THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, MAY 25, 1903. INSANE CRIMINALS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12279, 25 May 1903, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, MAY 25, 1903. INSANE CRIMINALS.

The antiquated, not to say inhuman, manner in which we still treat certain classes of the insane, is being repeatedly forced upon public attention by judges, gaolers and juries. Hardly a week passes but we have presented to our view some new inj stance of the utterly inadequate condition of law, custom and practice in I this respect. Now, it is by the superintendent of a public asylum; again, by a judge in his address to a grand jury; in the most recent instance, by Mr. Severne, who bad last week a ravingly inline prisoner in his hands and who has for years protested against an indefensible and inexcusable system. Nobody appears to come officially into contact with such cases without speedily becoming a warm advocate of reform, a fact which speaks well for the change of heart that has taken place in certain quarters since Howard gave his energies and his very life to the cause of prisoners who had found none other to plead for them. The press is . continually drawing attention to the general matter, in the varied ramifications of which the question of the insane criminal is but one. Yet nothing is done. We are inclined to think that nothing is done because of the feeling that if we once began to tamper with our present criminal law system there is no knowing where we shall stop. It is certain that if we had no prisons we should not invent them on their existing lines. Nor is it as easy as it seems to remedy effectively evils which may be in the bone of the present penitentiary method. The seeming indifference and callousness of the administration may be due to an unconscious recognition that public opinion is momentarily stationary between two opposing theories, violently and vigorously antagonistic to each other. For there is evidently no possible compromise between the theory that we should turn the insane out of our gaols into asylums, and should dedicate our prisons to the automatic carrying out of judicial sentences, and the theory that we should turn the sane out of our gaols into the world to which they properly belong and should dedicate oiu- gaols as asylums for.

the treatment of patients, who have forfeited their liberty because they are mentally unfit to be trusted with it.

The evil of the sending of iihb*eileSs and insane prisoners to gaol instead of to asylum lies entirely in the different organisation of the institutions. In either and both a man is a prisoner, absolutely subject to command, absolutely deprived of freedom of action. But in one place the inain purpose of authority is to prevent him from escaping, in the other the main purpose is to restore, his mind to normal balance or to maintain him as near normality as is possible. That our gaols are no longer places of hopeless horror and infamy is due wholly to the increased sensitiveness of the public conscience reflected in the increased humanity of the prison staff and the. modified severity of prison rules. Otherwise they are as they have always been, mere places of punishment with which thought of reformation is only superficially connected. Nobody would send an erring friend to Mount Eden Gaol in the anticination that thereby he might be reformed, but many would send an unbalanced friend to Avondale Asylum in the hope that thereby mental health might be restored. A humane judge will talk in authoritative tone of the lesson a sentence he is about to impose should be to the convict, and how in future years a law-abiding life may result therefrom; but every judge knows that, if it were the law to do so, he could save most of the merely erring by saying " Go and sin no more 1" and that the actual criminal type is not reformed by either long or short sentences in the existing prison. The present uncertainty of public opinion is not due to any doubt as to the worthlessness of the existing prison, but to doubt as to the possibility of improvement. Once upon a time, any new penitentiary proposal was seized upon with eagerness. After Pentonville- hod driven men raving mad with its torturing silence and American palace-prisons had set up a comfortable criminal caste, the public became less inclined to seize upon panaceas. The only possible alteration of the day is in the direction of the scientific treatment of the criminal, but this requires a gradual reconstruction of the entire penal system. It requires that our gaols shall be turned into criminal asylums and placed in charge of scientific experts and that all ordinary criminals shall be discharged on probation only when "cured." It requires that the indeterminate sentence shall take the place of our present fixed sentence and that the law-breaker shall be treated as an irresponsible individual who cannot with safety be allowed at large. Whatever may be said of the ultimate of this it must be recognised that all later day amendments of penal law have been in that direction. Were the movement continued the present great reason for objecting to the retention of insane criminals in gaols would I evaporate. We should regard all criminals as insane—and treat them accordingly.

But in the meantime the state of affairs so bitterly complained of is not right. We do not presume to offer any suggestion as to the proper solution of the difficulty, for this is essentially a matter for experts and for experts alone. But when even Red Indians and Chinese shrink from, harming or neglecting those upon whom the hand of God has been laid in such appalling fashion it is a public scandal that Christian communities should allow mere red-tape to interfere with the humane treatment of the criminal insane. Let us admit at once that the cloak of insanity or imbecility may often be cunningly assumed by detected lawbreakers. At the most, they gain little thereby and has it? not been said that successful assumption of insanity is proof of inherent and incipient insanity ? While we have the further and more convincing reason for some reform that the ablest gaol officersnecessarily suspicious of malingering to a fault—are the most pressing advocates of a more humane system. Whether by special wards and special attendants in gaols or by special wards and special attendants in asylums, or by such other way as appears best to those most conversant, with the whole question, something should be done. For there are other madmen and imbeciles in gaols than those who rave and other difficulties than those which find their way into public print.