Criminology in the British Empire

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen,--In all civilized nations the character and aspect of crime appears to change with the ever-varying conditions of their social and political life, and a study of the problems and tendencies of crime has become a necessity for the well-being of every community. From the days primeval all social progress has taken its root in the sense of failure to realize ideals, which mark each epoch of the world's history. As a result we now have as many distinct ideals as we have groups of men. There is the economic ideal of a prison, to make it self-supporting; the administrative ideal is that it shall be secure and orderly; the punitive ideal is that it shall crush its helpless inmates and strike terror into the hearts of men tempted to enter upon a criminal career; the sentimental ideal is that it shall be the abode of comfort and content; the philosophic ideal is that it shall be so conducted as to reform as many of those committed to it as are susceptible to reformation and rehabilitation.

Those ideals spring tip partly from within and- partly from without penal jurisdiction. Prison officials have the opportunity of studying the criminal at first hand. By close and continued contact with him, they note his tastes, his habits and his peculiarities. They study the effect of a wholesome discipline and change their attitude to him according to keener insight and the more accurate judgments gained by a large and sometimes long experience in prison administration. The outside world look at the criminal from a different viewpoint. They form their judgments from the results of crime as found on the ledger of the Police Court, or by the effect of the crime committed in a community, or by the account as published in the daily newspapers.

In England, in the year 1800, there were two hundred crimes punishable by death. At the present time there are only four, viz., High Treason, Murder, Piracy, with violence, and setting fire to the King's ships, Dock-yards or Military stores. When Queen Victoria came to the throne her convict subjects were in the United Kingdom about 53,000. The convicts in prisons about the end of 1899 were only 3,700, notwithstanding an increase in population of 13,000,000. For centuries the underlying principle of penal law was that of vengeance and repression. Both the State and the Church tried to suppress crime by the terrors of torture and intimidation. Ancient treatment of the criminal was such as to produce untold misery and despair, in the hope that his being filled with the terror and hideousness of his offence, would, upon his release from prison, act as a deterrent to like offences. Even upon his release the pitiless vengeance of society followed him up, marking and branding him a criminal for life. Did it work out as anticipated? Pacts show that crimes of violence and against property became even more daring until experience was crystallized into the axiom that "crime thrives on severe penalties," and the prisons in the Old Country became so choked that the Government had to resort to transportation and established penal colonies for the disposal of their human rubbish.

After eighty years of futile experience of this kind, the failure of the transportation system was admitted and it was abandoned. But this experiment was not without its value, for at least it gave the world the object lesson that, in many cases, a desperate criminal could turn over a new leaf in a new environment and become a useful member of society. Now, the principle has been adopted of working with the criminal as well as for him, embracing the industrial, the educational, the religious, and the disciplinary methods, which are proving to be reformative and curative agencies, bringing a large percentage of our criminal strata up to the social strata of usefulness and good citizenship. It is the advent of hope. I know it would be foolish to even estimate the exact percentage of corrigable, or what is termed "incorrigable convicts," or to shut our eyes to the persistency of the criminal type of character, or to expect in the eyes of the law anything more from the average prisoner than that he shall cease to be a lawbreaker and become law-abiding; but the concrete fact has been established that opportunity succeeds where mere cruelty in the past has failed in a treatment of our criminal classes. We send the whole man to prison and it is necessary to treat the whole man to produce satisfactory results.

The man, while remaining a criminal, is a constant menace to society, also to the life and property of the individual; he is a tremendous burden upon the resources of the state financially and ethically. He is an abiding heart-ache to anyone with a feeling of pity or an inspiration for the nobility and progress of humanity. The criminal is not an isolated fibre, but a condition of life closely interwoven with all that goes to make our complex social fabric. He is not an isolated, but an associated factor. He is more than a relic from past ages. He is not a mere reversion to a primitive type of humanity, but an actual, if very imperfect, member of our present day society. The criminal is still a man, a something more than a curious anatomical specimen of humanity, that some would have us believe. Whatever he may have done he is part of that corporate life 'in which we all live and, have our being. I do not believe the criminal act to be a strange deed of a remote and non-human order of being, nor the outcome of a satanic prompting, but a part of the conduct of one who is linked in a thousand and one ways with his fellows. The act is anti-social, anarchic, distinctive and destructive, but to understand the actor we must revert to his social conditions and human relations. Likewise, we trace our criminal problems to their true rootage and treat them successfully only when we can understand causes from a broad and scientific viewpoint, seeing in the criminal a social unit not unified, a social factor not socialized, and an ethical possibility not realized. To understand the criminal you must set him in a frame of general history, illuminate him by a knowledge and a philosophy of human nature and a psychology that takes account of all facts and goes far enough beyond nerves and grey matter to reach the real man with a will, a hope and a conscience.

We satisfy human sentiments or public opinion of our age only when everything is done within a possibility for the convict while he is under the custody of the law and, from the penitentiary viewpoint in Canada there can be little honest criticism of the construction or the administration of the institutions, or of the general treatment of the criminals under their care. Trades of various kinds are taught the inmates, the moral welfare of the prisoner is well guarded by the enforcement of a strong and helpful discipline, giving the prisoner a practical lesson in self-control that he never knew before, while the chaplains devote themselves exclusively to the spiritual needs of the inmates, all in operation for their general betterment. Following up the impressions made by our modern systems and penal treatment, I am anxious to create a deeper interest, and a conscience in some localities of our vast Dominion (where it is needed) to see that no discharged prisoner is left standing outside of a Canadian institution on the day of release, without a friend to aid him or the opportunity provided for the delinquent to follow up the good impressions or resolves made while under authority.

I will now give some statistical data upon this subject.

The United Kingdom, estimated population in 1906, 41,655,377; 21,580 persons were under conviction in His Majesty's prisons in the United Kingdom on March 28th, 1906; Paupers, England and Wales, year 1906, 909,918--a decrease of 4,825 over the preceding year

Scotland has 111,202 paupers. In the judicial statistics of England and Wales for the year 1905, I find that Greater London, with a population of over 6,500,000, had only 24 homicides reported, 20 of these were tried in the criminal courts, with the result of 20 convictions. In England and Wales the verdicts for willful murder numbered 191 cases, as against 189 in 1904. The annual average for the past five years is 171.4. In 42 cases during the past five years (where verdicts of willful murder were returned), several committed suicide at the time of the murder. In addition to the 191 verdicts of willful murder for the past year, there were 126 verdicts of manslaughter, making, altogether, a total of 317 culpable homicides.

In England and Wales for some years past crime, as represented by indictable offences, has grown steadily. In 1899 the number of persons charged with such offences was 50,499; in 1904, the number was 59,96o; showing an increase, in five years, of 9,461. In the former year the proportion of offences to 100,000 of the population was 158-97, but in the latter the proportion had risen to 177-59. The number imprisoned during the year was 223,911, or 1 prisoner in 145 of the population. It is interesting to note that while crime generally has increased, offences against the person have decreased; falling from 2,785 in 1899, to 2,525 in 1904, a decrease of nearly 9 per cent. The obvious deduction is that passion and brutality are becoming less potent factors in the causation of crime. The great increase has taken place in those kinds of offences that require not only dishonest intention, but also some education and skill in their perpetration. Hence false pretences, frauds, embezzlements, and larcenies make up the increase; the deduction being obvious, that dishonesty, cupidity, and lack of principle are becoming more powerful causes of crime.

During 1904, the figures for burglary and housebreaking were 2,942, an increase of 79 over the previous year. As these offences are usually committed by habitual criminals, there is some satisfaction in knowing that the increase in this kind of offence is but small in comparison with the increase of the two previous years. But the fact that this increase still goes on demands -attention, and it is evident that the problem of the habitual criminal still awaits solution. There has been an increase of 110 over the previous year in the number of juveniles (i.e., persons under the age of sixteen) committed to prison, and an increase of 1,031 in the number of those under twenty-one; the total for the year being 1,141 boys and 43 girls under sixteen, and 16,081 males and 2,326 females under the age of twenty-one. During the year 54,388 prisoners were dealt with, showing an advance of 3,086 on the previous year. This increase has been going on year by year, for in 1893 the number so dealt with was 33,862. 138 prisoners were certified insane in local prisons during the year; 85 of these were insane when received, and 53 were found insane within a month of reception. It is a noticeable fact that, while crimes of dishonesty have considerably increased, there was during the year a reduction of no less than 1,044 in the number of women charged with larceny.

In Scotland the most satisfactory feature of the figures for 1904 is the fact that the daily average number of prisoners in custody has dropped from 2,604 to 2,545 But the number of committals to prison being 3,546 less than the previous year, the average length of time that prisoners were in custody rose from 15.8 to 16.5 days. Crime in Ireland appears to be stationary. For six years the daily average of prisoners to 100,000 of the population ranged between 61 and 58; in 1904 the average was 59 Drunkenness appears to be slightly decreasing; the proportion of prisoners committed for this offence has fallen from 50 to 43 per cent. A daily average of 2,601 prisoners was maintained during the year. The principal conclusions as to the increase and decrease of crimes and offences to be drawn from British statistics may be thus shortly stated

1. Crimes against the person have diminished.

2. Crimes of the classes chiefly committed by habitual criminals have ceased to increase at the same rapid rate as in previous years.

3. Minor offences of dishonesty have increased.

4. Serious frauds of dishonesty and trust have increased.

5. Drunkenness is stationary.

6. Offences of the vagrancy class are growing rapidly.

From our Dominion, for the same year (1904) the number charged with murder was 27, against 26 in the previous year. Of the 27 cases, 14 convictions. resulted from the trials. There will be a small increase in the number of homicides in the Dominion this year, in Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Quebec Province. The increase in the number received from jails is ten per cent. as compared with the previous year. In Canada we have 333 1-3 prisoners per million population, and this number has held stationary during the last ten years.

Since the year 1885 there have been in the United States 131,951 homicides, and only 2,286 convictions for murder. In the year 1904 the number of murders increased to 8,432, while the number of executions for the same year was 110, against 108 executions for the year 1885, with 1,808 murders committed. During the last five years 45,000 persons were murdered in the United States. More persons were murdered last year than died of typhoid fever. This awful total has been due to the way in which the law was administered. And the law itself is bad and inefficient. It is burdened with restrictions and technicalities, and in almost every case the criminal has nine chances of escaping to one of being found guilty.

So declared judge Marcus Kavanagh in an address before the alumnae of St. Ignatius College on "Enforcement of the law in large cities." He declared that the United States was "the most criminal country in the world and the jury system the most loose and antiquated." In 1880 there were 1,350 prisoners per million population of the United States, and in 1890 there were something over 1,500 prisoners per million population, a gain of 12 percent during the ten years. The figures for 1905 are yet incomplete, but they show even a larger pin of the criminal population per capita, about 2,000 persons per million, making an increase of 20 percent during the past five years. Approximately one divorce suit in every three marriages is the appalling record disclosed by a compilation of statistics for the first eleven months of 19o6.

In India the Reformatory School at Chingleput was the first of its kind established. An esteemed correspondent has very kindly furnished some particulars of its work for 1904. The school was kept tip at its full strength of 185 boys and complaints are made as to the lack of accommodation. Another school, it is said, is sorely needed. The inmates included 6 Christians, 24 Mohammedans, 2 Brahmins, 27 of the criminal classes, 106 non-Brahmins and 20 Panchamas. 128 boys were convicted and committed for theft and 43 for housebreaking.

In New South Wales, Australia, the steady decrease in the number of prisoners, which was noticeable in previous years, was still more pronounced in 1904--in that year showing a decrease of 774. On December 31st, 1894, there was a prison population of 2,604. On the last day of 1904 the number had fallen to 1,685, an actual reduction of q19. The total commitments to prison, 13,380, showed a decrease of over 700 compared with the previous year. In 1885 the commitments were 20,740, upon which number the year 1904 showed a reduction of 7,36o, although the population had increased by half a million. Although this decrease in prison population must be a source of satisfaction, the Comptroller is by no means satisfied, for he points out that these figures are swelled by habitual drunkards and vagrants, who are constantly going in and out of prison, and who are convicted many times over during the year; one man alone having over twenty convictions in the year. He also points out that the methods of dealing with these

human derelicts are hopelessly defective, and need radical alteration. The number of the prison population, he considers, might be still further reduced if a system of probation was established, and he goes on to say: "My experience convinces me that there is a great deal too much gaoling for minor offences. It is no doubt an easy way of meeting a difficulty, but it causes misery and great expense."

The Inspector-General's report for Victoria, 1905, gives some interesting and encouraging information. Although the daily average 'of prisoners shows an advance of 16 over that of the previous year, yet comparing this average with that of 18gi, 1892 and 1893, it shows a substantial decrease. In 18gr, the daily average was 1,886 prisoners; in 1905, 1,034. In the former year there was 1 prisoner to 613 of the population, but in the latter the proportion was 1 to 1,178, a decrease of nearly one-half. But while the number of commitments to gaol has been reduced, the number of those sentenced to more than two years' imprisonment had increased; the inference being that the more serious crimes have slightly increased, while minor offences have largely decreased.

The Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons in New Zealand states that there was an increase in the Gaol population on Dec. 31st, 1905, of 230 over that of Dec. 31st, 1895. The Inspector-General of Victoria in his Report gives some particulars of the Tree-Planting Prison Camps in New Zealand supplied to him by Col. Hume, Inspector of Prisons. Some following particulars may be of interest. Prisoners are employed in tree-planting on plains belonging to the Crown, which are not considered suitable for cultivation. There are four tree-planting camps, the largest having 6o prisoners, the smallest 25. Prisoners engaged in tree-planting earn by good conduct a remission of one-half day per week. There is no night supervision, the prisoners being locked in their huts by bolts and padlocks on the outside. Four prisoners sleep in each hut. Their clothing and diet are the same as in town prisons; the proportion of officers, who are all single men, is one to eight prisoners; the officers occupy similar huts to those occupied by the prisoners, but only two occupy each hut; no extra pay is given to the officers, but they are supplied with rations; the prisoners are supplied with library books, and friends are allowed to send them daily papers or periodicals; when possible, Divine Service is held on Sundays by visiting clergy or lay readers. In Egypt, from a Blue Boo!; recently issued, it appears that crime is slightly decreasing. During 1904, 3,109 persons were convicted; in 1905 the number fell to 3,011, a reduction of 98; which is considered satisfactory.