The memorandum of the chief police magistrate, beside briefly describing the practice of former times, recommended important changes for the future. Instead of assignment from the ships, he suggested that all prisoners should be placed on the public works, for a period to be fixed by the judges. He proposed a new distribution of time penalties: thus instead of seven, fourteen years, and life, to recognise by law a more minute and proportionate sub-division. In assignment, he recommended wages, rateable at the discretion of government; afterwards a _first class_ ticket-of-leave, with a permission to choose employers; and a _second class_, to include most of the privileges of freedom, voidable only by a court of quarter sessions for specified offences. The conditional pardon he deemed it necessary to defer a longer time than usual; since, when released from surveillance and responsibility, ticket-holders often relapsed into the vices from which they had previously emerged. Mr. Spode concurred with the chief police magistrate, though with serious reservations: especially, he deprecated any delay of assignment--a state he deemed most conducive to reform, and highly useful to the colony. Mr. Forster had declared that female prisoners "_were not available subjects for prison discipline_." Mr. Spode recommended solitary confinement, or marriage. In the meantime, Maconochie having drawn up his report, submitted it to Captain Cheyne, and made a proselyte. Captain Cheyne took the colony by surprise. Not only did he denounce assignment, but spoke of the settlers with still less tenderness: he asserted that a great proportion of those entrusted with convicts "were dissolute in their habits, and depraved in their principles." That there "existed a fearful degree of depravity, unparalleled in any age;" that assignment was the great source of crime and caste: for the convict "no man cared;" few were exempt from contemptuous and brutal treatment--few escaped punishment. Such opinions could only usher in a system radically new. Thus Captain Cheyne proposed to divide the prisoners into gangs of two hundred each, and the adoption of task work proportioned to physical strength. He proposed wages to be paid to the road parties, to be expended in the purchase of comforts, or reserved for a future day. On introducing the prisoners into society, he recommended a graduated scale of indulgence, not greatly dissimilar from the propositions stated already.