Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66, No 409, November 1849

Various

Various

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66, No 409, November 1849

THE TRANSPORTATION QUESTION

The great question of Secondary Punishments has now been settled by experience, so far as the mother country is concerned. It is now known that imprisonment has no effect whatever, either in deterring from crime, or in reforming criminals. Government, albeit most unwilling to recur to the old system of transportation, has been compelled to do so by the unanimous voice of the country; by the difficulty of finding accommodation for the prodigious increase of prisoners in the jails of the kingdom; and by the still greater difficulty, in these days of cheapness and declining incomes, of getting the persons intrusted with the duty of providing additional prison accommodation, to engage in the costly and tedious work of additional erections. An order in council has expressly, and most wisely, authorised a return to transportation, under such regulations as seem best calculated to reform the convicts, and diminish the dread very generally felt in the colonies, of being flooded with an inundation of crime from the mother country. And the principal difficulty felt now is, to find a colony willing to receive the penal settlers, and incur the risks thought to be consequent on their unrestricted admission.

It is not surprising that government should have been driven from the ruinous system of substituting imprisonment for transportation; for the results, even during the short period that it was followed out, were absolutely appalling. The actual augmentation of criminals was the least part of the evil; the increase of serious crimes, in consequence of the hardened offenders not being sent out of the country, but generally liberated after eighteen months' or two years' confinement, was the insupportable evil. The demoralisation so strongly felt and loudly complained of in Van Diemen's Land, from the accumulation of criminals, was rapidly taking place in this country. The persons tried under the aggravation of previous convictions in Scotland, in the three last years, have stood as follows: —

– Parliamentary Reports, 1846-48.

So rapid an increase of crimes, and especially among criminals previously convicted, sufficiently demonstrates the inadequacy of imprisonment as a means either of deterring from crimes, or reforming the criminals. The same result appears in England, where the rapid increase of criminals sentenced to transportation, within the same period, demonstrates the total inefficacy of the new imprisonment system.

And of the futility of the hope that the spread of education will have any effect in checking the increase of crime, decisive proof is afforded in the same criminal returns; for from them it appears that the number of educated criminals in England is above twice, in Scotland above three times and a half that of the uneducated, – the numbers, during the last three years, being as follows: —

– Parliamentary Returns, 1846-8.

Nay, what is still more alarming, it distinctly appears, from the same returns, that the proportion of educated criminals to uneducated is steadily on the increase in Great Britain. Take the centesimal proportions given in the last returns for England – those of 1848: —

– Parliamentary Returns for England, 1848, p. 12.

The great increase here is in the criminals who have received an imperfect education, which class has increased as much as that of the totally uneducated has diminished. Unhappily, imperfect education is precisely the species of instruction which alone, in the present days of cheapened production and diminishing wages, the great body of the poor are able to give to their children.

Mr Pearson, M.P., who has paid great attention to this subject, and whose high official situation in the city of London gives him such ample means of being acquainted with the practical working of the criminal law, has given the following valuable information in a public speech, which every one acquainted