The progressive or retrogressive passage from one phase to another
is made by a sort of automatic regulator, depending on the number
of marks gained or lost by the prisoner through his good or bad
behaviour, to which we know the moral or psychological value to be
attached--a value purely negative.
This progressive, gradual, or Irish system has obtained a
supremacy in Europe, so that even Belgium, the classic land of the
cellular system, reconsidered the ideas which it had based on
daily experience, and was the first continental country to
introduce conditional sentences (in 1888), which are the fruit of
short sentences and cellular punishments.
I do not deny that this progressive system is better than the
others, though we must not forget that the almost miraculous
effects of amendment and decrease of recidivism (which indeed are
claimed for every new system, only to be disproved later on) were
due in Ireland to the wholesale emigration of those conditionally
released to North America--an emigration amounting to 46 per cent.
of the prisoners released. Nor must we forget that this system,
which requires a trained staff of officers, is less difficult to
work in countries where, as in Ireland, there are only a few
hundred prisoners; but it would be much more difficult in Italy or
France, where the prisoners are numbered by tens of thousands.
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