ps, ten per cent. of the prison
population.

[30] In 1889 there is a slight decrease.

Let us now consider the case of young offenders between the ages of 16
and 21. This is the most momentous for weal or woe of all periods of
life. During this stage, the transition from youth to manhood is
taking place; the habits then formed acquire a more enduring
character, and, in the majority of cases, determine the whole future
of the individual. If youths between the ages just mentioned could by
any possibility be prevented from embarking on a criminal career, the
drop in the criminal population would be far-reaching in its effects.
It is from the ranks of young people just entering early manhood that
a large proportion of the habitual criminal population is recruited;
and if this critical period of life can be tided over without repeated
acts of crime, there is much less likelihood of a young man
degenerating afterwards into a criminal of the professional class. It
is most important that the professional criminal class should be
diminished at a quicker rate than is the case at present; and, in
spite of police statistics to the contrary, it is a class which has
not become perceptibly smaller within the last twenty or five and
twenty years. A proof of this statement is to be seen in the fact that
offences against property with violence display a tendency to
increase, and it is offences of this nature which are pre-eminently
the work of the habitual criminal. It is a comparatively rare thing to
find a habitual criminal stop mid-way in his sinister career; the
accumulated impressions resulting from a life of crime have too
effectively succeeded in shaping his character and conduct, and he
persists, as a rule, in leading an anti-social life so long as he has
physical strength to do it.

The only hope, therefore, of diminishing the habitual criminal
population, is to lessen the number of recruits; and as most of these
recruits are to be found among lads of between sixteen and twenty-one,
it is to these lads that serious attention must be directed. Every year
a certain proportion of youths ranging between these two ages shows a
pronounced disposition to enter permanently upon a criminal life by
repeatedly returning to prison. The deterrent effect of short sentences
has ceased to operate upon them, and all the symptoms are present that
a downright career of crime has begun. In such circumstances what is to
be done? A plan has b