The contagious influence of your jails is so well known, and so justly
dreaded, that he who comes out from them is everywhere an object of
scorn, aversion, and alarm. Were he twenty times an honest man, he would
scarcely find occupation anywhere. And what is more: the penalty of a
ticket-of-leave banishes him to small localities, where his past life
must be well known; and here he will have no means of exercising the
exceptionable employment often imposed on the prisoners by the contractors
of the maisons centrales. If the liberated convict has the courage to
resist temptation, he abandons himself to some of those murderous
occupations of which we have spoken, to the preparation of certain
chemical productions, by which one in ten perishes; or, if he has the
strength, he goes to get out stone in the forest of Fontainebleau, an
employment which he survives, average time, six years! The condition of
a liberated convict is, then, much worse, more painful, more difficult,
than it was before his first criminal action: he lives surrounded by
shackles and dangers; he is obliged to brave repulses and disdain--often
the deepest misery. And if he succumbs to all these frightful temptations
to criminality, and commits a second crime, you show yourself ten times
more severe toward him than for his first fault. That is unjust; for it
is almost always the necessity you impose on him which conducts him to a
second crime.
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