PRISON SYSTEM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25798, 20 March 1945, Page 4

PRISON SYSTEM

TREATMENT OF DEFAULTERS HARSH PRACTICES ALLEGED (P.A.) AUCKLAND, Mar. 19. A congregation of 6000 people in the Baptist Tabernacle last night unanimously carried a resolution calling urgently for a thorough inquiry by an impartial tribunal into the New Zealand prison system, and demanding “ an investigation into the harsh treatment of otherwise well behaved prisoners who are honestly adhering to principle.” The Rev. Dr Alexander Hodge said that as an old soldier he could speak with feeling of the malingerer who hid behind a temporary conscience, but there were others, and in individual instances their treatment should be deplored by the whole nation. He deplored the present system of prisons as hopelessly out of date and senselessly cruel. Solitary confinement should be reduced to a minimum. In most cases it was senseless inhumanity. ~ , , Dr Hodge said he was appalled at the apathy of Christians in the matter of a military defaulter of grade 111. At the point of death from hunger striking, not as a gesture of defiance, but as a protest against injustice, he was given the maximum of 30 days close confinement, and robbed even of his mattress. On the seventeenth day of his hunger strike he had a haemorrhage, and now alternated between solitary confinement and the hospital. Brutality never redeemed anybody.