-. expenditure involved in his numerous detections, prosecutions, imprisonments, and final transportation. But there are two items in the bill which we cannot estimate, the extent to which our judicial, penal, and police establishments might be reduced were we to diminish our criminal population, as it would be diminished by the adoption of sound principles in dealing with juvenile and adult offenders; and the amount of wealth abstracted and consumed by the delinquent before his career is interrupted or cut short. We have no means of ascertaining what proportion the offences detected bear to those committed; how long a child has been subsisting on plunder before he falls within the grasp of the law; of how many robberies he has been guilty between his first and his final conviction. We only know that their name is legion. In the case of one crime we are able to approximate to a discovery of the fact we seek, that of forgery. The Recorder of Birmingham informed the Committee of the House of Commons that only one forgery in 164 was detected and brought home. It was ascertained in one instance by the Inspector of Prisons†, that 20,000 offences had been committed by only fifteen persons; and individuals have been known who have pursued a course of lucrative depredation for thirty years without a single interruption. Now, we find that the average entire cost per annum of a juvenile in a well-conducted reformatory does not exceed 251. In many cases, as at Stretton, it rarely reached 167. At Mettray, the entire cost of each youth, from the time of his recep tion to the time when he was placed out in an honest calling -the cost of his reformation, that is- was 421. at Stretton it was 317. If we add to this the expense of emigration, in those cases in which it would be necessary to resort to it, we may take 50%. as an excessive estimate of the entire net expenditure of the process of turning a young thief into a true man.' When Reformatories are once established on a proper scale and on a sound system, it would probably fall far short of this. Now let us collect a few calculations on the other side, carefully made by competent authorities. The Chaplain of the Liverpool Gaol ascertained, from the history of thirty juvenile offenders, that they had cost, in punishments alone, 621. per head. Mr. Rushton followed the history of fourteen, all very young, and found that they had cost 637. each, and that ten of them, who were transported, cost 821. each additional; making a total of 1451. Mr. Clay made out the earnings of a family of Hill, on Crime, 27. * Blue Book, 1852. Question 385. pickpockets, who had been working at their trade from two to nine years, to be 12,6007; besides which, they had cost in prison 4,030. Mr. Osborn, Chaplain of Bath Gaol, informs us that ninety-eight lads, who had been committed 216 times, had cost in all 6,0637. We merely adduce these comparative figures in deference to those economists whose first inquiry as to any scheme is, 'Will it pay?' We are fully aware in our own mind both how inadequate and how superfluous they are. These several points, then, being thus admitted and made good,-viz., that juvenile delinquents are in the vast majority of instances no fit objects for retributive punishment, but for rescue and educational treatment; that even if it were otherwise, sending them to prison has no effect in deterring them from a repetition of their offences, but has a very great effect in deterring the compassionate from prosecuting those offences; that in place of preventing crime it only stimulates, hardens, trains, and completes the criminal; that we have a positive certainty, derived both from reason and experience, that a different mode of treatment will, generally speaking, secure the protection of the community by the reformation of the offenders; and finally, that this reformation will be sound economy: it remains to inquire what steps have been taken by Government, and by private individuals, to draw and put in practice the obvious conclusions that flow from these admitted premises, Till fourteen years ago, though great efforts had been made by enlightened individuals to induce and to promote legislative interference, and though the necessity of the case was as clear then as it is now, nothing had been done by Government to amend the cruelty and the insanity of the existing system.. Infants continued to be committed to the common gaol, there to be educated into finished thieves, and the ranks of adult criminals and ruffians continued to be annually recruited from these feeding schools of delinquency, just as they had been in the days of our fathers and our grandfathers. In the year 1840, the first Parliamentary effort was made towards the introduction of a better system. An Act was passed For the Care and Educa⚫tion of Infants who may be convicted of Felony,' empowering the Court of Chancery to assign these infants as wards to any person whom it might select. But whether from the general dread of having anything to do with the Court of Chancery, or because no individuals came forward and volunteered to take. charge of these infants, or because institutions formed with that object had not the security for their permanence which was necessary to enable the Lord Chancellor to commit his wards to their keeping; we are unable to hear of any case in which the provisions of this Statute have been put in force. In 1847, an Act For the more speedy Trial and Punishment of Juvenile Offenders' gave a power of summary conviction to Justices in cases of simple larceny where the offender was under fourteen (afterwards extended to sixteen) years of age. The same Act also empowered the Justices, if they deemed fit, to dismiss the child unpunished if competent individuals came forward and gave sureties for his good behaviour. This enabled benevolent parties, having reformatories of their own, to take charge of such delinquent if he were willing to go with them and remain under their care, but gave them no power of detention, and, consequently, made their surety' a very perilous affair. Besides these two Acts, the Crown has for some time past been in the habit of granting conditional pardons to such juvenile prisoners from Millbank or Westminster Bridewell as were recommended to them by the Inspectors, on condition of their consenting to go to and remain at the Philanthropic Society's Farm School at Red Hill. About 100 are now sent thither annually; and for these the Government pays 251. a head. These slight and tentative steps were the only official ones taken in the right direction till last year; and their inadequacy must be painfully obvious to every one. They barely amounted to an acknowledgment of what was needed and obligatory. At the close of the Session of 1854, however, two Acts were passed, one for England and Wales, and one for Scotland, — known respectively as Lord Palmerston's and Mr. Dunlop's Acts-which, though defective on more than one point, conceded the long required principle, and conferred the necessary facilities. The first of these Acts empowers Judges and Magistrates, in the case of any child found guilty of an offence which subjects it to fourteen days' imprisonment at least, to commit such child, after the expiration of its sentence, to any reformatory which shall have been duly certified by the Inspector of Prisons*, for a term of not less than two, nor more than five years. The Act also gives power to compel the parents or step-parents of such youthful offenders, wherever able, to pay for their maintenance in these reformatories, and charges the Government with this maintenance wherever not so recoverable from the parents. The Scotch Act extends the provisions of the law to vagrants as well as convicted children, and empowers the Education "The number of schools thus certified is now twelve. Committee of the Privy Council to aid in the establishment of Reformatory Schools, and contains, besides a clause, burdening the parish with the maintenance of the vagrant and delinquent children so committed, in default of parental ability. These Acts are such a vigorous and hopeful step in the right direction, that we are little disposed to be strict in marking their defects. Nevertheless we must signalise the principal of these, if it were only for the sake of having them remedied, and because they are in truth very serious and utterly gratuitous. In the first place, half the value of the measure is destroyed by the clause requiring the magistrate to commit the child to prison in the first instance, in place of empowering him to send it at once to the reformatory. By this strange enactment, you secure the aggravation of the mischief before you will begin to remedy it; you first administer the treatment which you know will exacerbate the disease before you administer the treatment which is designed to cure it; before you send the child to a place where it is to be rescued from evil and trained to good, you insist on passing it through a preliminary course at a school where it is certain to be trained to guilt, and where any lingering remains of good it may retain are almost sure to be obliterated. This singular provision speaks trumpettongued of that inconsistent logic and that half-conviction which disfigure and paralyse so much of our legislation. No man with the smallest insight into the subject would have drawn such a clause. No Legislature which understood and believed in the facts that induced and justified the Act, would have dreamed of contradicting those facts by such a strange provision. No one who had mastered the preamble of the case would have found it possible to stultify it by so suicidal an enactment. the prison is really the fit place for childish criminals; if it does good either to them or to society to send them there; if it be a deterring and reforming place, and not an encouraging and hardening one, why not keep them there? why not continue to send them there till it has done its beneficial work upon them? why send them to a reformatory at all? If Another, though comparatively an unimportant defect in the measure, consists in fixing the time of detention in reformatories at 'not exceeding five years,' instead of extending its maximum till the offender comes of age. No institution would desire to retain any inmate beyond the time at which he could be safely apprenticed out or set up in life; but to compel the directors to dismiss an inmate before his training or reformation was complete, and when he might again fall under the control of bad parents*, seems, to say the least of it, uncalled for. This error has been avoided in France, and, we believe, in America likewise. The third mistake in Lord Palmerston's Bill is contained in the same clause. Why restrict the power of committing to reformatories to children whose offences incur at least fourteen days' imprisonment? The idea which suggested this restriction is obvious enough: it was, that very slight offences hardly deserved such severe treatment as being sent to a reformatory for two years. But here, again, the sort of half comprehension and half conviction of which we have already spoken, are manifest. Parliament did not know its own mind: it had no clear or settled notion in which of two lights juvenile criminals were to be regarded-whether as objects of vengeance or as objects for rescue. In its imperfect understanding, infantine theft was still a thing to be dealt with retributively, only not too severely. But in truth the youngest and least offending delinquents-those whose sentences are for less than fourteen days-those whose steps in crime are as yet timid, tentative, and feeble-are precisely those whom it is most important to get into reformatories at once; whom there is the best chance, or rather the greatest certainty, of being able to redeem and amend; whom it is most obligatory upon us to rescue without delay from the parents, the circumstances, or the companions that have decoyed them into crime. Moreover, every one must see, this restriction is only postponing the day of their committal to reformatories and rendering their cure when there more difficult; for the child that has been sent to gaol for seven days or for ten is certain to come before the law again, and sooner or later, when more skilled and more aguerri, to be imprisoned for a longer term. "A stitch in time saves nine;' and what should we think of the medical canon which prescribed that the physic was not to be administered till the obvious and recognised disorder had reached a certain stage of aggravation. The inarticulate sentiment of compassion, too, which evidently dictated this clause, is ludicrously out of place. To send a child, who has once entered on the path of depredation, to a reformatory school is the greatest kindness you can render him. Reformatories are not places of punishment. They involve no hardships and inflict no penalties which are not inevitably implied in the fact of education-of training their inmates, that is, from the way in which they should not, to the way in which *Persigny's Report, Murray, p.8. |