ABSTRACT
The main cause of the increase of crime, however, was the leniency of sentences of penal servitude. There is evidence to suggest that the ‘moral panic’ of the years led to crimes being defined rather easily as garotte robberies, and thus to severe sentences. Crime is evidently making a fresh start, it is becoming young again, there is the spring and saliency of a now morning of life about its ways and habits. It sticks at nothing, and marks its prey as coolly in one's thoroughfares as if it were watching in the lane or forest. The judicial statistics of last year give an increase of 556 burglaries over the preceding year, and the same judicial statistics give an increase also of about a thousand tickets-of-leave in that year over the preceding year.
