison under his original sentence."
These conditions, admirable in themselves, were not enforced and so were practically useless. Ticket-of-leave men almost invariably destroyed their licenses (which they were not compelled to keep), and if apprehended for a fresh offence, or on suspicion, stoutly denied that they had previously been convicted; nor was it easy for the authorities to prove the contrary in the absence of any proper system for the registration of convicts. The helplessness of the police in the matter may be measured by the fact that constables were instructed on no account to interfere with ticket-of-leave men, "nor when seen in public houses are they to be pointed out to the landlord, and required to leave, as in other cases of convicted thieves and suspected characters." It was of course only just that convicts released on license should not have their comings and goings continually dogged by constables; but to elevate them into a privileged class, and to place them on a higher plane than "suspected characters" who had never been convicted, was, in the words of Sir Richard Mayne, "to give them opportunities to commit crime which they might not otherwise have." The police were not to blame for this state of things, for they only carried out the instructions of the Home Office, which, again, did not feel justified in interfering with liberated convicts unless authorized to do so by Act of Parliament. To shew how entirely the police authorities dissociated themselves from any responsibility for the supervision of licensees, it may be mentioned that, in his evidence before the Select Committee of 1856, the Chief Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis made the following confession. "It may appear strange for me to say so, but until a few months ago I never saw a ticket-of-leave, and did not know what was endorsed upon it:—it was no business of mine."[228]
Fortunately this state of affairs was not allowed to continue indefinitely. Various reforms, extending over a series of years, were successively taken in hand with the object of making penal servitude reformatory as well as retributive, of ensuring that convicts released on ticket-of-leave should remain under police supervision until the expiration of their sentences, of arresting the criminal career of juvenile law-breakers by means of reformatories and industrial schools; and of protecting society, as far as possible, from the repeated ravages of incorrigible offenders, by instituting a system for the thorough identification and registration of criminals. The history of these reforms must be briefly sketched.
Of all the abuses which used to disgrace our penal establishments, the most disastrous in its results, was the promiscuous herding together of male with female, adult with juvenile, habitual with casual offenders, under conditions calculated to lower the tone of the whole prison community to the level of the most degraded inmate. The evils inseparable from unchecked association of felons in confinement were recognised even in the eighteenth century; and Bentham, Howard, and other reformers persistently urged the adoption of the "separate" system for all English prisons. Ultimately the Government was induced to make the experiment, and in 1821 Millbank Penitentiary was opened for the reception of prisoners. A long delay followed, and not until 1840 was the first stone of the next model prison laid at Pentonville. Both Millbank and Pentonville were constructed on the "radiating" principle which admits of the constant exercise of perfect supervision over all the prisoners, who are, however, confined in separate compartments. The expense of the new establishments, as well as a popular prejudice against solitary confinement due to its too rigorous enforcement in Pennsylvania, retarded progress, and although a few gaols of a modern type were here and there constructed, the large majority of those convicts who were not transported, were allowed to corrupt each other in the old-fashioned local prisons. This policy of inaction continued until 1865, when the "Prison Act" was passed, which requires that every male prisoner shall be accommodated with a separate cell, and which insists on uniformity of treatment for all persons (except first-class misdemeanants and debtors) undergoing a sentence of two years' imprisonment or less.
We have already seen how the gradual discontinuance of transportation (1838-1867) and the abolition of the hulks (1857) caused "Public Works Prisons" to be established at Dartmoor, Chatham, etc. At these places, (where prisoners undergoing penal servitude are incarcerated) the plan of silent associated labour by day, with separate confinement by night, was adopted; and although no relaxation of discipline was allowed, the reform of the criminal, rather than his punishment, was aimed at. Under the modern system the convict spends the first nine months of his penal servitude at Pentonville, or in some other local prison, and during this period is kept to solitary hard labour of an irksome and unproductive description; he is then moved to one or other of the "Public Works Prisons," where his life at once becomes less monotonous. As long as his conduct merits advancement, he is passed through various stages, each more tolerable than the last; most of his work is now done in the open air and in the company of his fellows; and hope lightens his labour, for by constant industry and by an exact observance of the prison rules, he is allowed to earn a partial remission of his sentence, amounting to about a quarter[229] of the whole term. Our penal system may not yet be perfect; but during the late reign prison life underwent a marvellous metamorphosis. Pest-houses have been transformed into sanatoriums where the patients have to submit to a healthy discipline beneficial to the mind as well as to the body; formerly gaol-fever, dirt, and bad food ruined the constitution, whilst evil communications corrupted the mind; now convicts leave their prison physically robust and often morally convalescent. This amelioration of the conditions to which prisoners are subjected has been accompanied, pari passu, by a steady decrease in the number of convicts in confinement. When Queen Victoria came to the throne, 43,000[230] of her subjects were convicts, at the present time they number less than 6000,[231] and this in spite of the fact that during the interval the population of these islands has just about doubled itself.