The Dominion. THUESDAY, MARCH 16, 1911. THE RIGHT VIEW OF CRIME.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1077, 16 March 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. THUESDAY, MARCH 16, 1911. THE RIGHT VIEW OF CRIME.

Great prominence was given by the London newspapers on February 3 last to an unusually interesting and stimulating Blue-book issued by the British Home Office. This was Part I of the Judicial Statistics for the year 1909, containing, several hundred pages.of tables relating to crime, together with an important essay upon the statistics by Mr. H. B. Simpson; an official of very long experience who has made a special study of criminal questions. It is to bo hoped that Dr. Findlay will pay attention, as an amateur, to this peculiarly expert production, but it is still more important that the public should be put in the right way of looking at the problems of crime. It is no new thing with us, as our readers arc aware,, to protest against the dangerous weakenirlg of the moral standards that is resulting from the various activities of that flabby sentimentalism that shrinks from admitting the ugly facts of life. When Dr. Findlay explained his new "prison reform" system last August we had to rcpall our often-expressed warning against the great danger of the idea that Crime is a disease, the criminal an invalid, and Society the real malefactor. This is the burden of Mr. Simpson's, essay in, the Blue-book under" nfitice. He was struck, not so much by tho fact that the total number of persons tried for indictable offences in 1909 was greater than in any year before 1908, as by the greater fact that the statistics point to a steady increase 6f criminality during the past ten years. . From 1882 to : 1899 the number of persons tried for indictable offences showed a strong tendency to decrease; since that year.there.has been a. marked and regular -increased "During last century/' in fact, so Mb. Simpson summarises, "the proportion of crime to population tended to fall; dur--ing this century it has risen." amongst the causes of this disturbing phenomenon Mr. Simpson places "the marked growth since 18!)8_of a strong sentiment of compassion for the criminal." Some of the expressions of this ECntiment Mr. Simpson is prepared to'approve, such as mitigations of prison discipline, the probation system, the Borstal plan, "but public sentiment, or at any rate the sentiment that finds public expression, has gone far beyond this": In the magazines and newspapers that aro ordinarily regarded as reflecting pnbUc opinion articles on crime and punishment are commoner than , they ever were, and tho sentiment thai is expressed towards the criminal is almost universally compassionate and often sympathetic to an extent that no previous generation has shown. From some of the expressions used it might almost seem that the reading public is on the side of the criminal as against the Inw, and is ready to accept without corroboration anything he .may say to impugn tho administration of justice. Tales that would' be unhesitatingly rejected if they were told by a begear. in the street appear, when urged frohi the dock as an excuse for tlyjft, to be received with much readier credulity. We had a locaj illustration of this truth recently, when the "life story" of a really bad fellow was widely printed so as to touch the hearts of tho muddle-headed sentimentalists who_ are, beginning to bs unable to distinguish between right and wrong. Mr. Simpson gave several illustrations of his own, and concluded that "tho first impulse of a considerable portion of the public is to side with the law-breaker against the law." Our-next quotation will probably have tho • approval of everybody, yet how completely do many people forget the principle involved ■when it comes to a particular case !— Of nil influences for tho repression of crime (Mr. Simpson observes) the most potent is exercised not by the Courts, nor the police, nor the prison authorities, but by public opinion. . . . Apart from religious or purely ethical motives, there is nothing that supplies so strong a motive for honesty as tho general sense of tho community. A community that no longer resented crimo and hnd'lenrncd to feel nothing but compassion for the criminal would in time inevitably find itself faced by a flood of criminality against which police and prison authorities would struggle, in vain. And though we are far at present from any such catastrophe it is permissible to suggest that the steady increase of crime during the last ten years is largely due to a general relaxation in public sentiment with regard to it. Thero is at all events ground for fearing that reprobation of crime and resentment against the criminal are at present factors of diminishing strength in the primary, function of civilisation—the safeguarding of pprsons and property and the enforcement of the law; and that the increase in the number of indictable nffences as shown in the judicial statistics for the last ten years is not a mere passing phenomenon such as has often l«i' n noticed in the statistics for previous years, but the symptom of a real and in creasing danger to the public welfare '

The tendency everywhere is to lend a ready car to the plea that the criminal is "a victim of Society." The inequalities and uglinesses of our social system are everywhere inspiring the most noxious of propagandas, and not, the least noxious is the theory that crime i* the outcome of a revolt of the poor against the rich. In noting this theory, Mr. Simpson docs not trouble to argue about the absurdity and wickedness of it: he contents himself with the cold water of brutal and unromantic {acts, H is ho ihows,. the poor who suffer most from

tho criminal. Most of the victims of larceny and house-breaking, for example, are shown hy the statistics to bo ill-paid clerks, working men and women, lodginghouse-keopers. domestic servants, and artisans. The criminal is therefore not a romantic, but a sordid and shabby, figure. He is generally—there are exceptions, of course—a bad fellow who deserves little sympathy and for whoso crimes Society should not be blamed. To Mr. Simpson, who has studied him for many years, he is ''a man who is not 'very different, from the rest of the world except perhaps in having rather less moral principle than others and none of that terror of prison which marks the criminal of fiction, and who follows an anti-social mode of life not altogether from innate perversity but in the belief that, as things are at present, crime offers on the whole an easier means of living than any other that is open to him." There is a special necessity that this view ot the criminal, and, indeed, all'of Mr. Simpson'? opinions, should bo kept before the New Zealand. public. j Prison reform, and the "scientific" treatment of the criminal, are very liable to aggravate the disease where the. ''reformer" loses his touch with facts and allows himself to be moved by a vicious sentimentalism.