What Is to Be Done With Our Convicts
Transportation having had a fair and patient trial, and having altogether failed as a punishment, and having no colony fitted and willing to receive the sweepings of our gaols, the alternative to which we are compelled is to keep our convicts at home, and to make the best of them, by making them self-supporting. Or, in the forcible words of the late Mr. Charles Pearson, City Solicitor:
If the honest millions, as they pass through life, can, and do, during what is recognised as the producing age, not only provide for their own wants, but create a large surplus, by which the non-producing classes are supported and the institutions of society are maintained, it surely ought not to be endured that any portion of the same race and of the producing age... should be permitted to renounce their allegiance to the fundamental law of their existence, and declare in practice, that by the sweat of the face of other men, they will eat of earth’s choicest fruits.
The only rational, merciful, and effectual corrective of such offenders against all laws, human and divine, is to classify and place them in secure prisons, surrounded by lofty and substantial walls; to subject them, week by week, to seventy, or at least sixty, hours of useful and profitable work; to allow them sixty, or at most seventy, hours for food, rest, cleanliness, and their other bodily requirements; to give them twenty-eight hours with means and opportunities for mental and spiritual instruction, and for the public and private worship of God.... If any Government, having thus placed at its disposal annually the hundred millions of hours of confiscated labour, which 30,000 criminals would yield, cannot make the class not only self-supporting, but productive of a surplus for the future benefit of those who produce it, such a Government would be pronounced by men of business unfit to be at the head of a great manufacturing and commercial people.