QUESTIONS—OBSERVATIONS. (Hansard, 24 July 1890)

§ * LORD NORTON

In rising to ask the Lord Chancellor whether the Government intend to introduce a Bill next Session on the subject of the length of terms of penal servitude, said: This is a repetition of the question which I put to the Lord Chancellor 692 at the end of last Session, and I need not repeat the reasons for the question, which I gave at full length then. The answer that I got from the noble and learned Lord was, that he was aware that the subject was under the notice of the Home Secretary, but that it had not been considered by the Government. I understand now that a Bill is ready drafted, and I hope that the noble and learned Lord will be able to tell your Lordships that it has been approved. What I want to know is, now that the commencement of the next Session is so very near, if the noble and learned Lord can tell us whether the Government have made up their minds to introduce this Bill early next Session. I can only say it is a far more important Bill than it seems from the size of the Bill, the proposition being simply to restore among the terms of penal servitude a minimum term of three years which was omitted in the Act of 1879. In a very interesting little pamphlet, published by Sir Edmund Du Cane, in 1885, he pointed out two things: first, that a very great mistake was made by Parliament in 1854, when penal servitude was substituted for the exhausted and no longer practicable punishment of transportation. I served upon the Committees which considered this subject myself, and I protested then, as Sir Edmund Du Cane says, against the mistake of assigning periods of penal servitude in proportion to the previous terms of transportation, which was a punishment, as your Lordships know, of no similitude whatever to the substituted punishment of penal servitude. It was also a mistake, that not only were the maximum terms a great deal too long, but by the omission of the minimum term, the term which comes between the maximum term of imprisonment and the minimum term of penal servitude in the Act of 1879, there is a want of sequence in the scale of punishments which is very detrimental to their efficacy. As Sir Edmund Du Cane puts it, the two punishments of imprisonment and penal servitude are absolutely similar. They are, indeed, only two kinds of the same category of punishment, the latter being the longer and ending in service on public works. But the two ingradations would make a complete scale of 693 punishments. The longer terms of penal servitude had lost much of their deterrent effect by their length, which is the principal object of all punishment; but this minimum term which has been omitted would be found to be most useful, and, by its omission, leaves a gap in the centre of the scale, and I am perfectly convinced myself that the simple restoration of that minimum term of three years, which is the whole object of the Bill which I understand the Home Secretary has ready drafted for introduction, would make the punishment of imprisonment a much more useful weapon in the bands of the Judges and Magistrates of this country. They ask for that restoration, and I believe we should not have the number of re-committals to prison, which is a painful subject of comment by all visitors of prisons at this moment. It is at this moment, I believe, the only thing which arrests the steady decrease of crime in this country which has been brought about by our improved system of education, Reformatories, and Discharged Prisoners' Aid Societies. I therefore hope the Government will be able to assure your Lordships that they intend to introduce a Bill for that purpose early next Session.