CRIMINALS AND CRIME

A REPLY BY AN EX-PRISONER

SIR ALFRED WILLS, during the twenty-one years he sat upon the Bench, had always the reputation of being a humane, painstaking, and courteous judge. I think it is a pity that, when he has retired from active work, full of years and of honour, he should have lent the great weight of his name to such proposals as those he has put forward in the last number of this Review for dealing with what is undoubtedly the grave problem of professional crime. At the close of his article Sir Alfred remarked: 'I do not seek to dogmatise, and I am quite as desirous to learn as to teach.' Some of us who read his remarks may consider this repudiation of any dogmatic desire rather inconsistent with the whole trend of the article on Criminals and Crime.' I do not, however, desire to be verbally hypercritical, and, as the writer of that article aspires to learn in the matter of the undoubtedly difficult problem of dealing with criminals and crime, I propose, in all modesty, to attempt the educational process.

My qualifications for this task are simply and only that I have at one time in my career unfortunately been one of the criminals about whose treatment Sir Alfred Wills, Sir Robert Anderson, and other well-meaning persons are considerably exercised. It may savour of impertinence for the man who has once stood in the dock to attempt to teach the man who has at one time sat on the Bench anything. The man who has stood in the dock, and has been deprived of his liberty for a period arrived at by a rapid arithmetical calculation on the part of the man on the Bench, has one qualification which the sentence passed by that man has conferred upon him. He knows, and only he, precisely what imprisonment is, and what are its effects, physical, moral, and mental. He can lay his finger on the weak points of the system he has had practical experience of. He has had opportunities, which no person outside a prison can have, of gauging the opinions of his fellow-prisoners, and generally it may be said that, if he be an observant and a truthful man, his opinions upon criminals and the punishment of crime are worth more than all the wisdom of all the philosophers and all the knowledge and judgment of all the

judges and of all the police and prison officials that exist or have existed in this country. A good many persons, some officials included, are quite aware of the facts I have stated, but they attempt to discount them by asserting that all ex-prisoners are inveterate liars, to whose statements no credence whatever can be given. The atmosphere of a gaol, we are told, is an atmosphere of deceit, and the man who has once breathed it is ever afterwards rendered incapable of speaking the truth in regard to what he has seen and heard during his incarceration. I shall not attempt to dispute this view of the matter. Those who so believe would probably be unconvinced by any arguments I might adduce on this head. I will content myself by asserting that, although I have had the misfortune to spend three and three-quarter years within the walls of his Majesty's prisons, I consider myself quite as truthful a person as any man who has not had that experience. I will furthermore assert that every statement made by me in this article, or in any other article I have written on prison matters, is penned in good faith, in an honest spirit, is the unvarnished truth, and can, if necessary, be proved. So much I think it advisable to say, by way of introduction. I will add that I think the large number of persons in this country who write upon prison matters, without having had any practical experience of a prison, would be well advised to refrain from gibes and jeers at the unveracity of ex-prisoners. The exprisoner has, by the completion of his punishment, purged himself of his crime, he has a right to be heard in a free country in reference to a matter of which he can claim to know something, and, if his statements are impugned and his facts are disputed, his assertions ought to be met by argument and not merely by a contemptuous reference to that polluted atmosphere in which he has dwelt, and to which some so-called reformers aspire to re-commit permanently a large number of their fellow-beings.

At the commencement of his article Sir Alfred Wills remarked that he proposed, in considering the question of crime and criminals, to deal only with crimes against property. This seems to me to be an extraordinary admission. I have noticed that other advocates of the recrudescence of a drastic penal code have similarly limited their proposals. The offender against the rights of property is, if they get their way, to have a bad time of it in the future. They apparently have not a word to say in reference to crimes of violence, virulence, and brutality, in regard to those awful offences against women and children which periodically shock the community, and make us wonder whether, beneath our veneer of civilisation, man is not becoming more bestial, more brutal, more barbarous, more revolting in his ideas and habits.

Sir Alfred Wills tells his readers that, nowadays, 'such importance is given to the reformation of the culprit that sometimes all other considerations seem to have been lost sight of.' He also tells his

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readers, and here I am in full agreement with him, that 'the deterrent effect of punishment ought not to be eliminated.' The importance of the reformation of the culprit may loom large in platform speeches, in magazine articles, and elsewhere. It was emphasised by the King in the speech he made at the opening of the new Central Criminal Court. But, with the exception of the jejune attempt recently made in regard to young offenders, it has, I assert, no place whatever in the English prison system. That system is neither reformative, educative, nor deterrent. It is simply a system of dull routine, the result of which is to manufacture that professional criminal whose existence is a disgrace to our civilisation, but who will never be got rid of by the method that Sir Alfred Wills proposes.

In his article he adopts the classification of Sir Robert Anderson in respect to criminals and draws a distinction between the habitual and the professional criminal. I say there is no such differentiation; I assert furthermore that the picture of the professional criminal who prefers a life of crime with its excitement, its large element of sport, its periods of luxury, idleness, and debauchery, to anything which involves the comparative monotony of honest work,' is simply a figment of the imagination. This class, says Sir Alfred Wills, comprehends forgers, perpetrators of many commercial swindles, the jewel thieves, expert burglars, robbers of banks, coiners, blackmailers, and other contrivers of great criminal enterprises, having robbery in one shape or form for their object.' Quite a long list this. Admitting for one moment that all these persons are criminals for the love of the thing, let me ask Sir Alfred Wills if they were born such ? Does he imagine that any woman in this country is ever delivered of a child having all the criminal instincts in an embryonic condition? I imagine his reply would be 'No.' Then how, may I inquire, are these ruffians of our boasted civilisation evolved or developed? I will answer this question: they have been largely manufactured by the English prison system.

Sir Alfred Wills is quite convinced, and I am sure in good faith, that there are a considerable number of professional criminals in this country whose reformation is absolutely hopeless, who positively revel in a life of crime, and whom nothing in the world would win therefrom. He, accordingly, lends the great weight of his name to the proposals of Sir Robert Anderson and other penologists that these men who, it is asserted, not only commit crime but love crime, shall be permanently incarcerated. Sir Alfred accepts this proposal, and immediately, being a humane man, runs away from it. He admits the existence of this desperate, this adroit class of professional rogues, but he cannot, after saying he would, make up his mind to put them under lock and key for the remainder of their natural lives. He would simply give them an 'indeterminate sentence.' The man so sentenced would not be released till he had given proof of advance

in character, such a proof, in fact, as would make it safe for the community that he should be set at large again. He will, of course, have to give this proof in gaol. How, may I ask, is he to give it, and what is the proof to be? I can tell Sir Alfred Wills what would be the precise result of these indeterminate sentences. These professional thieves and other scoundrels who 'throw a glamour of success and romance over their nefarious trade' would throw a glamour over the prison chaplain, while their adroitness, which has been devoted outside to planning and scheming crimes of various kinds, would be directed in prison to planning and scheming theological propositions for the delectation and edification of the ministers of religion in prison. The result would be that there would be developed in gaol an even larger proportion of religious humbugs than are to be found there at the present time. No man, either in prison or out of it, can furnish absolute proof of repentance or reformation or of a change in his moral character. It is impossible in gaol, as out of it, to establish a psychological inquisition. Men's characters must be judged by their actions, and in order to enable us to judge of their actions properly, men must be in a position of freedom. There is no opportunity in gaol for forming correct opinions of men's characters from their actions, except in relation to prison routine and prison discipline, and accordingly there could, under no possible circumstances, be any opportunity for obtaining proof of any value of such a sufficient advance in a prisoner's moral character as to make it safe to release him and send him back to the world-a reformed man. There There may be something to be said for permanently incarcerating the professional criminal, but I fail to see any logical argument in favour of indeterminate sentences.

Undoubtedly the whole question of crime and the punishment of our criminals has been greatly exercising the public mind of late, and the arguments of a certain school of penologists who advocate drastic measures in reference to the professional criminal-arguments plausibly put forward, and backed up by assertions as to the halcyon state of things that will come about when all the professional criminals are securely under lock and key-have had a considerable effect upon public opinion. Indeed, as I write this article, I read in the public press that the Home Secretary has announced his intention of introducing into Parliament a measure designed to permanently imprison men who are convicted of living a life of crime. Mr. Gladstone has, in my opinion, made a very grave miscalculation if he imagines that his prospective Bill has any chance whatever of being passed into law. The great majority of the people of this country have, I opine, not yet abandoned the opinion they have held for some centuries past in respect to the value of safeguarding the liberty of the subject even at some little cost, and I imagine they are unlikely to acquiesce in a measure which would strike a very serious blow at that essentially

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British idea. Because, putting the matter tersely, the suggestion of the penologists whose views Mr. Gladstone has apparently adopted is that a man is to be permanently incarcerated, not so much in respect of what he has done as with a view of preventing him doing something he might very possibly never do in the future.

There is no man who more loathes crime than I do, or who so greatly deplores the existence of a professional criminal class. But I would urgently plead that before this country adopts the retrograde step of locking men up for life because they have in the past committed a series of, it may be, petty crimes, it should attempt a simpler and, as I think, the obvious solution of the problem-namely, the endeavour to discover, and if possible to remove, the causes which make the professional criminal. I repeat that no professional criminal is born into that role; his is a gradual growth. Where does he grow? Why does he become such? I may here remark that I put entirely on one side, as unworthy of serious notice, the whimsical assumption that some criminals find a fascination, an exhilaration, a glamour in crime, and that so long as life lasts they will never forsake the horrible career upon which they have embarked. It is possible that in the history of the criminal classes we might find an occasional freak of this kind, but I assert he is so rare that it is not necessary to seriously consider him. During the period of my incarceration I availed myself of the opportunity to discuss this and other matters with criminals of every kind and degree, and I most solemnly assert that I never came across a single instance of a man, however long he had been a criminal, who did not loathe and detest his occupation. But while loathing and detesting it, he was sensible of the fact that, as things were, it was his only possible occupation, that Society had, rightly or wrongly, made him a social pariah, and that, having been made such, he could only act as such. But when I came to investigate the history of these men, I found out, in nearly every instance, that the evolution of their career proceeded upon regular lines. And I had only to look round the corridors of that great convict prison in which I was myself a prisoner to see that the evolutionary process was still actively at work in the gradual, but sure, manufacture of the professional criminal. For in this prison there were between seven and eight hundred men drawn from every rank of life, the slaves of a deadly dull, stupid routine. No attempt was made during one single hour of their incarceration to educate them ethically or to reform them morally. They were not only degraded, that was perhaps a necessary condition of their imprisonment, but they felt they were degraded. Every hour of their lives in that prison they had borne in upon them the fact that they were not as other men, and that they never could be again as other men, and on their return to the world they were given to understand, in unmistakable manner, that they assuredly were not as other men Some two or three years ago, when I was discussing this matter of