Penal colony

“ To render the introduction of penal labour into a colony an advantage, three things are necessary. 1st, that the convicts sent out should be for the most part instructed in some simple rural art or occupation, of use in the country into which they are to be transplanted. 2d, that they should in general be beginners in crime, and a small number of them only hardened in depravity. 3d, what is most important of all, that they should be preserved in a due proportion, never exceeding a fourth or a fifth to the free and untainted settlers. ”

“ At this day, when care for the health, education, and religious instruction of criminals is carried to an extent which shows, in painful relief, the neglect our peasantry endure, it is with amazement and horror that we look back on the cool, careless indifference with which the ministers of George the Third, in 1797, set about founding a penal settlement at the opposite side of the world.
Captain Cook and his companions had passed a few days on the intended site of the proposed penal colony, and had found a small river, a profusion of curious plants, and an indifferent harbour. ”

“ As this settlement is part of a penal colony to which Great Britain consigns her malefactors, for from five years to the duration of their lives, to atone for offences against the laws of their country, the society is not, consequently, what we at home would call select; but, such as it is, it has its aristocracy. Although the majority of the inhabitants are convicts, some of whom have served out their term of punishment, the word convict amongst themselves is never used—it being apparently banished, by common consent, from their conversation. ”

“ Virginia and Maryland absorbed the human exports from English courts, and their descendants joined in the building of a great nation; while the penal colony in Australia resulted in a civilization of the first rank. While the deportation of our criminals to-day may be neither practicable nor desirable, the establishment of industrial penal communities in every State, on a profit-sharing basis, is both practicable and desirable, and would unquestionably result in the permanent reform of many who are now a menace to public safety. ”

“ Aliens, or prisoners hailing from the other colonies, should have every inducement and encouragement held out to them to return to their native homes. Your Commissioners have examined a number of prisoners, who comes from India, Africa, or South America. They have rendered themselves subject to our laws, of whose principles they usually understand little or nothing. They are usually persons whose ethical code, if any, is not in consonance with Australian ideas, and their antecedents do not point to the likelihood of their ever becoming desirable Australian colonists. ”

“ The Governor has certainly shown very good judgment in the formation of this penal establishment. It is the dread of the natives throughout the colony; and those prisoners who are released inspire among their fellows the greatest horror and dismay by their tales of the hardships they have suffered. No punishment can be more dreadful to these savages—the most indolent race in the world—than being compelled to work; and as their idleness brings them occasionally in contact with the superintendent's lash, their recollections and accounts of Rottnest are of the most fearful description. ”

“ Judged by the standard of sentences awarded in England for like offences, the term of incarceration in this case is very long. Even if we do not go outside the colony for a standard of comparison, we find that for 'threatening to kill' this person received a sentence of eight years, being practically the same sentence as another prisoner is undergoing for actual murder. He has already served over three years, and we wrote to the Colonial Secretary recommending the case for the exercise of the clemency of the Crown. ”

“ A penal colony is one formed of convicts sent out from the mother country. Many of these colonies have proved successful, particularly the ones where the prisoners are allowed to work and build up their own homes for themselves. ”

“ It was to this island that many of the Filipinos were exiled in 1896 because of alleged complicity in the Katipunan which in August of that year raised the standard of revolt. The Iwahig Penal Colony about 8 miles from Puerto Princesa, the capital, is also easy of access. This is a novel experiment in the reformatory treatment of criminals. Here have been gathered under the name of “colonists” over 500 convicts who have conducted themselves well at Bilibid prison in Manila. They are put at entire liberty without any armed guard or any special restraint. ”

“ Undoubtedly, one great object in a penal colony should be that of gradually purifying the population from all disgraceful or [Pg 238] vicious associations; but the hasty attempts of a governor to elevate a class like that of the emancipated convicts were sure to end rather in their depression. Time, and a succeeding generation, would have done quietly what Colonel Macquarie, with all his power, was unable to accomplish. If a governor cannot make pickpockets become good farmers, still less likely is he to succeed in endeavouring to make good magistrates of them ”

“ The relaxation of penal discipline, which the real friends of the colony have to complain of and to deplore, has been of forty, and not merely of four years' continuance; and it must be evident to every candid person, whether in New South Wales or in England, that in proportion as the colony increases in wealth and population, and especially in convict population, the effects of that relaxation must only become more evident and more intolerable. ”

“ In their case even more than in that of Europeans, it is essential that all punishment should be short, sharp, and effective, whilst if it is to be deterrent in its influence upon others it should, wherever practicable, be inflicted in the district where the offence was committed.
Confinement in gaol, especially at a distance from the scene of the crime, has no deterrent effect whatever upon the offender's fellow tribesmen. All they know, as the Queensland Commissioners point out, is that "the man has disappeared;" they have no conception where. ”

“ They know that the innocent as well as the guilty are liable to be sent there; that thousands upon thousands have died or been murdered there by the autocrat's petty tyrants, placed there to guard and work them, and that their bones molder or bleach upon the inhospitable shores, where wolves lay in wait for the bodies of victims which are thrown where they can reach them, and thus save the trouble of burial.
A large portion of the penal colony is honey-combed with mines, which the prisoners are forced to work for the benefit of the government that has exiled them there ”

“ It is common for private individuals to deprecate the severities of public justice, but the awful state of the colony must be admitted, when fifty persons, among its most opulent and even humane inhabitants, were anxious to hasten the offices of the executioner.
The ignorant and brutal among the prisoners rushed into violence and crime, with a recklessness of life scarcely credible. Not less than one hundred were in arms at that time: [172] most of them were absconders from the various penal stations, and had exhausted all those forms of severity which stopped short of the scaffold. ”

“ To protect society against the repeated misdeeds of these offenders and those of born criminals, segregation is essential. However, the institutions set apart to receive these classes should still regard the redemption of the inmates as their chief aim, and only when all attempts have proved futile should they be replaced by almost perpetual isolation in a penal colony. ”

“ Resolved, that the establishment of a penal settlement in this colony would seem to present some advantages to the Home Government to counterbalance the expense of the measure, inasmuch as the convicts would be employed in developing profitable resources which at present are totally useless, either to the mother country or to the colony, from the want of adequate means in the settlers to render them available. ”

“ When he had walked so far from the cell that she could not hear his voice, he asked the governor what work these privileged prisoners were engaged in, and was almost startled into an exclamation of astonishment when the governor answered
"They are just now engaged on a pleasant task for themselves. They are making their outfit for the penal colony."
"Is she—is that prisoner going to the penal colony?" asked Will Sheridan, scarcely able to control his emotion.
"Yes, sir; she and all those in this pentagon will sail for West Australia in the next convict ship," said the governor. ”

“ Apart from extradition arrangements the national law cannot reach such persons, be they citizens or aliens, until they come within the territory of the state whose law has been broken.
The codes of France, Germany and Italy make the penal law national or personal and not territorial. In some British colonies whose legislatures have a derived and limited legislative authority, indirect methods have been taken to deal within the colony with persons who commit offences outside its territory. ”

“ Forty years after the establishment of the penal colony, the prisoners were allowed to be rented out to private individuals. Those who hire them must pay the prison authorities about two and a half francs a day each, defray certain hospital insurance, and comply with several irksome and rather stupid rules. ”

“ As the only available outlet at this time was French Guiana, this tropical colony alone was adopted as a convict receptacle. In doing so, the very first principles of penal legislation were ignored. To consign even convicts to a pestilential climate, and expand the lesser penalty into capital punishment, was a monstrous and illegal misuse of power. Exile to French Guiana meant nearly certain death. For three years every attempt to colonise the country had ended in disaster. Yet the government of Napoleon III accepted deportation with a light heart and on the most extended scale. ”

“ The important question was whether New South Wales was still a suitable place for a penal settlement. "So long," he wrote, "as the Colony was principally inhabited by convicts and but little advanced in cultivation, the strictness of police regulations and the constant labour, under due restrictions, to which it was then possible to subject the convicts, rendered transportation, as a punishment, an object of the greatest apprehension to those who looked upon strict discipline and regular labour as the most severe and least tolerable of evils". ”

“ After some years of occasional scarcity, during which, once, even kangaroo flesh was sold at one shilling and sixpence the pound, and sea-weed, or any other eatable vegetable, was equally dear, the colony began to take root and to increase, still continuing, however, its original character of a penal settlement—a place of punishment for the convicted felons of New South Wales. ”

“ Alternatively to a grant the Army asks for an allowance of 10s. per week for each man, so long as he remains at the farm.
An institution of this class would be worked in association with a Prison Gates Brigade, which is very urgently wanted in West Australia, and has proved to be of incalculable benefit in all the eastern colonies.
It is not going too far to say that no known organisation in the world is so thoroughly and constantly in touch with either the criminal or the destitute classes or both, as the Salvation Army. ”

“ A meeting was called, under the auspices of Messrs. Kemp, Gellibrand, Hackett, Thomas Horne, and others, which complained that the hope entertained, that the colony might ultimately be freed from its penal character, had been disappointed, and that the colonists "were made materials for the punishment of British offenders;" were considered only as the "occupants of a large prison;"—phrases of Arthur—and that "this penal character had recently increased; thus violating the feelings of the adult, and barbarising the habits and demoralising the principles of the rising generation." ”

“ They hold out scarcely any terrors to criminals, while, from the impossibility of separating the most hardened malefactors from those who for the first time find themselves inmates of a Gaol, they tend to demoralise rather than to correct, all who are admitted within their walls. . . . . . Your Committee see no alternative but that of the separation of prisoners, both before and after trial. They therefore recommend that prisoners, when committed for trial, should be placed in light solitary sleeping cells, and provided with employment when practicable. ”

“ They should be handed over to that authority whose special duty it is to detain those whose presence at large is a mischief to the community. Detention Colonies under the control of the Home Office should, in our judgment, be established for the reception of this class. We believe that no system of labour or industrial colonies can be properly worked unless there is in reserve a semi-penal institution, to which those who refuse to comply with the rules and regulations of the colony can be sent upon proof of repeated or continuous misconduct. ”

“ The infant colony was chiefly composed of the worst class of felons; they were the days of barbarous justice even in England, and it would often be difficult to say why some convicts were sentenced to transportation, while others for lighter causes were [Pg 20] punished with death. There was, at that time, a fearful indifference to human life in our penal code. ”