SURPRISING ?

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 125, 29 May 1930, Page 8

SURPRISING ?

(To the Editor.) Sir, —What strange things are somctimei said and done by way of protecting society v from its lower elements! Here; foe instance, we have a dispenser of justice recently objecting to the idea of a Court of Domestic .Relations, on the ground that domestic relations are best adjusted out of Court —just as though his own Court never has to deal with a single maintenanco case! Here, again, is another, giving his reason for continuing to send feeble-minded offenders to gaol without referring them at all to the Eugenics .Board (as jn the Act of 1928 he is enjoined to do), ii, terms that show that at his Court neither tae police, the probation officers, nor'he himself apparently know the difference between a feebleminded person and one who" is insane! Here, again, is a "respectable" employer of labour, discharging an employee because he has been in gaol, though now he 13 running straight, with the eventual result that the man feels it is useless to try and run straight, relapses into crime, and justifies it by his experience of-the way "society won't ever forgive." (This is a trim case.) Here, again, we have a Judge, remarking upon the "incompetence" of one who has tried his hand at stealing, and yet (instead of putting him on probation and making him behave honestly and pay back) sending him to prison for six months, where thieves more "competent" will be delighted to improve his antisocial education (again, I speak of ivhat I know). This is an excellent way not to cure a criminal but to confirm one. And. so is the metnod still pursued with the unfortunate R. R. Witting, who, it will bo remembered, was some months back sent to prison by a Judge, apparently in retaliation for his having , escaped, certainly not by way of an encouragement to continue going straight as he had been doing; and whom the Prisons Board at a recent sitting refused to release. And yet wo wonder that we are not curing criminals in New Zealand, and have to support some four times the daily prison population of England, in proportion to our whole population. Aren't we wiseacres? —I am. etc., B. E. BAUGHAN. Sumner, 28th May. ■ ■ i ' ■ ■ :.-■•■'