The Press.
London, England, 1857-01-31 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

prisoners is complete, I propose that they shall, as nearly
as economical considerations and prison arrangements will
admit, be employed in the pursuits at which they are
most apt, and to which they will be returned at the tcrmi•
nation of their sentences.

Mr. Pearson then enters into the details of classi-
fication, and continues :
As I denounce idleness, so I disclaim compulsory slave-
abour as an instrument of prison discipline or reforms-
Wry punishment. I would make, it is true, bodily labour
t condition precedent to bodily enjoyment. Labour should
e made to feed the appetite, or the appetite should be
made to enforce the labour. It is proposed, as Maeonochie
and Whately and Paley and Howard proposed, that the
sentence of the case shall not be a rigid time sentence
which good or bad conduct cannot either abridge or pro-
long. It is proposed, instead of a judge ccndemning the
criminal to so many years or months of imprisonment,
that the sentence pronounced shall be a labour sentence of
so many thousand hours of labour, as the character of the
criminal and the crime shall appear to warrant. It is pro-
posed that the criminal shall have, asan idle man's allowance,
ltioz. of bread a day, with water ad libitum, and that every
honest hour's labour fairly performed shall entitle him to
one halfpenny worth of additional diet, and shall at the
same time cancel one hour of his labour sentence; so
that if the instinctive love of liberty, or the lower motive
of bodily gratification, shall prompt the criminal to give
twelve hours a day, day by day, of honest work, ho will at
the end of the week have obliterated seventy two hours
from his labour sentence, and will have earned the right—
the positive right—to have and enjoy 3s.worth of palateable
food in addition to his 711 b. of bread, the zero diet of his
class. If these motives are less operative upon the minds of
other criminals, and they choose to work only ten hours, or
eight hours, or six hours out of the twenty-four, their diet
will be as much below the diet of their industrious fellow-
prisoners as the duration of their imprisonment will be
prolonged. Assuming that the equivalent of a twelve
months' sentence under the existing law would be 3,000
hours of labour, as representing ten working hours for
each working day, the man who worked ten hours per day
would cancel his sentence in one year ; he who laboured
twelve hours would work himself out of gaol in ten months;
while he who worked only eight hours or six hours a lay
would have his 2s. worth or his 181 worth of food per
week, and he would remain in confinement fourteen
months or sixteen months as the case might be.

Mr. Pearson then enters into some details respect-
ing his plan, and concludes as follows
My Lord Mayor,—lt will be said, I dare say, as the par-
liamentary committee reported of my proposed plan, that
" many difficulties would probably arise under a discussion
of its details," and therefore a disposition may exist in
some quarters to postpone its consideration for another
seven years. But the Government will now be beset in
all directions by difficulties upon the subject of penal
punishment, the extent of which they will be compelled to
weigh and compare. They cannot stand still, and they
must not go back. Society will not call again into requi-
sition the gibbet and the pillory, the whipping•post, the
stocks, and the branding irons, the underground dungeons,
the penal settlements, and slavery and chain gangs
neither will they tolerate the prison palaces and castles of
indolence, where ablebodied men in the prime of We cost
for hoard and lodging 301. or 401 , and earn only 31. or .11.
per annum ; where they have labour for relaxation only,
and spend their time in qualifying themselves to deliver
lectures upon a variety of subjects which it would have
puzzled the Admirable Crichton to deal with.