A CRIMINAL’S HISTORY

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7355, 6 February 1911, Page 4

A CRIMINAL’S HISTORY

The life history of an habitual criminal told in our news columns this morning is interesting, principally, because of the manner in which it reveals the complete failure of the social agencies which operated upon this man, from infancy upwards, to achieve their purpose. Here we have the case of one who at the age of eighteen was thrown on to the world after spending fifteen and a half years of that period in industrial school, reformatory and gaol—who at the' most plastic period of life was suddenly given freedom without equipment, immunity from' restraint without knowledge of what liberty meant or of the obligations of citizenship. The story unfolds itself with the inevitablenesis of tragedy. There is the first brief encounter with a new environment and a return to gaol, eventual liberation, another criminal. offending and gaol again. Thus.it goes on, a pitiful record of weakness, vice, misery and shame. We know that this sort of record in its later stages merely runs parallel to the records of many offenders whose upbringing in youth had been such. as to give no warrant for their subsequent lapse into crime. Here, however, we have the grim, disturbing fact of h child being taken charge of by the State, and through operation of a hum-drum system of detention, punishment and neglect made if not exactly into a criminal at least so immorally moulded that descent into the pit became the easiest and most natural thing in the world. Even those comfortable individuals who find it profitable to address erring humanity on "strength of character” and the ‘fragrant results of "self help'' may probably find their imagination begin to boggle very seriously indeed, at contemplation, of a fellow mortal who knew neither home nor mother as a child and first met his father in a penal servitude establishment. Mournful though’ it be Macphersom's case, as the Jtttornoy-Geneial says, is one of very great significance. Taking the man's letter to Mr Justice Cooper as a guide it seems clear that he has mental apprehension of the truth which underlies the apothegm about honesty being the best policy. Yet this is not singular among criminals. Indeed a quite considerable number of them experience remorse and suffer penitence—for a time. Their undoing is lack of resolution, obedience to impulse, surrender to monen'ary temptation. Whether this modern autobiography of a thief is the production of craft—for your thief is not above trading on hla weaknesses—or the appeal of a sorely harassed soul is a nice question in criminology. The point of interest at the -moment is the man's life h:s ory—the steady march from the cradle to the coll. - In view' of this it would be a matter of great surprise if Macpherson wore anywhere else than he now is. Only the elect couU triumph over such train- ! ing and environment.