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No Deterrent. Ever since 1925, when a reporter visited Guiana and wrote a blistering exposé of the prison colony for his paper, Le Petit Parisien, enlightened Frenchmen have been clucking over the shameful institution they call "the dry guillotine," but little was done about it. It took more than ten years before the French government finally admitted that Cayenne "does not appear to have any deterrent effect upon the criminals" and was "not good for the prestige of France in [the American] continent." In 1938 the government announced its intention to let the penal colony "disappear by extinction." Red tape, lassitude and the demands of World War II slowed down the process, but last February the government decided to bring home the last convicts and libérés. Last week Théodore Roussel, a freed man who had spent more than 50 of his 76 years in French Guiana for a long-forgotten robbery, gazed blankly at the soft landscape of his native land. "I can't blame anyone but myself," he said of his wasted life. "I was headstrong."