AI-generated from sources

The Ticket-of-Leave Trap, or How Watching the Released Convict Can Send Him Back

Main authors

Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise Enrico Ferri Thomas Holmes

Every prison sentence ends at a door, and the reformers who wrote about prisons placed the danger there. In The Twin Hells, John N. Reynolds named the critical time for a prisoner who wants a new life as the moment he "crosses the threshold of the prison" and goes out into the world ^[1]. The anonymous author of Six Years in the Prisons of England gave a darker forecast. A convict liberated after some five years will return to crime, he wrote, and can scarcely do otherwise while the authorities treat prisoners as identical automatons ^[2]. Release, in these accounts, is less an ending than a test that prison has prepared the man to fail.

Release on licence was meant to soften that threshold. The convict leaves before his term expires, on a ticket-of-leave in England or on parole in the American states; he reports at fixed intervals; if he relapses, he returns to serve what remains ^{[3, 4]}. The device carries two promises, an earlier liberty for the man and continued protection for society, and the witnesses of the time disagree on whether both can be kept. Everything turns on what supervision means. Where it meant watching, the watch could cost the released man the work that kept him outside; where the same oversight also found him a master, as in Ireland, the licence appears to have held ^{[5, 6, 7]}.

The licence as a sentence served in the street

Before it was a road to rehabilitation, supervision was a way of keeping hold. W. L. Melville Lee, in A History of Police in England, lists it among a series of reforms that also aimed to make penal servitude reformatory as well as retributive: convicts released on ticket-of-leave were to remain under police supervision until their sentences expired ^[8]. In the same breath he mentions reformatories for juvenile offenders and, to protect society from incorrigible offenders, a system for the thorough identification and registration of criminals ^[8]. The company is mixed: supervision sat between the apparatus of control and that of reform. Writing in 1921, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise called it a pity that the law obliged the authorities to discharge outright, at the end of their sentences, persons known to be dangerous to the community ^[9]. Seen this way, the licence is not liberty with conditions but the sentence continued in the street.

Its defenders trusted the threat of return to work on the conscience. In the Northern American states, according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, prisoners were paroled once a board of prison officials was satisfied they would not abuse their liberty ^[3]. A watch was then kept over them, with a monthly report on their conduct and their actual position, and any relapse exposed them to recommittal ^[3]. Maud Ballington Booth, in After Prison—What?, welcomed precisely this mechanism. The knowledge of being on probation would be a safeguard for many men, she believed, and would make them careful; those who proved unworthy could be returned to prison ^[10]. For her, surveillance was the price of a liberty granted before men had lost courage, strength and confidence.

The weakness lay upstream, in how the licence was earned. Under the old English ticket-of-leave, Ruggles-Brise explained, remission came from "a more or less mechanical observance of prison rules," and the unexpired portion of the sentence was then passed under police supervision ^[11]. He reported opinion turning toward other methods, tried with what he called singular success on habitual criminals ^[11]. A writer in the Pennsylvania Prison Society's journal of 1919 stated the underlying objection. Good behaviour under prison conditions gives no assurance of an honest life after release, yet the paroling authority has nothing but the prison record to guide it ^[12]. The licence thus rewarded the virtues of a docile prisoner and left the street to test those of a free man.

Conditional liberty also shifted power toward those who granted it. Julian Hawthorne, in The Subterranean Brotherhood, charged that parole and the indeterminate sentence, framed to open the way to reform, were used by prison officials to intimidate and debase prisoners ^[13]. An ex-convict who dared to protest, he wrote, met a ready answer: no one believes a "jail-bird" ^[13]. The man on licence had every reason to keep silent. His freedom hung on the goodwill of the very officials he might accuse, and his word counted for nothing against theirs.

Who will hire a ticket-of-leave man

The trap closed at the hiring office. The anonymous chronicler of the burglar Charles Peace noted that it was taken for granted that a released convict could never obtain work if his past were known ^[5], and that discovery would mean immediate dismissal from any place secured under a false character. He did not blame the man for thinking so: while the English convict prisons remained what they were, and public distrust of their power to reform continued unabated, that belief was perhaps, in his view, well grounded ^[5]. His conclusion is cautious but telling. The acknowledged ticket-of-leave and the avowed police surveillance "might possibly impede" a man's return to honesty ^[5]. A licence that announces itself becomes a record that follows the man from one job to the next.

What the police counted as relapse was partly produced by the watch itself. Enrico Ferri, in Criminal Sociology, describes a society that abandons released prisoners to wretchedness and idleness and gives them no help in earning an honest living ^[14]. Worse, it sometimes pushes them back into crime through harassing police regulations that prevent them from finding or keeping honest employment ^[14]. From the other side of the counter, the same men looked like a plague. The book on Charles Peace calls ticket-of-leave men an endless source of trouble to the honest citizen and the police, and concludes that the whole system wants remodelling ^[4]. Each witness sees half of a single circle: the police see the return to crime, Ferri sees the regulations that prepared it.

The logic shows most plainly in a rule aimed not at convicts but at vagrants. Henry A. Murray, in his travels through Cuba, the United States and Canada, describes a police force empowered to re-imprison anyone once committed as a vagrant if met in the street unemployed ^[15]. His objection is practical. Employers will not take the trouble to seek out vagrants, so the rule forbids the one search that might save them: looking for a place themselves ^[15]. Put a ticket-of-leave man in the vagrant's place and the structure holds. A condition of liberty punishes the very movements by which liberty could be secured.

Reformers came to see the problem as one of roles. A writer in The Review welcomed a new body under the Home Secretary because it would make possible the abolition of police supervision in Great Britain ^[16]. That supervision, he wrote, had been one of the almost insuperable obstacles in the path of every ex-prisoner trying to live down his past ^[16]. The reason given is not cruelty but occupation. Police officers, busy with the militant work of fighting crime, cannot share in "the task of rehabilitating the vanquished" ^[16]. The metaphor gives the game away: the ex-prisoner is a defeated enemy, and his guard is still at war.

The objection, then, is to a certain kind of watcher rather than to conditional release itself. Another contributor to The Review, noting that many American states were adopting the indeterminate sentence with release on parole, observed a great difference in how the public regarded a man known as a discharged convict and a man released on parole ^[17]. Status carried a meaning of its own. The licence for young offenders leaving Borstal institutions, as James Devon summarizes it, placed the released person under the supervision of some person or society willing to take charge of him and named in the licence ^[18]. Where a society undertook the assistance or supervision of those discharged, its expenses could be met from public funds ^[18]. Supervision here has a name and a face, and the public purse pays for help as well as oversight.

Ireland and the farm at Lusk

Ireland offered the counter-example. Ruggles-Brise explains that England declined to adopt this part of the colonial system because the government shrank from the great and novel responsibility of finding employment for discharged convicts ^[6]. Ireland could take it on. Its rural and scattered population, its demand for labour and its centralized police made it possible to secure employment and, with it, police supervision ^[6]. The order of the phrase matters: the job comes first, the watch comes with it. It was still the police, but its oversight was to be friendly rather than hostile—not "a system of espionage" but a supervision drawing on local knowledge to promote the convict's welfare ^[6].

The Irish result rested on a belief as much as on a method. In 1861, a writer in Once a Week reported a conviction in Ireland that the convict prisons did reform their inmates, and that masters were consequently ready to take discharged prisoners into their employment ^[7]. Those who had first tried a few with doubt now applied confidently for more, and the writer declared the grand problem of what to do with convicts solved ^[7]. The tone is triumphant, and the report is a single witness. Yet it reverses, point for point, the English case described by the chronicler of Charles Peace, where distrust of the convict prisons perhaps made the released man's fear of dismissal well grounded ^[5]. The same licence led to opposite hiring offices: a stigma where the prison was doubted, a recommendation where it was believed.

Ireland also suggested that liberty could be approached by degrees. Arthur Griffiths, surveying German and Austrian prisons, recalls the old Irish farm of Lusk, where men could go half free while proving their fitness for complete liberty ^[19]. The administration he describes found such intermediate prisons no longer necessary. Its men, held under no restraint among a free population, made no attempt to escape in three years, and the mere threat of return to prison sufficed for discipline ^[19]. In this version, the prison is a backstop rather than a daily presence. Thomas Holmes, writing from the London police courts, asked for the same gradient at home: conditions that approach freedom as release draws near, in a system that does not turn men's eyes into "the eyes of hunted animals" ^[20].

Ireland should not be read as a recipe, however. By Ruggles-Brise's own account, its success depended on facilities particular to the country: scattered rural settlement and a demand for labour ^[6]. The evidence for conditional release was also open to a different reading. Herbert Spencer accepted that Captain Crofton had shown by experiment that a prisoner could safely be liberated on the strength of good conduct under prison discipline ^[21]. He used the finding to argue for something safer still: weighing the character a man had earned before prison, not only his conduct under the eyes of officials whose experience of him was limited and who paid no penalty for misjudging ^[21]. What the Irish example proved was narrower than its admirers claimed. Release on licence held where the released man walked into a job that employers had come to offer.

Bread, a bed and the limits of help

The reform literature drew the lesson in a single formula: supervision and livelihood are one duty, not two. Reynolds held it the duty of the State to reinstate the penitentiary man in society, through a conditional discharge, the finding of work for him and an obligation to report at stated periods ^[22]. Reporting comes last in his list. James Devon, in The Criminal & the Community, pushed the idea further. A prison, he argued, ought to be merely a place of detention until proper provision is made for the offender's supervision and means of livelihood in the community ^[23]. In both, the watch and the work come together.

Lodging entered the programme alongside wages. One association described in The Review aimed to find employment for men when they were discharged or paroled and, where no work could be secured at once, to furnish them with a temporary lodging place ^[24]. Another contributor wanted paroled prisoners turned over to a prisoners' aid society attached to the state convict department, which would retain control of them and sustain them until they were placed at work ^[25]. Control and sustenance sit in the same institution. The supervisor who can send a man back is also the one who must keep him fed until he earns.

Whether such schemes worked is barely measured in these sources, and the few judgments are impressions. Jack Black, in You Can't Win, published in 1926, observed that while the number of convicts was growing, the share of second and third timers was falling ^[26]. He credited more humane treatment, more liberal parole laws and road building that gave a prisoner the work habit and fitted him for the outside ^[26]. It is one man's reading of a trend, not a study, and it names more liberal parole and the work that fits a prisoner for the outside side by side, as separate causes.

Help, however, could become a trap of its own. Thomas Holmes found it absurd to keep a man in prison for years at unremunerative work, then hand him over on release to some society where he would continue working for nothing ^[27]. For Holmes, "the cheapness of his labour" at liberty was the real danger, not the work he did inside ^[27]. A patron who supplies the job can also set its price. Supervision tied to employment protects the released man only if the employment pays him like a free one.

The deepest objection reached beyond any form of supervision. Enrico Ferri held that imprisonment can do nothing to amend the guilty if, on leaving, they must return to the same conditions that led them to crime ^[28]. He dismissed the prisoners' aid societies as "arcadian devices" incapable of adequate social prevention ^[28]. A writer in the Pennsylvania journal of prison discipline offered a blunter way out of the same conditions. A liberated convict who cannot find labour where his antecedents are known, he argued, may go to countries where labour is in demand, reaching them with the gratuity earned by his own industry in prison ^[29]. The same writer warned that reformers too often overlooked the interests of society in seeking the comfort of the transgressor ^[29]. Between Ferri's pessimism and this call to emigrate, the licence appears as what it was: a modest instrument, dependent on a labour market it could not create.

Release on licence was built to serve two ends at once: an earlier freedom for the convict who earned it, and a continued hold for a society that feared him. The witnesses gathered here, from an 1861 report on Irish prisons to a 1921 history of the English system sixty years later, describe how the second end could defeat the first. Where supervision meant a visible police watch, employers were believed to dismiss the man whose record surfaced, regulations could harry him out of honest work, and reformers came to call police supervision an almost insuperable obstacle to living down a past ^{[5, 14, 16]}. Where the same oversight came with a job, in a country with a demand for labour and employers who trusted the prisons, men were taken into service and asked for again ^{[6, 7]}.

Neither faith survives intact, neither the trust in surveillance nor the trust in charity. Aid could cheapen the labour it supplied, and no aid society could change the conditions to which a released man returned ^{[27, 28]}. What remains is a narrower principle, and a harder one to meet: the condition attached to a man's liberty must be one he is able to fulfil. A licence that only watches counts the days until his return; a licence that finds him work gives those days a use.