The Dominion. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1909. PRISON REFORM.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 430, 12 February 1909, Page 4

The Dominion. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1909. PRISON REFORM.

The hopes of those .who are anxious to eeo a,good beginning made : in this coun-; :try with, the sciehtific.treatment of criminals will haye been ■ appreciably raised by- Dr. Findlay's interesting 'statement; which we printed yesterday, upon • the working of the prison-camp .system and: the attitude which lie has taken up on the general question: of - prison, reform. Even after the,;. necessary discount has been made from the Minister's glowing eulogy ■; of the tree-planting'. camps,;;'' it remains 7 clear, .that-, the experiment has. been a very; wise one, and that some real reformative work has been achieved,. Of more' interest than :this;portion. of the Minister's; statement iis the indication lie gives: of his future'intentions;; He does . not, lie says, intend to submit' to the Government any "radical proposals of change'.' until he. has investigated the conditions" in. all - the gaols of the Dominion, but ho leaves- us in no doubt respecting the.; "advanced" state ,of his/ views on .tho. punishment of criminals. : The', late Minister 'for. . Justice took such' a .narrow and view of the subject—he once, contemptuously 'j dismissed tho Borstal system as one which he thought;worthless—that it is specially easy to congratulate; Dr. Findlay upon tho v _new, spirit which ho brings to the administration, of the Prisons Department. The subject of criminal anthropology, as he says, is one to which he has given a good deal of thought, and thought,. we think, of the right kind, since he_ appears not to be tainted: by : the s,entimentalism that makes -so - many advocates .of; criminal reform really dangerous people. ■>'

His ideas' are pretty fully set. out in an essay in • his recent. . volume Humbugs _ and Homilies, and - although ; his reasoning is not always; sound in detail, it is quite sound and scientific in the main. He reminds us that the punishment of criminals had its origin only in revenge. In the earliest times:.redress was a private affair; and even;..-when the State .began . to take; the' punishment of crime into its own hands, revenge was still; the guiding' motive of punishment, and'tho law, which only regulated - the. procedure, was only the. reflection of the stage of 'civilisation of those Tvho made it. The tree, which fell upon a man and killed him was delivered to his relatives to.be chopped to pieces, .the ox that gored a : man was stoned to death, the hand of the suicide was'severed from the body and buried separately. Dr. Findlay. reminds us that the law of deodand, under which a cart-wheel that killed a, man was treated as a wrongdoer and subject to forfeiture, ; wa,s actually, in force in New Zealand until 1867.' Gradually, however, civilisation has effected a "steady - sublimation from punishment to, acts to punishment according to desert." This process has been .worked out unconsciously, but it has ; "accompanied with equal step our intellectual development: and tho ; slow discrimination of cause in the consideration of 'human action." . Dr. Findmy accordingly asks: "Arc we in tho final stago of this evolution, or is there yet beyond us a stage, as far removed from ours as ours is from that of the days ol the earliest lex tali•

onis 1" To this question he replies in tho affirmative. He does not say that "punishment" will disappear, but what will disappear is "that spirit.of revenge upon which is based our criminal law, and which stands in the way of any fair and truly scientific treatment of the problem of crime." "Punishment by dfcsert" of an exact and proper kind is of course impossible until the freewill controversy is settled, and Dit. Findlay evades that controversy, contenting himself by questioning whother vice and virtue, sin and holiness, really are "independent entities which man produces from sheer choice." Ho thinks rather that they are "phases of the vital procoss depending essentially upon the nature' and tone of a nervous system."

. But a settlement of tho freewill controversy is not a necessary preliminary, anyway, to. the introduction of /obviously useful changes in the existing system. -It is sufficient to know that, in many cases at least, "moral obliquities arc not without their physical causes." :The question of Oliver Wendell Holmes is pertinent: "Suppose that one should, go'to the worst quarter of the city and pick out the worst looking child of the worst couple he could find, and then train him up successively at the for Infant' Rogues,. the. Academy for Young Scamps a,nd the College for Complete Criminal Education, would it be reasonable, to expect a Fran-, cois Xavier or a Henry Martyn to be the. result of such training ?"• Only. perfect social conditions can produce a race free from criminals; in the meantime, therefore, the of offenders should bo, such that, it will not confirm in crime those whose fall is wholly, or largely, or partly the effect of . removable conditions. We cannot prevent tho existence of criminals,'but we can cease, the manufacture of them. . We can end the present system, which' Dk. Findi,ay marises as "lecturing. : the. man \ in. : the dock from the moral standpoint of the bench .and' sentencing him to imprisonment for a term of years depending for .their number as frequently '- upon tho state of the Judge's stomach as upon any scientific'consideration, of; their effect." Tho. danger of reform is, of course, the liability, of the heart to take charge . ..of tho head—a danger not lessened by, the fact, noted by tho, Minister, that,."the old contest between lawyers and doctors is: .to what amounts .to insanity is extending to the whole field-of moral ' responsibility.".. If, his' radical convictions on this important subject 'are govorned by . conservatism in; action, the Minister for.. Justico. should do. some very good work.