The Ammonia Outrages

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 188, 7 May 1931, Page 7

The Ammonia Outrages

Sir, —Evidence published as regards the perpetrators of the ammonia outrages should make us all think. First, one of them was a mentally abnormal person, with regard to whose defect his friends bad twice already had to take action —yet, though before the court for an offence so recently as eighteen months ago, he nau never lieen reported to the Mental Detectives Board, as he should have been. Moreover, neither t he judge nor prisoner’s counsel in the present case seemed at all clear as to how this should be done, or by whom I No wonder that it is openly said that the legislation designed to protect the public from this kind of "social defective” is at present but a dead letter. Next, the other man. like the first, had already been in prison: which, far from doing him anv good, had. according to his counsel, taught him, through the associates he met there during his month s sojourn, to try ammonia as a means of stupefying the victim of his n,xt offence. Yet we are still innocently told that prisons are for reforming people! When shall we see that they are not in the least likely to do anything of the kind, and abandon our out-of-date policy of using them so freely, instead of keeping them, as they should be kept, as the very last resource? This is what the Motherland is doing more and more. Recognising that “evil communications corrupt good manners.’ she is elosing prisons, and turning to more sensible methods of curing criminals. “Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the State’’—and doos not this case illuminate, that fact? ’Prisons are extremely expensive, too. Why. in these days of financial stringency, do our courts persist in giving us daily some 1400 persons to maintain in. gaol, at the cost of something like thirty shillings a week each?—and the result, it would, seem, of teaching them new ways with crime? On a percentage basis. New Zealand hns some four times as many prisoners every day as England. How unnecessary, how expensive—and how bad for the public, it would seem, when they emerge from their schooling! . \ ’ There is one gleam of comfort in the whole dreadful affair, however; and that is, that this outrage was not the work ot competent and callous men. but of a pair of “amatiirs.” one mentally abnormal, the other smarting from what he deemed social injustice. We are free from many such crimes in New Zealand. May we always be! for. as the present financial depression may very well teach us. our real wealth is not in exports and imports, but in our men and women. , Please don t let us teach them crime, in prison fas we do—this, to my personal knowledge, is no isolated case of it) : please do not let us “protect the public” (!) in such a childish wav. and make us pay a heavy bill, in addition, for maintaining such “universities.” Don’t let us blame the prisons, either—they are mostly quite good ns such places go. It is the company that is bad! Yet. if you give solitary confinement. you injure the brain. , ns use probation more, and more skilfully. It is far less costly, and fnr more successful in protecting the nublic.—l am. etc.. B. E. BAUGHAN. Akaroa. April 30.