FEMALE VAGRANTS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCV, Issue 10919, 30 March 1896, Page 3

FEMALE VAGRANTS.

TO THE EDITOE. Sib, —It is again my unpleasant duty to call the attention of the public to the terribly unsatisfactory state of affairs as regards the old vagrant women of this town. Until St Saviour’s Guild is able to deal with those cases may I implore our Justices of the Peace to give longer sentences to the poor distraught old women who now haunt our streets and sleep in our watery gutters ? The longer sentence practically- means. a. longer shelter, with food and creature comforts. I dislike harping on the same subject, but really I cannot rest until something is done. Surely the Justices of the Peace know by this time that there are a certain number of women in Christchurch who cannot he, and will not be, received into any of the'existing institutions. Then why do these gentlemen persist in sending such .well-known : vagrants into prison for a £ew days ? What is the good ? I was at the prison on Friday last, and saw a poor old bedraggled semi-imbecile woman, every rag on her soaked with ’ mud, brought in for forty-eight hours. She had . only left the gaol the previous day. That woman’s face is as well-known to our Police Court Bench as are the very walls themselves. Another old offender gets her short sentences ; she has now come in for fourteen days ; drink has made her brain give way; she vows she is stricken withleprosy. She, too, will totter out of the sheltering walls of the prison in a few days, only, I suppose, to be again driven in for forty-eight hours or a couple of weeks. One could excuse our Justices if they did not know these “old hands.” The Justices may say it is not my business; but it is my business, because I personally come face to face with the shame and horror of the whole thing, and I am convinced that every woman in the city will stand by me in this my plea; shelter these women somewhere and somehow. —I am, &c., . E. W. CUNNINGTON,

Lady Official Visitor at the Lyttelton Gaol,