Life is nasty, brutish and short

Usk is now a small but pleasant town, but exploring Usk’s House of Correction Keeper’s Book for 1821 – 34 is both chilling and instructive:

A lady from Llanfoist called Mary Howard was sentenced to a year’s hard labour for bearing a child out of wedlock. There is no record of what happened to the child.

Little mercy was shown to vandals. William Morgan was imprisoned for a month for venting his ‘unlawful and malicious’ rage upon ‘one chestnut tree and one gooseberry tree in a certain garden.’

Welfare claims were not encouraged Richard Powell of Llangibby spent a month in prison for not providing for his family. 

 In 1827, James Williams was given three months for stealing three cabbages, a month for each cabbage.

In 1871, the Monmouthshire Merlin reported the case of William Betts (15) and James Betts (11) and Joanna Betts their mother. The two boys were convicted of stealing a lump of coal from a railway wagon from Newport docks. They were given a lashing and a day in gaol to ponder on their crime. Their mother was given 12 months hard labour because the boys had been her responsibility. She died within a year of her release. 

Twelve-year-old Sarah Hone was sentenced to hard labour for stealing a scarf. Soon after her release, she was sentenced to five years in a reformatory school for sleeping in somebody’s back lavatory in order to escape her drunken father. Rehabilitation clearly worked for her; she died in a Monmouthshire workhouse in 1899.

Jane Ann White was given three months hard labour for stealing some rashers of bacon, Randolph Pearcey six months for stealing six sticks of wood. Gardener George Peglar was given three years for stealing a pair of brass candlesticks. Olaf Hansen, a sailor, stole a mouth organ and was given seven days, and ragman, Will Wiltshire, blew a horn in the street and was sentenced to seven days for disturbing the peace.

One's first instinct is to recoil at the harshness of a previous penal code but, it raises some obvious questions when you consider what now prevails: shoplifting increasingly a lifestyle choice with instances of staff being sacked for trying to prevent it, and whole areas of the country where it is not safe to be out after dark. Will Wiltshire, given seven days imprisonment for blowing a horn, would give a rueful shake of the head if he was to wander Newport now on a Saturday night. 

There is no obvious answer as to whether we are now to lenient or the past too hard; but it would be foolish to ignore Thomas Hobbes’ dictum that life is ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ and that left to themselves, people pursue their own interests at the expense of everyone else. His solution was a social contract whereby an authoritarian state would enforce obedience in exchange for peace, law and order. 

Different countries offer different solutions. The San Salvador approach might have some merit, at least for those not incarcerated.

The Chinese have adopted a different approach to the problem with its surveillance society and social credit system. There, good behaviour is encouraged by an all enveloping 'stick and carrot' approach.

For me the worst solution is just to ignore the problem. So, what is my solution? I have none other than a warning. In Thomas Hobbes’ Social Contract, the people should no longer feel obliged to obey or accept a government that fails in its part of the bargain.