CRIMINAL CAREERS

Feilding Star, Volume 8, Issue 2559, 16 April 1930, Page 4

CRIMINAL CAREERS

A c-ritic of observing qualities who had toured our Dominion remarked that New Zealand was fortunate m having no criminal class to cope with If wo have no professional gangs, no gangsters and no. leader of organised climes, we certainly have crimes and no city or centre is free from them. Indeed, it was complained from tin* Supreme Court bench the other da. that thefts had become far too common. Well, our Magistrate's and Judges are the doctors and they' have the remedy in '-heir own hands. Let the police, in the cities and provincial centres make a raidj on tbr theive.s and let the Magistrates and Judges fit th* punishfmcnt adequately to tiie crime and the committee of the crime, without the application o probation—and the nrofessional thie l will quickly become! a minus quantity Apropos of the niov,Client tha: haprevailed in New Zealand for the past decade of pampering flti* con vieted criminal element in our cities wo are wondering whethiV om amateur and professional criminologists are keeping a record of the new and tunder treatment. In the Stab of Massaehussetts in TT.S.A. a. serve; or investigation was conducted oi 500 prisoners who had been released from thp reformatory. It was found that no htss than 80 per cent, had not reformed within, five, to 15 years of tltyir release, but were still following criminal careers. During the. first five years after their release from the reformatory these! 500 men under survey were arrested 1944 times. Was tins continuation in crime clue to thd treatment of the men in prison and reformatory, was it the system, or wa, ; it. just sheer human cussod.nessr We would not ovtin attempt to answer that question, for involved in it is the furtl?(er cynical query: Can or does the human -leopard change his spots? But, after all, there is in trt value in the precept and practice: Prevention is bet ter than cure.