report for 1881
add:--

"The condition of most of our life prisoners is deplorable in the last
degree. Not a few of them are hopelessly insane; but insanity, even,
brings them no surcease of sorrow. However wild their delusions may be
on other subjects, they never fail to appreciate the fact that they are
prisoners. Others, not yet classed as insane, as year by year goes by,
give only too conclusive evidence that reason is becoming unsettled. The
terribleness of a life sentence must be seen to be appreciated; seen,
too, not for a day or a week, but for a term of years. Quite a number of
young men have been committed to this prison in recent years under
sentence for life. Past experience leads us to expect that some of them
will become insane in less than ten years; and all of them, who live, in
less than twenty. Many of them will, doubtless, live much longer than
twenty years, strong and vigorous in body perhaps, but complete wrecks
in mind. May it, therefore, not be worthy of legislative consideration
whether life sentences should not be abolished and long but definite
terms substituted, and thus leave some faint glimmer of hope even for
the greatest criminals?"

Sir E. Du Cane stated in 1878 before the Royal Commission on Penal
Servitude Acts:--

"I myself do not think much of life sentences at all. I would rather
have a long fixed term. I think all the effect on the public outside
would be gained by a shorter period."

Mr W. Tallack, late Secretary of the Howard Association, writes in his
"Penelogical and Preventive principles":--

"Of life imprisonment it may be conclusively pronounced very bad in even
the best form of it. Years of enquiry and observation have increasingly
forced this conviction upon the writer.... A fixed limit of twenty years
would greatly aid the discipline of its subjects. And what is of more
importance so far as the public are concerned, it would, in most cases,
avail to practically incapacitate or effectually deter the persons who
pass through it from any repetition of their crime. The mere natural
operation of age, decay, and disease would tend towards this result; and
not only so, but it would, in a considerable proportion of cases, render
the limit of twenty years a virtual sentence in perpetuity by the
intervention of death. But meanwhile the elements of hope and other
desirable influences would be largely present, notwithstanding."

To say the least of it our criminals have a clai