PENAL REFORM

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 75, 29 March 1926, Page 14

PENAL REFORM

A lecture on "Penal Reform" was given on Sunday evening under the auspices o£ the Theosophical Society by Miss Baughan, 8.A., a member of the Howard League. Miss Baughan gaid that a new spirit of service was developing out of the suffering of the past years. The Howard League had as its object such service as Jesus taught His followers. To check the production of crime was aimed at by developing the probationary system. The lecturer stated that in England a diminution of crime had commenced when the feeble-minded began to be segregated from the normal. Many criminals belonged to tho feeble-minded class, and should be segregated and specially cared for, protected, and not penalised. In New Zealand far too little attention was, she said, given to this matter. The mentally defective were potential crominals, yet they were allowed to mingle freely with the community. Then there were the habitual criminals, whose. fall was. due to alcoholism, but who were well, behaved when sober. In Christchurch was a woman who had been' sent to prison 173 times. A short term of imprisonment could not cure such cases. What was wanted 'was a home for inebriates. There was a third class of criminal —the clever, even brilliant, individual, who had a weakness along one line. This was the very troublesome border-line mental cases class. The speaker had found that the cases most amenable to reform were none of these, but were the socially backward, those who erred more from want of knowledge and want of training than from any other cause. It was not too late to supply what had been lacking in such cases as these. Before Miss Banghan's lecture, Miss Nellie Taylor sang "Homing," and afterwards gave Brahams's "Sapphic Ode."