The Oamaru Mail. THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 1910.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 10536, 18 August 1910, Page 3

The Oamaru Mail. THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 1910.

A statement cabled recently deserves some attention heTrie Youthful cause it; throws some Burglar. light on the subject of

the reform oi the criminal which the Attorney-General has announced _ it is the intention of the Government to endeavor to bring about by hook or by crook per medium of the Crimes Amendment Bill now before the Legislative. Council. It relates to the case of a. boy of twelve who was found guilty of burglary and sentenced to confinement for a. certain period in a reformatory. Nothing very wonderful one says in this except the fact that the child .should be young and so abandoned, and perhaps that is not so wonderful after all. But the man who reads and knows the past is .struck by this absence of sensation. He knows that in the old clays there was no more mercy for children convicted of crime than for the. hardened sinners of old age. Vengeance was Iln- spirit of the criminal law, and degradation was the lot of the victim, who was always pronounced after his degradation to have, been irreclaimable from the beginning. - "Once a thief always a thief" was the cant phrase whenever a child came up for sentence. Therefore, once convicted the child went straight into the noisome dens where the worst characters did congregate. Under tho blue laws death was inflicted on children without .remorse or question. "Once a thief always a thief" and what was a. thief good for except to be hanged by tin- neck until he. was dead? In the time of the poet Bodgers that great humorist and society man once saw two little boys of eleven and twelve being carted away to Tyburn to be banged for a petty theft. In narrating the circumstances lie said the poor little chaps "cried bitterly." But it never occurred to him or to any one else to try and mitigate the horrors of the treatment meted out to infants. Half a century later —-in 1833 —a little boy of nine was actually sentenced to death for stealing twopence worth of paint. He was not hanged, but he was scut, after commutation of lii.s sentence, in among the rest of the criminals and the probability is that lie was hanged later for something more serious. The public conscience had at last, after many spectacles of young boys hanged publicly, crying bitterly, awakened to the iniquity, and the execution of infants was stopped. But their demoralisation wholesale went on unchecked to 189-1, sixty years after that small waif was saved from the gallows to which he had been consigned by an owl of a judge. In that year Mr Asquith obtained a Parliamentary Committee to enquire into the treatment of juvenile offenders, and its report startled the public greatly. At once the separation of the young was determined upon, but even then the lino was drawn absurdly. Nothing above, sixteen had any right to bo saved from tho prison environment, until the beginning of the present century, when the age limit was extended to 21 and provision made for its extension in cases of slow maturity to twenty-three. Thus it will ho seen how very modern is the system under which that small burglar of twelve received merciful treatment from the administrators of tho law. The prison lie will bo detained in is not called a prison: it is known as an "institution," the Borstal Institution. There the treatment is after the style described by tho Attorney-General when in moving the second reading of the Crimes Bill lie had occasion to describe tho system in vogue in the Fhnira penitentiary in the State of New York. There is no degrading punishment, nu "nigger-driving," no watching invidiously with foregone conclusion. But there is compulsion to work which is irresistible, there is briskness of habit which can not be. avoided or laid aside for a single moment after it is forcibly acquired." The result is that the inmates are sent forth with habits of industry, self-respect and determination to do well. The system is said by all who have any experience of it to have justified itself; so much so that men are asking why the- system is not extended to the whole prison system. At all events there is much experience m the stores of Lkusiol and much information for the guidance and eiicnur"agoment of the New Zealand sysleni.