Penal servitude

“ It is not generally known that two years’ imprisonment is the limit of a sentence of hard labour, after which the next higher punishment involves five years’ penal servitude. There is a vast deal of ignorance displayed on this subject, even by those who might be supposed to know better. It is generally believed that imprisonment with hard labour is a severer punishment than penal servitude. No greater fallacy ever existed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The same man who is at one time a convicted prisoner in an ordinary prison may at another time be undergoing penal servitude. While he is in an ordinary prison there is neither power nor occasion to order him the severe punishments which may be inflicted on convicts. If he need the lash when he is sent to penal servitude, there is at least the presumption that the cause lies as much in the character of the life he is compelled to lead as in the character of the man. The more punishment inflicted on prisoners in a prison the stronger the probability is that the place is badly managed. ”

“ Political offenders who have undergone a sentence of penal servitude, and who may be men of the highest character, acquire the prison look and never altogether get rid of it. If a man spends a certain number of years sharing the life, the food, the occupations of five or six hundred other men, if he mixes with them and with no one else, he will inevitably come to resemble them in face and feature. ”

“ Division, and that Courts, when satisfied that a person convicted on indictment of an offence punishable by penal servitude after more than two previous convictions on indictment, was leading a persistently dishonest or criminal life, and that it was expedient for the protection of the public that he should be kept in detention for a term of years, should have power, after passing a sentence of penal servitude for not less than seven years, to order that he should pass a certain period of his sentence in the Habitual Offenders' Division. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I suppose the Legislature understands the workings of the criminal mind, but I sometimes wonder whether men can be deterred from crime by dread of seven years penal servitude, if they are not deterred by dread of five. If they reckon things up at all, they probably pick out the biggest crime they can commit for any specified sentence—“may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb”—and then act accordingly. ”

“ Remember the instances I have cited in which the experiment has been tried—ten years in the reformatories and six convictions since; penal servitude on a lad's third conviction, and a second five years' penal servitude since, followed by the Prison's Office circular to me in January recommending a third more lengthened imprisonment then. It is plain that habitues in street crime cannot maintain reform in the streets. ”

“ Such a person, after being sentenced to penal servitude, may be ordered to be detained on the expiration of that sentence for a period of not less than five and not more than ten years, at the discretion of the Court. The charge of being a habitual offender can only be tried after he pleads or has been found guilty of the crime for which he has been indicted, and seven days’ notice must be given the offender of the intention to make such a charge. ”

“ If the substitution of penal servitude for death in cases of murder should cause any declaration in this conscientious scrupulosity, there would be a great evil to set against the real, but I hope rare, advantage of being able to make reparation to a condemned person who was afterwards discovered to be innocent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nevertheless, as it seems to us, a sentence of eight years' penal servitude on an old man like the prisoner, for "threatening to kill," is beyond the requirements of the case.
"No. 10,514.—Assault and Robbery, Seven Years.—In this case the prisoner, a man of previous good character, become accidentally associated (while looking for work at Bunbury at about the time when the alleged offence was committed) with a man known to the police. ”

“ The accused man will have an unqualified right of appeal. After serving his term of penal servitude he will be committed to a place of detention which will be a prison specially adapted for the purposes of the Act. ”

“ The law strikes men and women indifferently with the same penalties of penal servitude and imprisonment. In the case of women it only provides that they shall be separated from the other sex: that they shall be in the charge of female officers, and that they shall be relieved from the harder forms of labour. Generally speaking, the methods of punishment are the same, subject to such modification and exceptions as difference of sex obviously demands. ”

“ By its comparison with the French "travaux forcés" it has created an impression in foreign countries that it is a very severe penalty, applied only for the greatest crimes; at home it obscures the principle that in prison all labour is hard, i.e., that all prisoners are punished with an equal prescribed task, whether they be sentenced to imprisonment with or without hard labour: and in penal servitude, where the manual labour is of the hardest, the phrase has no legal existence. ”

“ Above the First Class is a Special Class composed of men whose conduct has been specially exemplary. Men may be admitted into this class 12 months before their liberation; they may also be placed in positions of trust and responsibility in connection with the prison, and are able to earn a gratuity amounting to six pounds. Such men are, as a matter of course, liberated at the expiration of three fourths of their sentence, which means that a term of five years' penal servitude is reduced to somewhat under four years. ”

“ In the present case, the contract under which the convict serves for the surety is made between the parties concerned, who determine and fix its terms, and is not fixed by the state as the punishment for the commission of an offense.
There can be no doubt that the state has authority to impose involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime. ”

“ Imprisonment at hard labor, compulsory and unpaid, is, in the strongest sense of the words, 'involuntary servitude for crime,' spoken of in the provision of the ordinance of 1787, and of the thirteenth amendment of the constitution, by which all other slavery was abolished. ”

“ A contract by which one person agrees to become the slave of another would not be respected in any court, nor could it become the foundation of any claim or right, even if it were entered into without constraint being used upon the person who assumed to surrender his liberty and to become the property of another. But involuntary servitude, no matter when it arises, if it be not the result of punishment for crime of which the party has been duly convicted, is as much forbidden by the constitution as is slavery. ”

“ Imprisonment with hard labor is not stricken from the statute books. On the contrary, involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime is excepted from the prohibition of the 13th Amendment in so many words. Also the power of the states to make breach of contract a crime is not done away with by the abolition of slavery. But if breach of contract may be made a crime at all, it may be made a crime with all the consequences usually attached to crime. There is produced a sort of illusion if a contract to labor ends in compulsory labor in a prison. ”

“ Can the act of a mere individual, the owner of the inn, the public conveyance, or place of amusement, refusing the accommodation, be justly regarded as imposing any badge of slavery or servitude upon the applicant, or only as inflicting an ordinary civil injury, properly cognizable by the laws of the state, and presumably subject to redress by those laws until the contrary appears? ”

“ There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided always, That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid. ”

“ The constitutional provision that slavery or involuntary servitude, except for crime, shall not be permitted within the boundaries of the United States is universally construed to mean that unconvicted prisoners cannot be compelled to labor. ”

“ Not only may Congress impose such liability, but the varieties of private conduct that it may make criminally punishable or civilly remediable extend far beyond the actual imposition of slavery or involuntary servitude. ”

“ The penalty for concealing a runaway servant was twenty shillings, and any one purchasing any goods from a servant without the consent of the master or mistress was fined treble the value of the goods, to the use of the owner, "and the servant, if a white, shall make satisfaction to his or her master or owner by servitude after the expiration of his or her time, to double the value of said goods, and if the servant be a black, he or she shall be severely whipped in the most public place in the township in which such offence was committed." ”

“ That if any person declared free by this act, or any law of the United States, or any proclamation of the President, be restrained of liberty, with intent to be held in or reduced to involuntary servitude or labor, the person convicted before a court of competent jurisdiction of such act shall be punished by fine of not less than $1,500, and be imprisoned not less than five, nor more than twenty years. ”

“ A person allowed to pursue only one trade or calling, and only in one locality of the country, would not be, in the strict sense of the term, in a condition of slavery, but probably none would deny that he would be in a condition of servitude. He certainly would not possess the liberties nor enjoy the privileges of a freeman. ”

“ But, as we have seen, it was the purpose of the author to make him exhibit all the rigours of convict discipline. His case must therefore be regarded as more exceptional than typical. As a rule, only men inveterate in crime were detained in constant punishment. Transportation for life meant servitude only for eight years if the convict conducted himself [p 72] well, a condition which, of course, depended largely on the sort of master who secured his services. ”