IS PUNISHMENT A CRIME?

Otago Witness, Issue 2947, 7 September 1910, Page 15

IS PUNISHMENT A CRIME?

! In these days when prison reform is very much in "the air, and pages of Hansard and columns of newspapers are being filled with varied ideas on the reform of the criminal, the opinions of an English medical expert are apropos. Dr C. J. Whitby seeks to answer the question at, the head of this article in the current. Hibbert. He believes that " every doctor, if he have any faculty of observation and generalisation, becomes in the course of yexrs a specialist in human nature." The true nature of punishment and its justifiability is a question upon which every good citizen must form an opinion. Hence the doctor's contribution. "The idea of punishment clearly has no claims to noble birth; it was born of the desire for retaliation, revenge/' The three aims of punishment are summarised thus by Dr Whitby : 1. To satisfy the sense of injury of the offended party. * 2. To reform the offender; and ! 3. To deter others, by fear, from like offences. The doctor thinks our conceptions of punishment are mostly wrong. Taking the mentally deficient, for instance, he 'points out that there is a form of epilepsy in which the sufferer, instead of taking a fit, becomes of a sudden raving mad. Such a person is just as likely to plunge a knife into the heart of the one standing nearest as to do anything else. " And on recovering consciousness ha will have no recollection whatever- of "what he has done. No doubt hundreds of such unfortunates have in the past suffered, the extreme penalty of the law. But what their case requires is not punishment but bromide of potasiium. To punish a man for something done when, through no fault of his own, he was out of his mind, is clearly a crime." And so on through all descriptions of feeble-minded criminals the doctor argues that our methods are wrong fundamenttally. Passing from that class of crime, Dr Withby says a pungent word on the relation of drink to crime. He contends that there are two forms of drinking—convivial and industrial. The former is associated with high days and holidays, and does often lead to crime; "but its importance is slight in comparison with that of industrial drinking. . . . There are many occupations, mostly of an arduous or monotonous character, mostly in greater or degree injurious and exhausting, mostly carried on under conditions obviously in need of reform, in ■which it has become a tradition among the workers to break off at stated intervals in order to procure drink. The custom is perfectly recognised by employers ; these breaks are provided for in the planning of the working day, and so firmly established is the tradition among the men that only those of exceptional strength of mind can possibly resist it." The habit is not engendered by any vici jus motive, ,but "it is one of the very commonest causes of all kinds ot crime." The law holds men of this class responsible, for their crimes, but the doctor is of opinion that the " responsibiity is, at any rate, shared by the employers who impose conditions of work so onerous and unhealthy as to force men to seek the aid of stimulants, and by society as a whole for tolerating such a state of affairs." The doctor finds the task of drawing a hard and fast line between social and individual responsibility almost impossible. " The average criminal comes of what breeders call a bad stock; all authorities agree that an inherited predisposition of a morbid kind is the rule among malefactors. The more we know about any given man's or woman's parentage ar.d ancestry the more intelligible that man's good or bad qualities will become." Again, the criminal is not insensible to the only public opinion he knows, and in his circles it is evil. " Among criminals, the hero is the man who has effected a clever burglary, who has fooled police; the demigod is the murderer whose portrait appears in the newspapers. Society at largo is responsible for the existence of the foul dens and rookeries infested by those dangerous beasts of prey called criminals, as well as for the hard conditions of life which force many well-meaning but weak individuals into crime." "This being so, what follows?" asks the doctor. " That punishment"" is a crime, to be utterly condemned and abandoned? No; but that it is. like surgery, a necessary evil, to be undertaken in no spirit of revenge, but with the same wise economy as a surgeon handles his knife. Punishment is moral surgery. The minimum of t<-rture for all punishment involves torture—and the maximum of reform are the ends to be kept steadily in view. .And to ensure success, the qualities mainly required are imagination, pluck, and" scienoe." Tho doctor holds that punishments that degrade are always unjust punishments. The business of society in its own interests is to " make the punishment fit the crime," and not merely the crime but the criminal. Hence, " individual treatment is the primary condition of penal reform, the initiation of which doubtless involves the elimination of theological preconceptions with regard to crime and and the subordination of the legal to the medical point of view."