PAMPERING CRIMINALS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1224, 5 September 1911, Page 4

PAMPERING CRIMINALS.

Sir,—The letter of "0.3.4" on "Prison lteform" gives me an excuse to quote a line opinion on this "hobby" of the learned gentleman who is looking for a safe Beat in the House. The passage is from an essay on "Tho ~Nc\r Iliiuianitananism," published in "Blackwood's Magazine" for January, 1808. The writer was that fiife scholar and brave man G. AV. Steovens, the most brilliaut journalist in tho world in his time, who died in Lady, smith during the siege. He discusses with depth and vigour tho "deification of painlessness" which he. saw everywhere "throttling patriotism and common sense and virility of individual character," and the passago I tjuote is just ono of many of his illustrations of his theme: "Nowhere do they show their sentimentality and tlieir imronson belter' combined than in what is called prisonreform. A plain man who sees tho warm, airy, light, clean cells of British prisons is apt to ask himself wherein, but for the necessary loss of liberty, the hardship of punishment consists. Let him turn to the exponents of painlessness, and he will discover that. Our prisons also, ns well as our hospitals, arc dons of hideous cruelty. Whett ho tries to find out what it is all about, 'ho discovers that somo prisoners have meagre fare, that a few aro set to really hard physical, work, that convicts spend a small part of their sentence- without constant companionship, that habitual insubordinates can, on a magistrate's order, bo whipped with a whipcord cat, and that warders do not always speak to convicts with respect. This is called cruel, tending to madness, bnitnlising. Our grandfathers would have laughed at such charges. Such cruelty, they would have replied, would coino not amiss to wifcbeators, ravishers, swindlers: if a man goes mad in nino months, though ho can constantly speak to his follow-prisoner? fit exorcise or wlmn at work about the corridors, then his mental balance is no loss to anybody; tho very cat can hardly brutaliso him, since ho has to be brutal before he could earn it. But such

Replies aro not for our soft-hearted senoration. Instead, they point westward to free America, whose'felons, as a native authority has said, are "better housed, fed, clnd, and comforted than tho labouring poor of any other, portion of the globe"; whoso housebreakers feed fin beefsteaks mid hot biscuits for breakfast, and street-walkers get jam lo their tea. They point us to Elmirn, that university miscalled a prisqn, where, the -.embezzler is taught German, shorthand; and telegraphy, and the disguise-artist is encouraged to'model'in-'wax. It is all one, more outcrop of exactly the same folly. Avoid immediate pain—no matter at what cost hereafter. And here again tho folly is exactly, as ' ironically self-destroying. It would "bo absurd to'ask whether'criminals inilict or suffer the more pain. It may bo nil one to you' whether pain be deserved or not; to save the guilty the greater suffering, you may, as would Willingly many of our crack-brained sentimentalists, inflict the lessor upon the innocent. But this is exactly what they do not do: to save tho guilty the lesser evil, they plague the guiltless with (lie greater. In point of fact, the modern vice of pamperrng criminals may fairly bo held to cause greater inconvenienco both, to tho innocent victims and to the interesting agents. For laxity does not reform. . . You will find a tumult of voices ever crying aloud for less, not more, severity. And, so far as crime can bo checked or encouraged by punishment, they aro asking for reforms that will spread- crime, involve more frequent if less sure terms of detention for criminals, and thus add prodigiously to the sum total of suffering among guilty and guiltless alike."—l am, etc., C.3.5.