3-074-572 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches in Scotland-Yard: the Convict Office for ticket-of-leave men and others under police supervision, 1883. 'A Trainer of Young Thieves...[View of] the arrangements for the supervision and identification of persons who have already been convicted of crime. There is a Convict Office...at which registers and records are kept, with photographs in classified albums, of all persons in England who are convicts liberated on license, or who are under sentence of police supervision. There is a corresponding Registry of Habitual Criminals in the Prisons' Department of the Home Office. Our Artist has very effectively illustrated the serviceableness of the Convict Office, by drawing the portrait of a known "trainer of young thieves," in the same Engraving which represents the scene in the Office, when that identical malefactor, who is a ticket-of-leave man, comes at the appointed time to report himself; while one of the assistants, directed by another reading from the paper, is reaching down from the shelves a volume of the register, containing photographs, one of which will be found to be his likeness. These photographs are daily made available for inspection by any police officer who may have arrested a person, and who needs to identify him...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.