WHY CRIMINALS HATE CRIME

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXXII, Issue 12437, 9 April 1908, Page 4

WHY CRIMINALS HATE CRIME

Ik opposition to Sir Alfred Wills (an exJudge;, H. J. B. Montgomery advocates, from his experience as a prisoner, short, severe sentences. He contends that the picture of the professional criminal who prefers a life of crime, "with its excitement, its large element of sports, its periods of luxury, idleness, and debauchery, to anything which involves the curative monotony of honest work," is only a figment of the imagination. The rutfians of our boasted civilisation have been largely manufactured by the British prison system. Sir Alfred Wills is quite convinced that there are a considerable number of professional criminals whose reformation is absolutely hopeless. He would simply give them an "indeterminate sentence." The man so sentenced would not be released until he had given actual proof of advance in character. In the opinion of Mr Montgomery the result would be that there would be developed in gaol an even larger proportion of religious humbugs than are to be found there at present. During his incarceration he discussed this and other matters with criminals of every kind and degree, and he never came across a man, however long he had been a criminal, who did not loathe and detest his occupation. He found out, in nearly every instance, that the evolution of their career proceeded upon regular lines. And he had only to look round the corridors of that great convict prison in which he was himself a prisoner to see that the evolutionary process was still actively at work in the gradual but sure manufacture of the professional criminal. Every hour of their lives in that prison they had borne in upon them the fact that they were not as other men, and that they never could be again as other men, and on their return to the world they were given to understand, in unmistakeable manner, that they assuredly were not as other men. He is very strongly of opinion that it is not short, but long, sentences that are mischievous. After a comparatively short period in gaol the only effect of imprisonment upon the man is to drive home on him the fact of its extreme stupidity. After two or three years it utterly fails to have any punitive effect whatever, and only tends to harden and degrade the prisoner, and to cause a mental and physical deterioration.