PENAL SERVITUDE.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 6, Issue 1647, 29 March 1884, Page 2

PENAL SERVITUDE.

It may not be generally known that penal servitude is, as now carried out, a very dreadful punishment indeed. Most proper is it that its full terrors should be kept before the mind of the brutal and habitual criminal. From the dock the convict is carted away in. the prison van, and on its arrival at the gaol the heavy gates are shut to, with a horrible sound, behiud him. Led along bare corridors, he is thrust into a narrow cell, there to remain without companionship for the next 'nine months. Scarcely ever hearing the sound of a human voice, save the stern tones of the warders, fed scantily oncoarse food, his fate is sealed for thirty-, six weeks, and after that he will probably be sent to another convict establishment where the discipline is somewhat less severe. .The nino months solitary confinement of a five year's convict is hard to bear. Some prisoners are driven to suicide, some perish of despair, almost all have periodical outbreaks of useless ra«e, generally followed by . abject Immilfation, In the door of every cell leading upon the corridor, about five feet from the floor is a peephole with a shutter outside. Tho warder in charge can lift the shutter and loolun on the prisoner at any moment, and the dread of the constant supervision induces in sensitivo prisoners a continual state of nerveus anxiety, iii such cases the most severe part of the punishment inflicted on them. Their sense of hearing becomes so fine with the custom of keeping on the alert that they start and tremblo at every footfall outside the cell. The period of solitary confinement at an end, they are allowed to work in gangs, under a strict and purposely vexatious discipline. Without further enlarging on thq repulsive details of prison life, it may safey averred that if a more correct knowledge of what a convict condemned to several years' penal servitude has to endure were more widely known, the total of crimes committed would probably be less, i At the same time, it is'not pretended that the penalty, with all its terrors, is put of proportion to the deserts of the graver sort of criminals.