movement towards prison reform, could offer but limited accommodation. A proposal was put forward to construct convict barracks in the vicinity of the great arsenals; but this, which contained really the germ of the present British penal system, was premature. The government in this dilemma steered a middle course and resolved to adhere to transportation, but under a greatly modified and it was hoped much improved form. The colony of Van Diemen’s Land, younger and less self-reliant than its neighbour, had also endured convict immigration but had made no protest. It was resolved to direct the whole stream of deportation upon Van Diemen’s Land, which was thus constituted one vast colonial prison. The main principle of the new system was one of probation; hence its name. All convicts were to pass through various stages and degrees of punishment according to their conduct and character. Some general depot was needed where the necessary observation could be made, and it was found at Millbank penitentiary. Thence boys were sent to the prison for juveniles at Parkhurst; the most promising subjects among the adults were selected to undergo the experimental discipline of solitude and separation at Pentonville; less hopeful cases went to the hulks; and all adults alike passed on to the Antipodes. Fresh stages awaited the convict on his arrival at Van Diemen’s Land. The first was limited to “lifers” and colonial convicts sentenced a second time. It consisted in detention at one of the penal stations, either Norfolk Island or Tasman’s Peninsula, where the disgraceful conditions already described continued unchanged to the very last. The second stage received the largest number, who were subjected in it to gang labour, working under restraint in various parts of the colony. These probation stations, as they were called, were intended to inculcate habits of industry and subordination; they were provided with supervisors and religious instructors; and had they not been tainted by the vicious virus brought to them by others arriving from the penal stations, they might have answered their purpose for a time. But they became as bad as the worst of the penal settlements and contributed greatly to the breakdown of the whole system. The third stage and the first step towards freedom was the concession of a pass which permitted the convict to be at large under certain conditions to seek work for himself; the fourth was a ticket-of-leave, the possession of which allowed him to come and go much as he pleased; the fifth and last was absolute pardon, with the prospects of rehabilitation.
This scheme seemed admirable on paper; yet it failed completely when put into practice. Colonial resources were quite unable to bear the pressure. Within two or three years Van Diemen’s Land was inundated with convicts. Sixteen thousand were sent out in four years; the Gradual abandonment.average annual number in the colony was about 30,000, and this when there were only 37,000 free settlers. Half the whole number of convicts remained in government hands and were kept in the probation gangs, engaged upon public works of great utility; but the other half, pass-holders and ticket-of-leave men in a state of semi-freedom, could get little or no employment. The supply greatly exceeded the demand; there were no hirers of labour. Had the colony been as large and as prosperous as its neighbour it could scarcely have absorbed the glut of workmen; but it was really on the verge of bankruptcy—its finances were embarrassed, its trades and industries at a standstill. But not only were the convicts idle; they were utterly depraved. It was soon found that the system which kept large bodies always together had a most pernicious effect upon their moral condition. “The congregation of criminals in large batches without adequate supervision meant simply wholesale, widespread pollution,” as was said at the time. These ever-present and constantly increasing evils forced the government to reconsider its position; and in 1846 transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was temporarily suspended for a couple of years, during which it was hoped some relief might be afforded. The formation of a new convict colony in North Australia had been contemplated; but the project, warmly espoused by Mr Gladstone, then under-secretary of state for the colonies, was presently abandoned; and it now became clear that no resumption of transportation was possible. The measures taken to substitute other methods of secondary punishment are set forth in the article Prison (q.v.).
France.—France adopted deportation for criminals as far back as 1763, when a penal colony was founded in French Guiana and failed disastrously. An expedition was sent there, composed of the most evil elements of the Paris population and numbering 14,000, all of whom died. The French practice.attempt was repeated in 1766 and with the same miserable result. Other failures are recorded, the worst being the scheme of the philanthropist Baron Milius, who in 1823 planned to form a community on the banks of the Mana (French Guiana) by the marriage of exiled convicts and degraded women, which resulted in the most ghastly horrors. The principle of deportation was then formally condemned by publicists and government until suddenly in 1854 it was reintroduced into the French penal code with many high-sounding phrases. Splendid results were to be achieved in the creation of rich colonies afar, and the regeneration of the criminal by new openings in a new land. The only outlet available at the moment beyond the sea was French Guiana, and it was again to be utilized despite its pestilential climate. Thousands were exiled, more than half to find certain death; none of the penal settlements prospered. No return was made by agricultural development, farms and plantations proved a dead loss under the unfavourable conditions of labour enforced in a malarious climate and unkindly soil, and it was acknowledged by French officials that the attempt to establish a penal colony on the equator was utterly futile. Deportation to Guiana was not abandoned, but instead of native-born French exiles, convicts of subject races, Arabs, Anamites and Asiatic blacks, were sent exclusively, with no better success as regards colonization.
In 1864, however, it was possible to divert the stream elsewhere. New Caledonia in the Australian Pacific was annexed to France in 1853. Ten years later it became a new settlement for convict emigrants. A first shipload was disembarked in 1864 at Noumea, and the foundations of the city laid. Prison buildings were the first erected and were planted upon the island of Nou, a small breakwater to the Bay of Noumea. Outwardly all went well under the fostering care of the authorities. The population steadily increased; an average total of 600 in 1867 rose in the following year to 1554. In 1874 the convict population exceeded 5000; in 1880 it had risen to 8000; the total reached 9608 at the end of December 1883. But from that time forward the numbers transported annually fell, for it was found that this South Pacific island, with its fertile soil and fairly temperate climate, by no means intimidated the dangerous classes; and the French administration therefore resumed deportation of French-born whites to Guiana, which was known as notoriously unhealthy and was likely to act as a more positive deterrent. The authorities divided their exiles between the two outlets, choosing New Caledonia for the convicts who gave some promise of regeneration, and sending criminals with the worst antecedents and presumably incorrigible to the settlements on the equator. This was in effect to hand over a fertile colony entirely to criminals. Free immigration to New Caledonia was checked, and the colony became almost exclusively penal. The natural growth of a prosperous colonial community made no advance, and convict labour did little to stimulate it, the public works, essential for development, and construction of roads were neglected; there was no extensive clearance of lands, no steady development of agriculture. From 1898 simple deportation practically ceased, but the islands were full of convicts already sent, and they still received the product of the latest invention in the criminal code known as “relegation,” a punishment directed against the recidivist or incorrigible criminal whom no penal retribution had hitherto touched and whom the French law felt justified in banishing for ever to the “back of beyond.” A certain period of time spent in a hard labour prison preceded relegation, but the convicts on arrival were generally unfitted to assist in colonization. They were for the most part decadent, morally and physically; their labour was of no substantial value to
