Society and Crime.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16361, 5 November 1918, Page 6

Society and Crime.

The address on crime and punishment delivered by Sir John Denniston to the Workers' Educational Association is a valuable contribution to the study of one of the most important and difficult of modern problems. Sir John Denniston's long experience as a Judge of tho Supreme Court, and the acknowledged success with which ho discharged his functions, will recommend to all judicious persons the opinions he has formed upon the relations subsisting, and the relations that ought to subsist, between society and the criminal. He did not, in this address, set himself to prescribe any general rules for the nature and degree of tho punishment to be inflicted upon criminals, or for the treatment of prisoners during their incarceration. His object was to recommend a point of view. He rejects altogether the old doctrine—which is, however, not old in the sense that it is now without followers—that it is the duty of society to hate not only crime but criminals. Nor, he contends, is it the function of society to punish the criminal for the sinfulness of his action. There has been a great deal of loose thinking and loose writing along the line of tho theory caat " crime is a disease" and criminals "moral invalids," but while sensible people realise the perilous character of the policy that some advocates of this theory would bring into force if th.9y could, most of them instinctively teal that there is enough truth in the theory to be worth preserving and developing. These will be greatly helped by Sir John Denniston's handling of the question. Everyone, he observes, has to a greater or less extent an instinctive knowledge of what is right and what is wrong, and everyone has his equipment of froe will. But both conscience and will are influenced) by heredity and environment, and riir John Denniston is disposed to think that of the two factors environment is the more powerful. He doubts, he says, " if, excluding extreme abnormal cases "on either mat gin, there is relativ >ly " as great a space between the extreme "of the mental, moral, and physical " standards of infants as there is -be"tween the extremes of tho positions, "advantages, and opportunities after " Birth." Society, then, which fixes th> environment, has some responsibility for the crimes that it punishes, and accordingly it is the duty of society, while punishing such crime as it cannot prevent, to prevent as much as it can. When society has done .its utmost ; n perfecting the environment of ita children—by "securing for every child," in Sir John Denniston's words, "a fair in- " troduction into life, a reasonable education, decent surroundings, and, ns "far as possible, equality of opportunity in the struggle for existence"— crime will still be with us, for the effects of heredity will remain. But no civilised society—however good its prison system and its criminal law— claim to have dealt properly with the problem of crime until it has reformed itself.