Random Reflections:-

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 384, 16 March 1937, Page 7

Random Reflections:-

By

“JOPPA,”

The Minister of Justice has been talking prison reform, and the Prisons Department has issued its annual report with some jubilation, that there are less prisoners than usual in our gaols. So I reflected on this whole business of the treatment of criminals, and I am giving you some of the benefits of my minings. Have you ever asked yourself what right we

have to put anyone in gaol at all, or to exact any penalty for what we consider the other fellow's wrong-doings? The old religious States punished crime as representing on earth the Divine Lawgiver. They held the sword 6f justice from God, so they believed, and carried out punishment as a Divine Right; and they punished! That was their aim and idea. So they made the punishment severe and as a deterrent to otheis. They tried to make the punishment fit the crimes, like the Mikado of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera. But a modern secular State can make no such claim, though lots of our judges and others still retain hazy notions of their business and deliver moral homilies to law-breakers as if they were parsons. New Zealand is rather proud of its secuk.rity—its secular

education and secular government—particularly our present Government. As such it cannot make the slightest claim to being a judge of morals or to punishing breaches of moral law. All it can claim the right to do is to protect the citizens from non-social conduct on the part of other citizens. This has been recognised frankly by the Bolsheviks, who at least hav* thought out the results in action of their ideas, however wrong-headed you and I think those ideas. And on this matter of the criminal their idea 'S right. We must abolish from on”

minds any claim or thought of punishing our social wrongdoers, even if some of the results seem comic to our present way of thinking. For instance, a boy in Moscow murdered his mother. She had a quarrel with her husband, whom she discovered was her, and ihe so took if out on the boy over a length of time that at last he turned on her and killed her. He delivered himself up to the police and was tried. The court decided that he was not much to blame under all the circumstances. Bolsheviks, as you know, do not worry much over a murder or two. But especially they decided that as there would, and could, be no repetition of the offence, since he only had one mother, he was not as a matricide a social danger. The lad was handed over to experts, who restored him to normal temper, and then after a. few weeks he was set free without a stain

on his character! Funny, isn’t it? Almost horrible to our present way of thinking. But see the point: As a

State the Bolshevik government I makes no claim and has no interest in j deciding whether killing your mother j is right or wrong. All they worry j about is whether you are likely to de- j velop the anti-social habit of mother- ? murder, and if so, how to get you out f of it as quickly as possible in order ■ to safeguard your fellows. This is a 1 true incident, and being so extraordin. | ary, it makes clear the point. The I secular State has no right to pose > through its courts as a moral mentor, i Its sole business is to protect its

citizens from the anti-social conduct of any of its members. That is our | criminal code and penalties must, be entirely directed to protection of thn citizens. There should be no penal element, as there, still largely is. We put men in prison for a fixed term and go to the expense of keeping them for the pleasure of satisfying our consciences that we are punishing the wrongdoer. Certainly, we call a lot of it "reformative treatment, and some of our judges, who srem queerlv if norant of the realities of our prison system, make much point from the j bench to the man being sentenced | that he is being given a sentence of | "reformative treatment” and not an ;

ordinary penal sentence. Actually, when once the prisoner is handed over to the prison authorities, it doesn't make much difference. Now our gaols in New Zealand, from the viewpoint of our muddled thinking of punishing and reforming the criminal, are fairly well run. I have been often in several of them. They are clean —uncannily clean; the food is good: fhp-n

are recreations and technical activities, and all the gaolers I have met are decent, honest, and generally kindly men—some of them with extremely kindly hearts if also firm in their discipline. Many of the prisoners are better off physically in gaol than in their homes. But the whole system is wrong and bas’d oh a f 1” idea. For all the prisoners are treated as children, and yet what is wrong with most of them is a lack of. dlrec>ive power in their will. The't s’" regatiou under tutelage is exactly the opposite of the treatment they need. Also the system punishes worst the wife and children who are deprived of their bread-winner. Behind our present prison system is a hideous

wrong to those dependent, on .he person who has been imprisoned, and in many cases separation from husband or wife and family leads to ser-on.s deterioration of physical habits. It is also an absurd and unnecessary expense to the community which could be avoided and is in Russia, where,

whatever else they have done, the Bolsheviks have established out and away the best penal system that has ver existed. But I must stop *his week. I will continue tn our next.