The Sun.
London, England, 1862-12-16 00:00:00

CONVICI LIFE AND LIVING A 7 PORI-
-

PORTLAND, Dec. 13.
Transportation versus Ticket-of-leave, or; in plain terms,
What are we to do with our convicts ? is a question which
is almost as foreibly impressed upon the visitors to the stu-
pendous works at Portland as upon any of the suburban
dwellers in London who creep timidly home after dark for
fear of garotters. We are not now about to enter upon the
old and much-vexed question of the value of convict labour
as compared with free, though it is one which at Portland
is, and alw aye must be, acrimoniously debated by the parti-
sans on either aide. Both, as generally happens in these
Gases, are a little in the wrong. Sir Joshua Jebb, who
finds his intractable proteges kept out of mischief by the
nearest approach to hard work they can be got to do, na-
turally supports it and over-estimates its money value in
consideration of its use in carr)ing out his " system ;" con-
tractors, on the other.hand, who have erected a plant equal
to the consumption of double the materials the convicts can
be got to supply, and who find themselves entirely idle on
wet days when the carefully nursed convicts are not al-
lowed to work at all, are apt to ignore its value alto-
gether. The truth lies between the two extremes. The
whole dispute, however, is entirely beside the real question
at issue. It is not what is the kind of labour which con-
victs have to do, but how much real 'labour is exacted
from them. It is, has our present system of penal
servitude any real terrors for the lawless and despe-
rate ? Or, ott the other hand, is it such in its care-
ful treatment, high feeding, and light work as
almost to induce ticket-of-leave men, like sailors
from a ship after a long cruise, to return with perfect
indifference to its discipline when they have had their run
of liberty ashore P At no place in the kingdom can these
questions be better or more practically answered than by a
visit :to Portland. From the lax discipline which it is
rumoured among prison authorities prevails in some of our
great convict establishments in this kingdom, it would not
be fair to take them as samples. At Portland, however,
the discipline Is really perfect, compared with others ; there
is a large establishment of convicts, there are the public
works in which they are supposed to labour hard; and
whether the whole system is good or bad, there, at least it
is in its best working order.
There are always from 1,400 to 1,600 convicts at Port-
land, mostly working in gangs by themselves, but now and
then in close proximity to groups of free labourers. You
know at once when you are coming upon the ground mostly
worked by the former; on all the steep headlands and high
commanding bluffs which are being scarped into perpendi-
cular walls for the fort of this Channel Gibraltar stalk the
tall figures of the warders all around, There is nothing
of the listless routine of sentry duty about these men. They
carry their rifles ready, and seem all eyes and ears as they
scan the ground beneath them, like eager sportsmen look-
ing for a shot. Passing through two or three lines of such
vigilant "look-outs" is rather impressing, and prepares the
visitor to expect such scenes of labour and enforced toil
among the convicts as would induce them to run some risk
to escape. Nothing of the sort is, however, to be seen
as you turn into the Old St. Paul's quarries,
where some of the blocks rejected by Sir Christopher
Wren are still upon the ground. Here, amid a number
of old and rush cranes, on the hills overlooking the sea, a
large body of the convicts are at work in gangs of 24 or 30,
each gang having its own warder, who, by the way, has 15
hours' work to the convicts' 9 or 10. The prisoners require
no pointing out, their dress, their closely shaven aspect,
their bard, firm, ruddy, healthy look, like pugilists in con-
dition for a fight, and, above all, their slow, lazy style of
working, or rather moving, which contrasts so strangely
with the busy energy and speed of the free workmen near at
hand, all show them at a glance to be "penal servitudes"
at " hard labour." Here are men of every grade of infamy
and crime, men who were once clerks, merchants, and even
commissioned officers, down to poachers, burglars, mur-
derers, and that worst and most inveterate of all ruffians,
who has been inured to every form of punishment known to
the law short of hanging—the true London criminal. Some
few are employed in platelaying, some in blacksmiths' shops,
some at masons' or bricklayers' work upon the great forti •
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the same remark applies as to light and slothful labours,
and nearly all are alike in their vicious and forbidding as-
pects—their low, narrow, retreating foreheads, keen, rest-
less eyes, and vindictive animal features. This is not the
mere effect of prejudice en seeing them as convicts. The
type of the criminal head and face is well known in Portland
and its neighbourhood. They may be recognised as a negro
would be recognised in Boston. Of all the convicts in Port-
land now there are not 5 per cent, whom anyman judging by
their looks alone would ever think of trusting in a position
requiring the exertion of sense or the forbearance of honesty.
Some few among the number in these quarries work in
heavy chains, in most quaint dresses of gray and yellow,
and gray and black. The former are those who ha re tried
to break away, the latter are ruffians who have used, or
from their threats are known to intend, violence to the
warders. Both, however, clank about with a defiant swag-
ger, as if their chains were honourable distinctions of their
strength and courage, in which light there is but too much
reason to believe they are also regarded by many of their
fellow-prisoners. In these quarries the men work at
quarrying and dressing blocks of stone in winter about
eight and a half hours a day, in summer nine hours, and
sometimes a little over. The work, indeed, would be hard
labour if fairly done, and there are some few, but very few,
who really do work well and as if labour was a relief to
them. But the great majority take matters very easily
indeed, as may be judged when five convicts kept at their
work only quarry about as much stone in a day as two free
labourers working for their hire. It is not suggestive of
hard work to see a fellow put down a heavy hammer that
he ought to be wielding lustily and stop to swing his arms
and clap his hands to keep himself warm. When this is
the "hard labour" we can see at once why convicts do not
dread it. When we come to know how they are nurtured
and lodged in the prison in order that their strength may
be kept up to the required standard for this imaginary
hard labour which they are supposed to perform, we get a
real light thrown upon the indifference with which penal
servitude in this country is regarded, and gain a clue to
the reason why it is that so large a proportion of ticket-of-
leave men are, to say the least, not unwilling to return
to the so-called " penal servitude," Perhaps, while the
visitor is regarding this mockery of work it may
begin to rain ; at once the mimic toil ceases and the con-
victs are marched off in gangs to sheds erected for the pur-
pose, where they are carefully sheltered from the weather
and can look out with complacency upon the free labourer,
who, having himself and his family to keep, must stay and
bear whatever weather Heaven sends, wet or dry, hot or
cold. The contrast between the condition of the two, how-
ever, by no means ends here. The comforts that are denied
to misery, though preferred to crime, have been an old
theme of invective ever since the new convict "system"
came into operation. At no part of England, however, is
the superior condition of the convict, as compared with
that of the honest labourer, brought side by side into such
ins thetartl worksingc
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as at Portland.
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yet kept comfortably warm, and, above all, so scrupulously
clean that it is a comfort to look at it. While the " hard-
labour " men are making their toilets their dinners are
carefully got ready, weighed out, ani served smoking hot
in bright clean tins, and at 12 o'clock each man comes for-
ward with his gang, and receives every one his separate
allowance. Their dinner three days a week is as follows :
One pint of soup properly seasoned, thickened with
barley, rice, carrots, and onions, and equal in nutriment to
any ever placed on a gentleman's table; 5i ounces of cooked
meat, free of bone ; 11b. of potatoes, and 10 ounces of rich
suet pudding. On three days a week the pudding is re-
placed with 6 ounces of bread, and on Sundays the meat is
increased to 6 ounces. With this little dinner in his tin
every man retires to his comfortable cell, where he is allowed
an hour to consume it at his leisure,—not that the time is
always so spent ; many have, or affect to have, suspicion as
to the weights or quantities they have got, and these fellows,
some of whom make a point of doing it for the sake of giving
trouble, have to be accompanied to the kitchen by the
warders, where according to the rules of the prison, they
are entitled to have everything reweighed and measured
before their eyes. All, however, do not dine in their cells—
some are portioned out in larger rooms in cosy little messes
of eight or ten. These are mostly men in the third or fourth
stage—that is, men who have completed two-thirds or
three-fourths of the time—not of the sentence—nobody
completes that—but the time at which they are entitled to
claim their ticket of leave. They have extra comforts and
privileges beyond dining in messes. In addition to the
dinner we have mentioned the men in the third stage re-
ceive on Sundays 2 oz. cheese, 307.. bread, and half a pint of
beer after it ; while the men in the fourth stage receive the
same as to bread and cheese and beer as the third, with the
addition of a treacle pudding after dinner on Thursdays
baked mutton, in lieu of beef, on Thursdays and Fri-
days, and baked beef instead of boiled on Sun-
days and Mondays ! Here, then, we begin by giving
our convicts a daily dinner such as for nutriment,
quality, and quantity few labouring men can afford on Sun-
days, and we gradually raise the scale of luxuries till they
dine at last on soup, baked beef, bread and cheese and beer,
and pudding. Yet the public, who don't know these things,
wonder why penal servitude is not dreaded, and why, above
all others, ticket-Of-leave men who have undergone this