(2) In sympathy with this measure, restrict the right of free migration in the case of the destitute unemployed to the extent of making it dependent on permission to travel in search of work. (The man with money in his pocket is his own master all the world over.)
(3) Further, and particularly, abolish the casual ward, as we logically must do. This may seem a strong measure, but so far as the tramp is concerned, it is really the fulcrum on which the lever of reformation must rest. "The why is plain as way to parish church." If vagabondage is to be regarded as an offence to be punished instead of an innocent weakness (which it never was and never can be) to be humoured, then the vagrant's free lodging-house must disappear. It is obvious that so long as we maintain wayside shelters for the special reception of tramps, it will be hopeless to repress vagrancy. The casual ward invites vagrants and creates them. Moreover, it is entirely incompatible with the laws which already exist for the nominal repression of vagrancy. It is illegal to beg, it is illegal to wander about without means of subsistence, but there is no habitual vagrant living who is not guilty of this compound fracture of the law, and few who have not been punished for it. Nevertheless, we wink at these misdemeanours, and in housing some 10,000 vagrants every night in the casual wards, we offer direct encouragement to known law-breakers to persist in illegality.
(4) But at these negative and repressive measures it will be impossible to stop. Their very operation would compel us to go further, for the tramp and the loafer having been hustled from their wonted haunts, and the casual ward having been shut in their faces, they would either have to betake themselves to honest work, or they would fall into the hands of the police, either as mendicants or homeless wanderers.
Here is seen the need for a new departure in our penal system. At present no correctional institutions exist suited to offenders whose radical fault is constitutional idleness. Discipline, enforced by all necessary use of compulsion, is their principal need, and this discipline can only be given in special institutions.
The ordinary prison has proved its uselessness for the treatment of the vagrant and loafer, for not only has it failed as a reformative agency, but its life has no terrors for him. By the testimony of prison governors and magistrates, the tramp, on the whole, prefers the prison to the present workhouse; an institution that would exercise a deterrent influence must, therefore, offer a severer discipline than either.
Complaint was made by the Standing Joint Committee of the Lincolnshire magistrates some time ago that mendicancy had increased 100 per cent. on account of the superiority of the prison dietary. "The professional tramp," said one magistrate, "was no fool, and he very much preferred in many instances to go to prison than to enter the casual wards of the workhouse." The Lindsey Quarter Sessions Committee appointed in 1903 to consider the question of vagrancy reported :—
"Frequent cases have come to the knowledge of the Committee in which tramps in the casual wards, when threatened with prosecution before the magistrates as a consequence of a refusal to work, have openly avowed their preference for prison life, and cases are also noted where, after sentence, the prisoners have made a similar statement as to their having no dislike for prison. This failure, they believe, is also partly due to the changes in the form of the 'hard labour' enforced, due to the abolition of tread wheel, crank, etc. Owing to the difficulty of arranging suitable work, and to requirements of the prison for chapel, meal hours, marching to and from work, etc., the hours of actual labour, as well as the severity of the work available, bear no comparison with those of many kinds of free labour outside. Prison conditions, indeed, to many persons with so low a standard of physical comfort as the average vagrant, must be extremely comfortable and even attractive."
Evidence to the same effect might be cited in abundance from other quarters. The point is one to which the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy gave special attention. Asked by the Committee "Do you not find that the seven days' sentence given to these tramps induces many of them to commit some small offence to get imprisonment, with a view to being helped along by rail to their destination?" Lieut.-Col. J. Curtis Hayward, Chairman of the Gloucestershire Vagrancy Committee, replied:—
"I do not think the prison has any terror. For instance, in one union they have had a great number of cases of refractory tramps, and they have always stated, when they have been had up, that they would rather do the hard work in prison than break stones in the workhouse, because it is easier work. I have been told by the governor of a gaol that some of the prisoners said that they liked the fare better than they did that of the workhouse."