Left in Poverty

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 689, 14 June 1929, Page 8

Left in Poverty

Wives of City’s Home-Deserters MEN who desert their wives and shirk their home responsibilities arc a dead-weight burden on the community. To bring them to justice is costly and uneconomic; to check their desertion in present conditions is out of the question. Suggestions come from social workers in Auckland that home-deserters should serve long terms of imprisonment so that the revenue from their labour will help to sustain their dependants.

The distressing plight of dependants was clearly established in an article published yesterday, In which it was shown that deserting husbands cost Auckland many thousands of pounds annually in direct and indirect relief payments. Not only do they suffer acute humiliation, but very often they are worse off physically than the deserter himself, who, if brought before the court and imprisoned, is warmly clad and well fed under modern prison treatment. In the great majority of instances, however, it is unsatisfactory both to the State and the dependants to have the defaulting husband arraigned for his offence. He is the most difficult class of prisoner to deal with, and his inclinations invariably are turned in directions far from work—otherwise he would be home shouldering his own responsibilities. Under the Maintenance Orders (Facilities for. Enforcement) Act, which incidentally was inspired in Auckland about seven years ago, a magistrate may imprison a wife-deserter for not more than six months. Usually the term ranges from one month to three mouths.

THREE MONTHS WITHOUT PAY Prison pay does not start until three months in gaol has been served, and as the great bulk of this class of prisoner are short-term men, the dependants possess little chance of collecting any appreciable amount of money for sustenance. Even a sixmonths’ term gives them inadequate monetary return for the hardship and humiliation they suffer. A prominent social worker in the city, a man who is in close association with cases of this kind, suggests that the only remedy is for the State to establish farming or other industries and make the wife-deserters work there for long terms and earn the keep of their dependants. “Most of these fellows are rotters,” he said, when working out the scheme. “In the ordinary way you will get nothing whatever from them, and bringing them back to gaol only increases the burden on the city. A term of three months, or even six months, in gaol is useless, because it simply tones the prisoner up physically, and lets him out into the world feeling better than before his incarceration. “I believe that if the habitual wifedeserter —and there are many hundreds of them in Auckland chronically l

habitual—were sent away for twc years or even three years, to a prison farm or camp established particularly for his reception, and made to work there, it would go far toward solving our greatest social problem. Wifedesertion is fast becoming the most serious social problem in the country.” In recording this suggestion the difficulty of upsetting the labour market cannot be entirely overlooked, though the immense cost of relief to dependants, and the dead-weight upon the State in the cost of prison maintenance, raises a strong argument for exacting all possible revenue from prison labour. The Prisons Department appreciates the immense difficulty of this factor. Of wife-deserters, the Minister of Justice in the Reform Government said in his report; “. . . Such prisoners are usually indolent and indifferent workers, and are unable to earn sufficient to pay the cost of their maintenance in prison. Various methods of punishment have proved abortive, and when under punishment they are not at labour.

TO MAKE MEN WORK “Deprivation of food is effective in only a few cases, and such methods tend to devitalise and render the prisoner less fit for work than before. This class of prisoner is most difficult to handle effectively, and the department seldom gets a surplus over their cost of keep. . . .” It is noteworthy that two industries conducted under prison labour were closed by the authorities after spirited protests had been made against their interference with private industrial enterprise. The timber mill at Waikune prison camp was returning a handsome profit, and the brick works at Trentham were turning out firstclass products, some of which are in use in educational buildings in Auckland. Both of these places have now been removed from the profit-making sphere of prison work. Maintenance day at the Magistrate’s Court tells its own pathetic story of Auckland’s domestic tragedies. Behind it all there is a story more subtly tragic and more poignantly pathetic—a story to which each ease contributes a chapter. But the problem of the autohrities is immediate and twofold; first, to decide why men leave home, and seconly, to find a means of making them pay—even indirectly—for the maintenance of those whom they have neglected.