Whatever advantages were supposed to pertain to a system of domestic punishment, it was opposed by formidable difficulties. To Bentham's system it was objected, that it required a supervision practically unattainable. The enthusiasm, ability, and integrity of the projector, it was alleged, would be probably confined to himself; and although the better plan, while under his eye, it would prove of all the most dangerous and inefficient, when directed by the unskilful and corrupt.[56] Nor did it prevent the return of the offender to society, and thus a relapse into crime.
The large preliminary outlay required to test the scheme of Bentham, which exceeded his first calculations, was urged against its trial, and its complicated details wearied the attention of the county magistrates. They preferred transportation, and cheerfully resigned the offender to the good or ill-fortune of his colonial career.
These views were strengthened by the increasing aversion to capital punishments. To detain a criminal for life seemed cruel to himself, and to release him would be perilous to the community. His treatment while in bonds, would vary with the temper of individuals entrusted with his punishment. This, Bentham himself confessed: he observed--"different tempers prescribe different measures of security and indulgence. Some forget that a convict in prison is a sensitive being; others that he is put in there for punishment. Some grudge him every gleam of comfort or alleviation of misery, to which his situation is susceptible; to others every little privation, every little unpleasant feeling, every unaccustomed circumstance, every necessary point of coercive discipline, presents matter for a charge of inhumanity."[57]
To American transportation, the following is a summary of his objections. 1. It was unequal: a man who had money might buy off the servitude. Again, with regard to banishment, it was unequal: some would have been glad to go by choice, others would rather die. 2. It was unexemplary: what the convict suffered, be it much or little, was unknown. 3. It was unfrugal: it occasioned great waste of life in the mode, and of money in the expenses of conveyance. 4. It did answer in some degree, in disabling the offender from doing further mischief: yet it has always been easier for a man to return from transportation than to escape from prison. 5. It answered, every now and then, the purposes of reformation pretty well; but not so well upon the whole, under the variable and uncertain direction of a private master, whose object was his own profit, as it might be expected to answer under regulations concerted by the united wisdom of the nation.[58] In these objections to American transportation the colonists will recognise familiar sounds--the chief elements of the arguments, in times both remote and recent, against the practice of transportation.