It is perfectly obvious that the higher up in the official scale one goes, the less intimate knowledge of the lives of prisoners, of the social conditions under which they lived outside, and of their needs, can you reasonably expect to find as things are at present arranged. The man who has the best chance to get a licence under the Act is the man who can dodge best. All our experience points to the fact; and it is not uncommon for the most objectionable character, by subservience and sycophancy, to impress favourably those who have the dispensing of privileges, and this is not confined to prisons or prisoners.
When a prisoner is liberated on licence from a place of preventive detention and placed under the supervision or authority of a society or person, the society or person has to report in accordance with regulations to be made to the Secretary of State, on the conduct and circumstances of the licensee. The licence may be revoked at any time by the Secretary of State, when the person licensed must return to prison. If the person under licence escapes from the supervision of those under whom he has been placed, or if he breaks any conditions of the licence, he forfeits it altogether, and may be brought before a court of summary jurisdiction and charged with breach of licence, and on proof be sent back to the place of preventive detention. The time during which a person is out on licence is treated as a part of the term of detention to which he has been sentenced; unless he has failed to return after his licence has been revoked, in which case the time during which he may have been said to have escaped does not count as reducing the term of his sentence. The conditions of licence may be withdrawn at any time by the Secretary of State, and the person licensed be set absolutely free; but in any case, after he has been out on licence for five years the power to detain him lapses, provided he has observed the conditions of his licence during that time.
In both the Borstal and the Preventive Detention Institution it is intended to teach the inmates habits and pursuits that will be useful to them in the world outside. What these are will altogether depend on what is to happen to them on liberation. No institution has yet been devised that even remotely resembles anything like the life that its inmates have to anticipate.