Twenty Years' Recollections of an Irish Police MagistratePorter, Frank Thorpe
History
Twenty Years' Recollections of an Irish Police Magistrate
Porter, Frank Thorpe
Crime -- Ireland; Criminals -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs; Porter, Frank Thorpe, 1801-1882
Two musicians belonging to a regimental band were observed one night to
cross a wall at Inchicore, into a garden abounding with every
description of choice fruit. The police were quietly apprised of the
offence, and the delinquents were apprehended coming out of the premises
precisely at the place where they had entered. They were both Germans.
Their pockets were crammed, and each had a handkerchief containing as
much as could be bundled in it. They had not taken a peach, apricot, or
plum; even the pears and apples were disregarded; and the produce of
their daring raid consisted entirely of onions. I committed them for a
week, and they were dismissed from the service by the regimental
authorities.
REFORMATORIES.
Previous to my retirement from magisterial duty, the offence of
fruit-stealing had greatly diminished, and I believe that it does not
now attain one-tenth of its former frequency. When the magistrates were
empowered to send juvenile thieves to reformatories, corporal punishment
ceased to be administered. I preferred having a boy flogged and
discharged to sending him to prison, to be kept, at the public expense,
in baneful associations. As soon, however, as a reformatory became
available, I transmitted the juvenile offenders, after a few days'
imprisonment, to the care and instruction which, in all those
institutions, have produced most beneficial results. My first
consignment to Glencree Reformatory was made under circumstances rather
extraordinary.
I was invited by my kind and valued friend, the late Mr. George Evans,
of Portrane, to spend a week at his hospitable mansion. Arrangements
were made by me with my colleagues to admit of my absence for that time,
and that I should take the duty on the Monday of the succeeding week.
Accordingly, I came to Dublin from Donabate by an early train, and
commenced the custody cases about ten o'clock, a.m. A constable
prosecuted a lad whom he had met on Rathmines Road about four o'clock on
that morning, carrying a coarse bath-sheet, in which two check shirts,
three pairs of cotton socks, and a washing waistcoat were wrapped. The
prisoner was charged with having those articles in his possession, they
being "reasonably suspected of having been stolen or unlawfully
obtained." I called on the prisoner to account to my satisfaction how he
came by them. He declined any explanation, and produced a laugh in court
by saying "that I would know time enough." I ordered him to be
imprisoned for a week, and then to be transmitted to Glencree for three
years. On my return home to Roundtown in the evening, I was told that my
bath-sheet, nightshirts, &c., had been stolen on the previous night from
a bleaching-line in the back yard, over the wall of which my first envoy
to Glencree had managed to clamber. The articles did not remain long in
the police store.
APOLOGIES FOR VIOLENCE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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