CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19759, 9 April 1926, Page 11

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

BILL LOR LONGER IMPRISONMENT. MORRISS CASE CITED. PRISON LIFE REVELATIONS. (From Cub Own Correspondent.) LONDON, February 24. The House of Commons have passed the second reading of a Bill which makes an important change in the criminal law. The genesis of the measure was admittedly the recent fiayley Morris* case, and the new proposals arose from the remarks of the Lord Chief Justice, who at the heating of the appeal complained that in the case of a man found guilty of a multiplicity of offences the court, under the existing law. could not sentence him to an adequate period of detention The new Bill Is called the Criminal Justice (Increase of Penalties) Bill, and it provides that where a person is convicted on indictment of a number of offences the court may impose a sentence of penal servitude for a term representing cumulative imprisonment on the various counts. Mr \V. Greaves-Lord was in charge of the Bill, which is a private member’s measure, and he explained that his object was merely to meet such a situation as that which drew the comments from the Lord Chief Justice and not to satisfy public clamour or to give vindictive sentences for purely sex offences. CORRESPONDENTS’ OPINIONS. Opening the debate, Mr Greaves-Lord amused the House by his account of the very diversified letters which have filled his poatbag since the announcement that he would introduce the present Bill. One of the correspondents showed his detestation of sexual offences by offering to execute offenders up to a limit of 50 per day at Is per head. While some well-meaning people thought no punishment could be excessive for sexual offences, however small. Others took the view that they should go entirely unpunished. One woman advanced the theory that the man who murdered his wives in a bath was led to do it by the fact that before he was born his mother conceived the idea of drowning him in the bath. In view of another of Mr Greaves-Lord’s correspondents. Hay-ley-MorrissWas really a species of early Christian martyr. Sir Henry Slesser was Inclined to favour delay pending a wider legislative reform, but Sir William Joynson-Hicks was in favour of the particular question touched on by tbe Bill being dealt with, especially in veiw of the fact that important commitees are now investigating other aspects of criminal law amendment. HARD LABOUR PRISONERS. A particularly interesting part of the Home Secretary’s speech was that in which he gave an explanatory little lecture on imprisonment. The days had passed, he saidj when hard labour was a brutalising affair of the crank and the treadmill, and he told the House, somewhat to its surprise. that there was now no difference between the work of an ordinary prisoner, a man sentenced to hard labour, and s convict in a penal establishment. Prison cruelty in the form of work, he added, had been completely abolished. Mr Ashmead-Bartlett suggested that hard labour prisoners, were more or less starved, while penal servitude men were properly fed, but the Home Secretary denied that there was a word of truth in any such distinction. As for solitary confinement, the hard labour prisoners got 14 days at the beginning of his term and the penal servitude man had the same treatment. As a rule, however, the solitary confinement ended long before the 14-day period was over. DON’T LET JUDGES LOOSE. Then came Mr Harney with unsparing condemnation of the Bill. “Entirely retrograde,” he described it. “Sentences should be reduced, not increased. Every month beyond what is necessary is an evil. It protects society no more, and reduces to a minimum the chance of reforming the offender. Nor did Mr Harney spare the judges. Some of them are tolerant, broadmii led, making allowance for human frailty; others are rigid, stern, precise, uncompromising. One would give three years for an offence for which another would give 15 years. “Don't let the judges loose to give staggering sentences, ’ exclaimed Mr Harney. Mr Rhys Davies (Parliamentary Secretary to the Home Office in the Labour Government) was in general agreement with the Liberal member’s appeal. _ Nearly all the prison governors, he said, are against longer sentences.