TREATMENT OF CRIME.

Southland Times, Issue 22010, 9 May 1933, Page 3

TREATMENT OF CRIME.

To the Editor. Sir —We feel that it would be in the public interest to make known the following facts which emerges from a comparison between English prison statistics as revealed in the latest report to hand and our New Zealand prison statistics covering approximately the same period. (1) The “total receptions” into English prisons during LJ3U numbered 59,936 (English Prisons. Report, 1932). Our own “total receptions for that year were 5761 (New Zealand Yearbook 1932). Our figure was thus nearly one-tenth of the English, although our population was only onetwentysixth. (2) The. “daily average in prisons shows us in still worse a light, our average being about oneeighth of the English (1466 and H,a46 respectively). (3) The number imprisoned “after conviction” was in England 9.77 per 10,000 of general population, compared with 19.19 in New Zealand. (4) Of the above, about 38 per cent, in New Zealand were first offenders ,as against 28 per cent, in England, where probation is much- more extensively used. (5) The net average cost per prisoner was in England £52 3/-, about £1 per week, as against some 30/- per week in New Zealand, where the net cost per prisoner per annum was about £77 (if the cost of “prisoner’s wages and dependants be deducted from the total, which is given as £BB 11/4). These figures can be checked by anyone who cares to study the English reports referred to, our own Prisons Report for 1931 and the Yearbook for 1932. The position may be summarized by saying that, had the New Zealand daily quota of prisoners been that of the Old Country (in proportion to general population), New Zealanders would have had to pay for the daily upkeep of 437 prison-inmates only, instead of for that of 1466; and had the cost been on the English scale instead of the New Zealand, the “Departmental upkeep” for the year 1930 would have been only £22,429 9/3, instead of what it actually was, namely £135,095 9/1! We submit that the situation to which these figures point is one which cannot but disturb the complacency of any thinking citizen in the effectiveness of our treatment of crime and the criminal in New Zealand. The excessive cost of our system might be less disturbing if we could point to better results than the English in diminishing the number of “criminals.” Instead of which our prison figures increase every year (they were far higher for 1932), and the latest Prisons Report tells us that “the prison population of the Dominion is largely composed of petty recidivists, who are repeatedly in and out of prison”—surely a clear confession that the system utterly fails to reform these people. We submit that some system less obsolete than that which our Courts still persist in using would both cost us less and pay us better. And in particular we strongly urge that imprisonment should be imposed only for major offences, and that our probation system, with its few failures and its far greater economy, should be much more extensively used.—l am, etc. N. M. RICHMOND, chairman, Dominion Executive, Howard League for Penal Reform,