EX-CONVICTS CHANCE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 53, Issue 211, 19 June 1933, Page 8

EX-CONVICTS CHANCE.

LONDON'S GOOD SAMARITAN.

FRESH START IN LIFE. The story of the remarkable activities of a wealthy Londoner, Mr Arnold Hamer Hall, who is spending his days and' fortune providing a fresh start in life for ex-conyicts, was told in the "Sunday Chronicle" recently. Mr Hall reclaims men from crime and brings them back into society by running a business staffed by the men themselves. His theory is: Give a man a job and a chance to make good, and he. will become a good citizen again, and help to reduce the 12,000 population of Britain's prisons. So successful are Mr Hall's plans that he is opening larger: premises. Once these men were criminals, men for whom society had no further use. To-day they are fighting their way back to self-respect again. It was a visit to a prison about ten years ago which made Mr Hall their friend. He was a man of independent means, with a country house, an estate, a yacht, and the mastership of a pack of foxhouds. He says the stories he heard convinced him that something must be done about discharged prisoners, so he decided to devote his life to their welfare, y Eight years ago Mr Hall opened a smalf basement business in Earl's Court, London, and employed one man. Then he a shop in Kensington where, altogether, he has employed about 50 ex-convicts who have worked for him for a while and then gone on to ether jobs. "Nowadays I get anything up to five men to see me every day," Mr Hall said. "The man who has been in prison is not some kind of animal different from the rest of mankind. He is a man like you or I. Give him the chance of getting a foothold in life again and he Mill go straight. "It is terribly difficult to keep straight.. Yet here is an extraordinary thing. I find the 'old Jags' are the best material." One of the men Mr Hall helped at the beginning fell out of work six months ago. He had 27s a week to keep a wife and four children, but he is not going back to crime.