harged Prisoners' Aid
Societies asking what was their experience with regard to
prisoners who had been four times arrested but not sentenced to
penal servitude, and had been arrested during a given period, say
a year. How many of them has turned out (a) satisfactory, (b)
unsatisfactory, (c) re-convicted? Detailed replies were received
from fifteen different societies, not all working in the same way,
or with the same machinery, giving a total of 253 such cases. Of
these only 95 were reported as satisfactory, 55 were reported as
unsatisfactory, 66 were re-convicted, 37 being unknown or
unaccounted for."

It has also to be remembered that a considerable proportion of
incorrigible offenders are not only mentally but also physically
unfitted to earn their living in a free community. Almost always
without a trade, and very often the children of diseased and
degenerate parents, the only kind of work which they can turn to is
rude manual labour, and this is exactly the kind of work they have not
the requisite physical strength to perform. It is only in skilled
trades that the physically weak have a chance at all, and if a feeble
person is not a skilled artisan he will, unless possessed of superior
mental gifts, find it rather a hard matter to earn a comfortable
livelihood. Should it be the case that such a person is below the
average in body and mind, to earn a livelihood becomes almost an
impossibility. Now, this is exactly the position of many habitual
criminals, and more especially of that large class of them which is
being continually convicted and reconvicted of petty offences. What
can be said of them, except to repeat that they are unfit to take a
part in working the modern industrial machine; what can be done with
them except to seclude them in such a way that they will be no longer
able to injure those who can work it.

Outside the ranks of the incorrigible and incapable there exists a
large class of offenders who are perfectly able to earn a honest
living in the world. In many cases it happens that such men require no
assistance on their liberation from prison; they can resume work
immediately their sentence has expired. All that is needed is to send
them back to the district they were tried in, and this is what is
always done if a man cannot reach his destination by mid-day on the
morning of his liberation. But in a certain number of cases discharged
prisoners require more