Word: penal
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Review. At 30 he was an M. P., the most effective speaker in Parliament. Two years later he was the hero of the bitterly fought Reform Bill. At 33 he was a member of the supreme council of India. (Resigning five years later, Macaulay left behind a new Indian penal code and educational system, had saved ?30,000.) He became the most successful English essayist (sometimes so intoxicated with erudite digressions that he wound up lamely saying that space did not permit him to finish); and a historian whose publishers gladly sent him ?20,000 advance royalties on the last...
...than 25 traitors to France have generally inhabited Devil's Island at one time. Currently only five or six exiles live on the island. So publicized was the case of the first prisoner on Devil's Island, the martyred Captain Alfred Dreyfus, that the entire French Guiana penal colony commonly takes the name of the tiny island...
...really for 14 years-seven years at hard labor, seven years as a libéré (freedman) confined to French Guiana. Any sentence for more than seven years is just a nice name for a life term, since the prisoner is then automatically condemned forever to the penal colony. It is usually the freedmen who escape...
...Salvation Army has recently repatriated over 200 men who have served out their time. About 93,000 convicts have been sent to French Guiana since the penal colony was established in 1852. Some commentators have pictured the colony as a happy, carefree settlement. The French Guiana climate is always humid, with the temperature ranging from 68 to 90 degrees, with frequent trade winds from both southeast and northeast. Undeniable fact, however, is the large number of deaths, which each year has generally equaled the number of importations, as well as the large number of men of broken health and spirits...
...open sore if not outright scandal that was long French Guiana made little impression on successive French governments until Léon Blum became Premier. Then the penal colony was described as a failure. The escaped convicts were said to reflect on Frenchmen everywhere. Explains the bill finally adopted: "Such a situation cannot be prolonged without doing injury to the prestige of France...