Part 14 (1/2)

”Five s.h.i.+llings and costs or seven days.” This familiar phrase, as Count Smorltork says, ”surprises by himself” the whole philosophy of police courts. Nothing is more marked in the treatment of rich and poor in the police court than the unfair incidence of fines. Take, for instance, the common case of a motor-car driver being fined forty s.h.i.+llings and costs for exceeding the speed limit and driving to the danger of mankind. If his master is a Cabinet Minister, say, he writes a civil letter to the clerk to the magistrates expressing his regret and enclosing the needful, which is just two five-thousandths of his official income.

But supposing he is a taxi-cab driver who owns his cab, or is buying it on the hire system, as many do. He, too, is fined forty s.h.i.+llings and costs, and as he earns, let us say, forty s.h.i.+llings a week, he has to pay one fifty-second of his income.

If he cannot raise the money his home is distrained on, or there is the option of imprisonment. That kind of option never worries the Cabinet Minister or the chauffeur thereof. In the old t.i.the days the parson took his tenth from rich and poor alike, and was no respecter of persons; all he wanted was one-tenth of your income in cash. As between Cabinet Minister and cabman the relation of fine should be as two pounds to ninepence--that is to say, if the law in the police courts desires to treat rich and poor alike.

There is no difficulty about doing this. All that is wanted is to enact in your statute that the fine should ”not exceed one-fiftieth or one one-thousandth of a man's income.” Then all would be fined off the same mark. At present the poor man is the scratch man, and the greater the wealth the longer the handicap.

As to costs, they should be wholly abolished. They are not only an odious tax on the poor, but they give the officials of the court an unholy incentive to make the court a paying concern, and, what is worse, give every clerk and officer in the police court a direct pecuniary interest in convictions. As things stand to-day a council of city men are not likely to advance salaries where their police court is losing money. A G.o.dly and righteous police court should glory in losing money year by year.

And whilst I recognise that at the head of each police court there should be a stipendiary to deal with the more important cases, and always to be within call when there are cases to try in which the local magistrates have a cla.s.s interest, yet I have no desire to abolish Dogberry, nor do I take any pleasure in reading that he has written himself down an a.s.s. In our chief cities there are now excellent stipendiaries and magistrates of all cla.s.ses, including representatives of working men, and all can testify how--taking the police court system as it stands--it is worked fairly and carefully and to the advantage of all.

But these places are far ahead of the county towns and districts where the squire and parson reign supreme, and the clerk to the justices is their own faithful attorney. I believe thoroughly that these men do their best, but it is quite impossible that they can take a normal view of such horrible crimes as the rape of a pheasant's egg or the snaring of a hare.

It is from the beautiful little corners of the lovely English country that the bitter cry of injustice in the police courts makes itself heard from time to time in the public Press. Why should not every hamlet have its Village Plowden to brighten life on the country side?

There we see, let us hope, the last of a decaying and rotten system--justice administered by a cla.s.s unlearned in law, and unlearned in a far more important branch of their business--the knowledge of the works and days and temptations of the fellow sinners whose judges they have elected themselves to be. In the remote country places more than anywhere is the stipendiary a necessity. Meanwhile, why should not direct representatives of the agricultural labourer be placed upon the bench if we are not to abolish Dogberry altogether?

While these words are being written, an effort is being made with a Criminal Administration Bill to do away with some of the abuses of the police court. The imprisonment of people for non-payment of fines is really imprisonment for poverty, and the scandal of it is at last officially recognised and the necessity of reform admitted. That, at all events, is to the good, though it is to be hoped that if the Bill at present put forward is to pa.s.s it will be widely extended and simplified.

It is quite a good thing to enact that it shall be obligatory upon magistrates to grant time for the payment of fines, but seeing that the magistrates have always had this power and never used it to any useful extent it would be well that there should be less discretion about the matter. Law for lay magistrates should be automatic and fool-proof. When you enact that a magistrate is obliged to allow time for payment of fines, ”unless the Court for any other special reason expressly directs that no time shall be allowed,” you are surely inviting the average justice to supply himself with special reasons why he should not carry out a law which you know by his past history he dislikes. It must not be forgotten that in Manchester, although the fees legally allowed for a summons are twelve s.h.i.+llings, the practice has been for fees not to exceed the fine.

Imprisonment for less than five days--which in the future is not to be permitted--has for a long time not been allowed by the practice of the Manchester justices. Where justices desire to be lenient and enforce the law temperately they can do so to-day, and therefore it is clearly no use in a new statute to leave a discretion to those who will certainly abide by old and evil customs unless they are forced to do otherwise.

The statistics of the police courts show that in one year 92,000 citizens were imprisoned in default of the payment of a fine and 80,000 imprisoned without the option. The number of persons sentenced to pay fines is no less than 460,000. Every year new statutes are pa.s.sed making new offences which can be committed with practical impunity by those whose purses are long enough. Under the heading Betting and Gaming, 3,346 persons were fined and only 738 went to prison. Under the heading Motor Cars, 10,631 were fined and only 36 went to prison in default; under the heading Sunday Trading, 6,654 were fined and only 12 went to prison by default. These offences are generally committed by persons with some money; but where the parties are poor what a terrible difference in their punishment. The mere giving of time to pay fines will not abolish this injustice unless the fines are made, as has been suggested, in some ratio proportionate to a man's income. If it were enacted that a fine should not exceed a day's wage earned by the prisoner, that would be a method of doing away with the burden of useless imprisonment that has to be borne by the poor. It is no use enacting that the Court in fining an offender shall take into consideration the means of the offender. I make no doubt that this is done already to a large extent by stipendiaries and the more enlightened magistrates. What is wanted is an actual printed tariff of fines fairly proportioned to the means of the offender, beyond which the magistrates may not go. Measures that depend on the sympathetic working by the members of the bench will be in many districts a dead letter, and inasmuch as the folk who go to prison in these cases are always poor people, very little will be known of their trouble except by those few persons who study blue books and statistics.

This habit of the magistracy to ignore the good intentions of Parliament and the Home Office is in nothing more marked than in the refusal of many country benches to give bail to poor people charged with offences that have to be tried at Sessions or a.s.sizes. Many judges have called the Grand Juries' attention to the large number of prisoners who are left in prison awaiting trial, some of whom are ultimately acquitted. But this is one of the matters where magistrates must of necessity have discretion, and although they receive Home Office circulars calling attention to their duties in the matter of bail they prefer to go their own wrong-headed way and unnecessarily keep a large number of poor persons in prison who might quite safely be allowed to remain out on bail.

It is curious how history repeats itself and how a lay magistracy, as a type, always tends to act without sympathy or consideration for the poor.

A hundred years ago the Yorks.h.i.+re magistrates came to the conclusion that it was a most improper thing that poor people committed for trial to the House of Correction should be allowed to idle their time away at the expense of the county, so they actually required them to work for their living, and as the treadmill was the only apparatus of a commercial character in the gaol the poor untried prisoner was put to walking round a wheel in company of his convicted brother. The way in which the matter was put by Mr. John Headlam, M.A., Chairman of the Quarter Sessions for the North Riding of the County of York, is a perfect specimen of the true Dogberry temperament: ”With respect to those sentenced to labour as a punishment, I apprehend, there is no difference of opinion. All are agreed that it is a great defect in any prison where such convicts are unemployed. But as to all other prisoners, whether debtors, persons committed for trial, or convicts not sentenced to hard labour, if they have no means of subsisting themselves, and must, if discharged, either labour for their livelihood or apply for parochial relief; it seems unfair to society at large, and especially to those who maintain themselves by honest industry, that those who, by offending the laws, have subjected themselves to imprisonment, should be lodged and clothed and fed, without being called upon for the same exertions which others have to use to obtain such advantages.”

Of course the whole question is begged when an untried prisoner is called an offender against the laws. The Headlam view of him always has been, and is to-day, that the mere fact that a policeman has arrested him is proof that he is an offender; this for all time has been justices' law, but it is doubtful whether the old doctrine that a man is to be deemed innocent until found guilty by a jury of his peers is not still sound law and ought not to be more fully recognised by the lay magistrates.

Of course the particular wrong that Mr. Headlam was contending for has long been abolished, not indeed without much argument and trouble, but we still punish an untried man by imprisoning him before trial, and in very many cases this is wholly unnecessary. The idea of keeping a man in prison is that he should be forthcoming on the day of trial. In some serious cases it is obviously necessary to keep a man in custody, but in many small cases if a cheap bail was fixed there would be no difficulty in finding the sureties and the prisoner could be outside arranging for his defence and earning money for the support of his family until the day of the trial.

Of 598 people acquitted at a.s.size Courts only 294 were allowed bail, so that there is a clear admission in the official figures of three hundred innocent persons--or persons not provably guilty--remaining in prison because the justices will not carry out the Home Office suggestions as to bail. Remember too that in some remote places there are very few a.s.sizes and eighteen of these unhappy persons remained over three months in prison awaiting trial. At Quarter Sessions the figures are even more remarkable.

Of 1,586 prisoners acquitted only 688 had been granted bail. Here you have a large number of innocent men and women kept in gaol charged with offences that are not of the most serious character, and this is done not because in this peculiar instance the law itself is harsh--because the law permits bail and the government office calls on the magistrates to make use of the law--but because the law is administered by well-meaning but incompetent men who have a fixed delusion, handed down to them from their forbears of hundreds of years ago, that a man arrested for a crime by the police and awaiting trial is, to use Mr. Headlam's phrase, ”an offender against the laws.” Where there are no stipendiary magistrates it would not be a bad plan to give any prisoner a right to appeal on refusal of bail to a judge of the County Court who lives within the district and is of necessity a magistrate though he seldom has much time to sit at petty sessions.

Before we leave the Police Court I should like to draw attention to a well-founded complaint against police methods that the Home Office might certainly take into their consideration when they are reforming the administration of the criminal law. I refer to the practice of identification which has come so prominently before public notice in recent criminal trials. I never met a prisoner who felt that it was fairly done. For myself, I have the firmest belief that the police endeavour as a rule to do what is right and straight, but after all we must not lose sight of the fact that the police are there to clear up the crime and to run in somebody--the real criminal of course for choice--and it seems hardly right to put them at this very critical moment into the position of a judicial authority deciding the most important point for or against the man they have arrested and believe to be guilty.

I have always wondered what legal right a policeman has to put you in a row with a lot of other men and bring people to look at you. Suppose a prisoner refused to undergo the ordeal and the policeman used force to compel him, could the prisoner recover damages for a.s.sault. These are recondite, and in a sense absurd points; but they do, I think, help one to see how wrong the present system is. At the ceremony of identification it is obviously necessary that there should be a presiding magistrate to see fair play and to take a record of what happened. It is really a part of the trial and a most important part of the trial. That a witness should identify a prisoner in a police yard in the absence of a judicial authority is clearly an unjust thing. Once he--or more especially she--has done so, the further swearing to the prisoner when he is in the dock is nothing. What the magistrate ought to see is the demeanour of the identifier when he first recognises the prisoner and especially ought a justice to be present to see that there is no suspicion of unfairness in the methods employed by the police.

We have had so many tragedies brought about by so-called identification, that it is more than time that the business of it was taken out of the hands of the police and made an integral part of the trial before the magistrate to which it in truth belongs. These reforms will not, I think, come about until we have stipendiary magistrates on the county benches, but though I wish to see this I do not want the old office of Justice of the Peace to be abolished. There is, and rightly ought to be, a keen desire among laymen to attain to this position, and it is an office of much dignity and respect and one in which a good man under sound legal advice can do worthy public service. I have been a local justice of the peace for many years and can testify to the number of occasions upon which a magistrate residing in his district is called upon for small services that would cost the applicant time and money if there was no available magistrate.

A great many lay benches with a clerk of sound learning and legal education administer excellent justice throughout the country. But there are cla.s.ses of cases connected with property that would be better tried by a stipendiary unconnected with county society. I have a pa.s.sion for old-world things, and grieve over the disappearance of the parish constables, the head boroughs, the t.i.thing-men, the aletasters, the beadles, and the reeves. I do not wish to abolish the Justice of the Peace. I only wish to put him in his proper place. Of course, if he cannot be happy there, then I am afraid he will have to go.

CHAPTER XII

LANDLORD AND TENANT

At number seven there's n.o.b'dy lives, they left it yesterday; Th' b.u.m-baylis coom an' marked their things, an' took 'em a' away.