The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. SATURDAY, JUDY 2, 1927. THE HEAD AS WELL AS THE HEART

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 86, 2 July 1927, Page 8

The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. SATURDAY, JUDY 2, 1927. THE HEAD AS WELL AS THE HEART

NO humanitarian would care to dampen the ardour of the newly-established branch of the Howard League for Penal Reform. On the word of Mr. E. C. Cutten, S.M., the league is “not a body of cranks and mere idealists.” It aims at establishing a correct treatment of criminals, the prevention of crime, and the rebuilding of the moral fibre of the delinquent. Truly an idealistic and comprehensive programme of reform. Excellent reports of the Howard League’s work are to hand from England, a country whose prison administration was not so many years ago a shocking thing, as pictured by many writers, including Charles Reade, in his powerful and moving story, It s Never Too Late To Mend.” Through the efforts of the league, it is claimed, England now leads the world in prison reform and crime reduction. If this be so, the advent of the league is welcome in New Zealand, where crime is seriously on the increase. Mr. Cutten instances the huge dull stone prispn for women at Mount Eden as a sample of what should not be, and declares that “the deadly monotony of duty” there is not conducive to good results. Mr. Cutten is a magistrate with many years experience of the ways of wrongdoers and of their punishment, and his opinions are entitled to respect. In advocating something better for prisoners, he does not mean that they should be treated as honoured guests of the State, entitled to the best accommodation and the choicest foods, so that by a superabundant kindness they should be brought tearfully to see the error of their ways. What he does intend is that they should not be so repressed and so kennelled that they are liable to abandon all hope and settle down into a morose resentment against society which will be expressed in further crime when they regain their liberty. The modern idea is that the law should be reformative rather than punitive. Dr. Mildred Staley, who condemns “the uselessness of undiscriminating penal severity,” and declares New Zealand prisons to be depressing, ugly and demoralising, aims, it is to be feared, at Utopia. The league, she says, does not believe the abolition of prisons to be an impossible objective. Prisons cannot in their nature be palaces of architectural beauty, offering all the comforts of a sanatorium and the brightness of an opera house. To take away from prisons the atmosphere of disgrace, the hardships, the confinement and the discipline would not be the way to abolish them; rather would it be to make them popular. There are many people in prison who ought never to have been there, who are not fit subjects for prison, and for whom other surroundings would offer greater chances of reform or rehabilitation. But there are others who are where they belong. These are the enemies to society; those whom not all the reformative kindness in the world would ever change. .And some of these, are exceedingly cunning, as Prisons Board members and other kind reformers have discovered to their regret before to-day. No doubt there is room for reform in the prison treatment of lawbreakers; but on so delicate a subject progress should be cautious and directed by the head as well as by the heart.