Penal labour

“ The Penal Class will be separately located and clothed in ordinary prison dress. They will be specially employed on hard manual or bodily labour. Failing such employment on the land in any capacity, they will be employed on the penal forms of labour already in existence, i.e., grain-grinding or stonebreaking. ”

“ As for penal servitude, the punishment reserved for the gravest offences, great changes had been introduced. We left this branch of the subject at a parliamentary inquiry. The verdict given was in the main satisfactory; but doubts were expressed as to the severity of the discipline inflicted, the principal features of which were moderate labour, ample diet and substantial gratuities. The first was far less than the work free men did for a livelihood, the second larger, the third excessive, so that convicts often left prisons with thirty, forty, , even eighty pounds in their pockets. ”

“ His next step is to an associated gaol where gang labour of a severe character is enforced, and is imposed for a year and a half. Then come three years of unremitting toil, the exact counterpart of penal servitude as understood in Great Britain—hard labour under supervision, unpaid, unrewarded, but he is well fed, well housed and cared for, and always closely guarded. Five years have thus elapsed in a painfully monotonous and irksome existence, after which his employment is pleasanter and his personal capacity is studied; the more intelligent are selected for positions of trust and authority. ”

“ The criminologists have strengthened the hands of administrators, have emphasized the paramount importance of child-rescue and judicious direction of adults, have held the balance between penal methods, advocating the moralizing effect of open-air labour as opposed to prolonged isolation, and have insisted upon the desirability of indefinite detention for all who have obstinately determined to wage perpetual war against society by the persistent perpetration of crime. ”

“ There has been a good deal of controversy upon the question whether the enactment of forced labour for Poor Law defaulters conflicts with Section 361, paras. 5, 7, and 10, and Section 362 of the Imperial Penal Code, but the judgment of the Imperial Department of Justice is in the negative, provided that such labour be required by way of restitution of relief afforded, and not as a punishment for misdemeanour, and that no definite term of detention be imposed. ”

“ That the laborer is entitled to a share in the fruits of his labor is true the world over, and industry and efficiency are stimulated by recognition of the relation of achievement to reward.
Strict repressive discipline applied to organized enslavement of labor is in direct violation of all these principles. The penal colony seems a rational method of dealing with those whose [Pg 283] permanent removal from our midst is deemed necessary. Time and again have penal colonies given satisfactory solution to the criminal problem. ”

“ Neither is it at all necessary to point out the manner in which gradations of punishment could be established in the different modes of employing convict labour above-mentioned, commensurate with the different degrees of criminality in different convicts. ”

“ It is alleged, that over and above the deterring from crimes, which is effected by this, in common with the other methods of punishing, there is the additional advantage, of obliging the criminal to repair by his labour the injury which he has done to the community. ”

“ All prisoners sentenced for one year or upwards should be liable to the strict labour discipline, and be transferable to convict working parties as convenience might direct.
I can scarcely touch to-night upon my second essential—the removal from the country of habitual criminals on discharge; without this no labour system, however perfect, can suffice; of the men discharged from Lusk some two-thirds emigrate, and of these 80 per cent, reform; of those who return to the city 80 per cent, relapse, sinking with the gravitation of dregs. ”

“ As I have already said in a previous chapter, one of the most glaring defects in our present system of penal servitude, viewed as a means of reformation as well as of punishment, is the indiscriminate association of all classes of criminals, or rather all criminals with a certain sentence, irrespective of the nature of the crime they have committed, the previous character of the criminal or the probability of his re-admission into society as an honest and useful member of it. ”

“ Sections 58, 59, 60.—Every person absconding from a workhouse and leaving his wife or child to be relieved therein, or who refuses to work, or is guilty of drunkenness or disobedience to the rules prescribed for the government of the workhouse, or who shall introduce spirituous or fermented liquors into any workhouse, is on conviction to be subjected to imprisonment with hard labour for not exceeding one month. ”

“ A special class was formed in 1880, in which all convicts “not versed in crime,” first offenders and comparatively innocent men, are now kept apart from the older and more hardened criminals. The committee last quoted gave it as their opinion that “penal servitude as at present administered is on the whole satisfactory; it is effective as a punishment and free from serious abuses . . . a sentence of penal servitude is now generally an object of dread to the criminal population.” ”

“ For all other offences, including the offence of idleness, the punishment is forced labour upon the vast national buildings which are always going on in some part of the country, with or without periodical floggings, according to the crime. ”

“ But all persons were subjected to a maximum punishment of three months imprisonment with hard labour who should by violence, threats or intimidation, molestation, or obstruction do, or endeavour to do, or aid, abet, or assist in doing or endeavouring to do, any of a series of things inconsistent with freedom of contract which the Act enumerated and defined. ”

“ The justice of the peace will allow the person arrested to make his own choice of the individual with whom he is to contract to labour.
“Art. 177. If, after eight days of detention, the prisoner shall not have agreed to go to field work, he shall be sent to the public works for cleaning the town or district where he may be arrested, and there he shall be employed until he shall consent to go to field labour. ”

“ Gangs of labourers upon estates shall be obedient to their drivers, jobbers, sub-farmers, farmers, proprietors and managers, or overseers, [341] whenever they are called upon to execute the labour they have bound themselves to perform.
“Art. 189. Every act of disobedience or insult on the part of a workman commanded to do any work, to which he is subjected, shall be punished by imprisonment, according to the exigency of the case, in the discretion of the justice of the peace of the commune. ”

“ Whosoever, in pursuance of any unlawful Combination or Conspiracy to raise the Rate of Wages, or of any unlawful Combine, tion or Conspiracy respecting any Trade, Business, or Manufacture, or respecting any Person concerned or employed therein, shall unlawfully assault any Person, shall be guilty of a Misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable, at the Discretion of the Court, to be imprisoned for any Term not exceeding Two Years, with or without Hard Labour. ”

“ It is piteous to see how a stout well-built man dwindles away on this régime. The men who are at work buy extras with their wages. Those who wear chains from ankle to wrist were sentenced under the old penal code. ”

“ In all countries where secondary punishments are severe and capital punishments rigorously inflicted, murders are numerous, and in countries where the machinery for the detection of crime is defective it may be the same. Earl Russell, in a late edition of his work on the constitution, expresses opinions on this subject with which I coincide, but I disagree with him when he prescribes imprisonment and hard labour as being the most suitable method of dealing with criminals not capitally punished ”

“ A penalty of one month's imprisonment and fine is imposed on artificers and laborers leaving their work unfinished. Wages are still to be fixed by the justices of the peace, and it is made a penal offence to give or receive higher wages than the lawful rate, and all contracts for higher wages are void. Unmarried women between twelve and forty may be compelled to serve in like manner, and everybody has to work at harvest time, that is to say, artificers as well as laborers. ”

“ When criminals have been convicted, and sent to the great gaol of Philadelphia to undergo their punishment, it is expected of them that they should maintain themselves out of their daily labour; that they should pay for their board and washing, and also for the use of their different implements of labour; and that they should defray the expences of their commitment, and of their prosecutions and their trials. ”

“ In order to thwart the mean man, who will consider neither the comfort nor the well-being of his employees, certain rules have been laid down, declaring how establishments, where abuses are likely to arise, shall be conducted.
“The generally accepted rule nowadays is, that good done is sufficient justification of an act, in [127] the absence of evidence that equal or greater evil will follow. Take as an illustration the inspection of apples and pears, which does not fall within the scope of what is normally considered labour legislation. ”

“ For the first offence of which you have been convicted, you are sentenced to be imprisoned one year to hard labour; and for the second, to be imprisoned eighteen months to hard labour, making altogether two years and a half. ”

“ Make a breach of labor contract by either party to it a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment "Fine or imprisonment" will not do—the employee, unable to pay the fine, would commonly go to jail, the employer seldom. ”

“ It provided that all agreements whatever between journeymen or other workmen for obtaining an advance in wages for themselves (p. 280) or for other workmen, or for decreasing the number of hours of labor, or for endeavoring to prevent any employer from engaging any one whom he might choose, or for persuading any other workmen not to work, or for refusing to work with any other men, should be illegal. Any justice of the peace was empowered to convict by summary process and sentence to two months' imprisonment any workmen who entered into such a combination. ”

“ In the movement for better conditions, organized labor takes a stand in the front rank. Of all of the systems of work that have been used in the various penal institutions the one most successful is the state account system by which the labor of the convicts is used for the state, and the products for the state institutions. This system eliminates nearly all incentive to bribery of prison officials, the exploitation of convict labor and the opposition to the parole laws. Under it the whole people get whatever benefits may be derived from the labor of the prisoners of the state. ”

“ For if punishment is weak to prevent crime, it is strong to produce it, and it is scarcely open to doubt that its productive force is far greater than its preventive. Our terms of imprisonment compel more persons to enter a career of crime than they prevent from pursuing one, that being often the only resource left for those who depend on a criminal’s labour. Whether in prison or the workhouse, such dependents become a charge to society ”

“ To make this of material value the prisoner’s labor must be productive. The distribution of the product of the prisoner’s labor inevitably presents the problem of competition. The confounding of the evil of penal servitude with the methods of production and the methods of distribution which have grown out of it has produced a confusion in the thought underlying prison labor regulation by legislative enactment. ”

“ It is indeed a problem which may well vex the brains of the wisest, and if the solution has not yet been found, we have at least got beyond the stage where it was thought sufficient, by the invention of fantastic devices for executing sentences of so-called hard labour, to give expression to a sentence of imprisonment. The Prison Authority of this day perhaps erred in regarding it as a part of their duty to add to the penalty prescribed by the Court by imposing, in the name of the Progressive Stage System, certain penalties and incapacities as a peculiar feature of the early Stages. ”

“ Those who really could not earn a living in the penal workhouses, and those who would not earn their living, I would transfer to the prison for criminal incurables. I would not have any first offenders against property in prison, I would punish them as ticket-of-leave men. In the penal workshops I would only have persistent thieves. In the convict prisons only great offenders against the person and traitors. All the persistent criminals of the petty class, I would consign to the workhouses ”

“ The prisoners are divided into three categories. The first includes those who are exempted from work without being obliged to pay for the privilege; these are the political offenders and persons who have contravened the laws relating to the press. The second comprises those who, for a payment averaging from six or seven francs a fortnight, purchase the right not to labour. To the third belong all the prisoners who are obliged to work in the shops directed by the speculator who farms the prison. ”