The third method by which Society professes to attempt the reclamation of the lost is by the rough,rude surgery of the Gaol.Upon this a whole treatise might be written,but when it was finished it would be nothing more than a demonstration that our Prison system has practically missed aiming at that which should be the first essential of every system of punishment.It is not Reformatory,it is not worked as if it were intended to be Reformatory.It is punitive,and only punitive.The whole administration needs to be reformed from top to bottom in accordance with this fundamental principle,viz.,that while every prisoner should be subjected to that measure of punishment which shall mark a due sense of his crime both to himself and society,the main object should be to rouse in his mind the desire to lead an honest life;and to effect that change in his disposition and character which will send him forth to put that desire into practice.At present,every Prison is more or less a Training School for Crime,an introduction to the society of criminals,the petrifaction of any lingering human feeling and a very Bastille of Despair.The prison brand is stamped upon those who go in,and that so deeply,that it seems as if it clung to them for life.To enter Prison once,means in many cases an almost certain return there at an early date.All this has to be changed,and will be,when once the work of Prison Reform is taken in hand by men who understand the subject,who believe in the reformation of human nature in every form which its depravity can assume,and who are in full sympathy with the class for whose benefit they labour;and when those charged directly with the care of criminals seek to work out their regeneration in the same spirit.
The question of Prison Reform is all the more important because it is only by the agency of the Gaol that Society attempts to deal with its hopeless cases.If a woman,driven mad with shame,flings herself into the river,and is fished out alive,we clap her into Prison on a charge of attempted suicide.If a man,despairing of work and gaunt with hunger,helps himself to food,it is to the same reformatory agency that he is forthwith subjected.The rough and ready surgery with which we deal with our social patients recalls the simple method of the early physicians.The tradition still lingers among old people of doctors who prescribed bleeding for every ailment,and of keepers of asylums whose one idea of ministering to a mind diseased was to put the body into a strait waistcoat.Modern science laughs to scorn these simple "remedies"of an unscientific age,and declares that they were,in most cases,the most efficacious means of aggravating the disease they professed to cure.But in social maladies we are still in the age of the blood-letter and the strait waistcoat.The Gaol is our specific for Despair.When all else fails Society will always undertake to feed,clothe,warm,and house a man,if only he will commit a crime.
It will do it also in such a fashion as to render it no temporary help,but a permanent necessity.
Society says to the individual:"To qualify for free board and lodging you must commit a crime.But if you do you must pay the price.
You must allow me to ruin your character,and doom you for the rest of your life to destitution,modified by the occasional successes of criminality.You shall become the Child of the State,on condition that we doom you to a temporal perdition,out of which you will never be permitted to escape,and in which you will always be a charge upon our resources and a constant source of anxiety and inconvenience to the authorities.I will feed you,certainly,but in return you must permit me to damn you."That surely ought not to be the last word of Civilised Society.
"Certainly not,"say others."Emigration is the true specific.
The waste lands of the world are crying aloud for the application of surplus labour.Emigration is the panacea."Now I have no objection to emigration.Only a criminal lunatic could seriously object to the transference of hungry Jack from an overcrowded shanty--where he cannot even obtain enough bad potatoes to dull the ache behind his waistcoat,and is tempted to let his child die for the sake of the insurance money--to a land flowing with milk and honey,where he can eat meat three times a day and where a man's children are his wealth.
But you might as well lay a new-born child naked in the middle of a new-sown field in March,and expect it to live and thrive,as expect emigration to produce successful results on the lines which some lay down.The child,no doubt,has within it latent capacities which,when years and training have done their work,will enable him to reap a harvest from a fertile soil,and the new sown field will be covered with golden grain in August.But these facts will not enable the infant to still its hunger with the clods of the earth in the cold spring time.It is just like that with emigration.It is simply criminal to take a multitude of untrained men and women and land them penniless and helpless on the fringe of some new continent.The result of such proceedings we see in the American cities;in the degradation of their slums,and in the hopeless demoralisation of thousands who,in their own country,were living decent,industrious lives.
A few months since,in Paramatta,in New South Wales,a young man who had emigrated with a vague hope of mending his fortunes,found himself homeless,friendless,and penniless.He was a clerk.They wanted no more clerks in Paramatta.Trade was dull,employment was scarce,even for trained hands.He went about from day to day seeking work and finding none.At last he came to the end of all his resources.He went all day without food;at night he slept as best he could.Morning came,and he was hopeless.All next day passed without a meal.
Night came.He could not sleep.He wandered about restlessly.
