MOUNT EDEN DISCIPLINE

Observer, Volume XXVII, Issue 20, 2 February 1907, Page 2

MOUNT EDEN DISCIPLINE

Love-letters Within the Gaol.

THE affiliation case of Mangan versus Stephenson Wrack throws

an interesting light upon the state of discipline in Mount Eden prison. Seeing that the cane itself is, at the time of writing, undecided, we are not entitled, nor do we deeire, to express any opinion with regard to its merits, or the reflections it involves upon the personal behaviour of an employee of the State. The attitude of the Minister of Justice with regard to the conduct of a gaol official, however, is an entirely different matter. It reveals an apparent indifference to serious charges that is, to say the least of it, extraordinary.

Briefly, the facts are that Gertrude Mangan, an ex-prisoner at Mount Eden, charges Charles Stephenson Wrack, one of the gaol warders, with being the father of her illegitimate child. Whether he is so or not is the question which the magistrate has yet to determine. Bat incidentally, she alleges that, though there were no impropei relations between her and Wrack until after she had served her sentence, the defendant abused his position as a gaol official by carrying on a clandestine correspondence with her in her cell, and also surreptitiously carried notes written by her to the horne 3 of her parents. Surely, this was a sufficiently grave reflectiou upon the gaol system to call for the fullest official investigation. J

The Minister of Justice, however, to whom the charges were sent directly by the Mangans, did not think so. Through the Inspector of Prisons he replied that the charges had been submitted to Warder Wrack, and that as he had emphatically denied them the Minister considered that no departmental investigation would be satisfactory — that the proper channel for such an inquiry waa a courc of law. All of which, as the pronouncement of the Minister in charge of the department, is not a little singular. Here were charges levelled at the system in one of the branches of his department, and yet be left it to the option of private persons whether an inquiry into these charges should be set afoot.

In thß first place, the law courts were not open to the Mangans when the Minister's decision was given. Their only possible recourse would be by means of affiliation proceedings, and at that time the child of the accusing girl had not been born. In any case, the question of paternity could have had no direct bearing upon Stephenson Wrack's alleged official delinquencies. Was it a question for the magistrate whether Wrack had written notes to the girl beginning " Dear Gertie," and signed " Fred ?" Could the magistrate, in a paternity case, have gone into the question whether Wrack had received notes from the girl dropped out of the window of her cell into the exercise yard ? Or whether he had arranged with her to plant some other of his billets-doux under a certain barrel ? And yet these allegations, as relating to the conduct of a prisoner and a warder, should have been a matter of grave significance to the department

If it is true that any warder in the gaol, be he married or be he single, has been able to place himself in friendly intercourse with a prisoner, and has constituted himself a means of connection between that prisoner and outside friends, the sooner the details of the prison administration are officially looked into the better. Indeed, now that the matter has been made public through the medium of the court proceedings, it would be bare justice to the gaol officials to have the matter investigated, in order to give them the opportunity of vindicating themselves. The very fact that the warder's wife was formerly prominent in political agitation, and that the correspondence definitely charges the Wracks with boasting that their political influence could block inquiry into this particular matter, should have made the Minister especially alert to see that he gave no opportunity for criticism.