Among the items of convict expense was a charge of £164,000 for rations. This Lord Stanley considered an extravagant outlay. He deemed it highly improper that in a country where all the means of subsistence existed in such abundance with an unlimited supply of manual labor, this charge should remain. He however feared that while the convicts were permitted to labor on works of colonial utility the local authorities would always find means to increase the charges for their subsistence (Feb. 28, '43). The treasury concurred in this view, and requested that explicit instructions might be given to Wilmot and the comptroller-general to prevent the employment of labor for the colonial benefit, and to devote their utmost efforts to raise the food on the waste lands of the colony.
The convict department attempted agriculture, and they selected for the experiment cold, damp, and barren soils. Gardens of a few acres occupied a thousand men: the cleared land was utterly worthless. Garden seeds were brought into the colonial market, and potatos sold at twenty shillings which cost the government £10 per ton. Several hundred men idled their time in cultivating land which did not equal in the aggregate a single farm.[240] The estimated value of all the articles produced on two stations, Deloraine and Westbury, in 1846, by four hundred men, was less than £2 per man; while the salaries of their officers were nearly double that sum.[241]
Mr. Montagu, the late colonial secretary, in estimating the cost of the convict department, presented a calculation £100,000 annually less than the estimate of the officers on the spot. This difference Lord Stanley set up as proof of the culpable negligence and profligacy of colonial expense. He considered the body of persons employed in the control of prisoners excessive. A reduction was therefore enforced, and in the end less surveillance was employed than free labor usually requires.
To each party of three hundred seven overseers were attached, without constables or other restraint. The sub-division of these parties in labor left them often to the practical oversight of a single person, and he an expiree. Thus they were able to make excursions for the purposes of robbery and pleasure: their clothing tended rather to disguise than distinguish them. As the terms of their service expired they were discharged in the prison dress, and no one could tell whether they were or not illegally at large. Escaped prisoners have been known to walk through bodies of men on the road without challenge. In several instances robberies were committed on travellers within the precincts of the stations. The enclosures were often merely the common garden fence. The judges avowed that in passing sentence for crimes they could not punish them with severity, considering the strong temptations of the men. Remembering the number virtually and legally at large, the degree of safety, or rather the instances of exemption from pillage, must be considered almost miraculous. A great portion of minor crimes were not prosecuted, and a still larger number were undetected; but eight hundred recorded crimes--a scourge to ten thousand families, and full of terror and danger to all--would not seem extravagant when divided among thirty thousand prisoners.