VICTIM OF OLD BRUTAL SYSTEM.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3555, 21 June 1912, Page 7

VICTIM OF OLD BRUTAL SYSTEM.

CONVICT SPENDS HALF A CENTURY IN PRISON FOR STEALING £2O- - FOR MERCY. (From Our Special Correspondent.) , LONDON, May IS. An extraordinary spectacle was j>sented in the dock at the London Sessions on Tuesday—a grey-haired, greybearded man, sixty-eight-' years of ago, who had spent three parts of his Inc —half a century—in -prison for thefts which to-day would call forth a comparatively trifling sentence. He is a laborer, named George Lawrence, and was found “guilty” of being an habitual criifiinal. He also pleaded guilty to having stolen a coat and other articles from an office in Chelsea.

The judge, commenting on some of the man’s sentences—five years for stealing coats and three terms of ton years for stealing forks, a box, and an overcoat respectively—said that for any one .'of those offences he would nowadays probably only receive three months’ imprisonment. It was an echo of the -brutal system of years ago. “In all I have served nearly fifty years in -prison,” said the old convict, “and I don’t suppose the things I stole were worth £2O altogether. I have never had a chance in my life.” The judge at first -passed sentence of three years’ penal servitude for the theft and) five years’ preventive detention, saying it was the minimum the law allowed in such a case, but later ho decided that the offence was one in -which he could, having regard to the past treatment of the prisoner, pass a sentence of twelve months’ hard labor, thus avoiding the sentence of preventive detention. When he heard the altered sentence the old man, -bringing liis f ,hand up to a military salute, exclaimed, in tones -of gratitude, “I will endeavor to make it my very last, sir.”