PENAL REFORM.

Waikato Times, Volume 118, Issue 19759, 14 December 1935, Page 9

PENAL REFORM.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —Our ■ probation system hadly needs bringing up to date, and then perhaps our courts 'Will use it nnoie freely. According to the 1935 Prisons Report, we spent last year on prisons and administration more than £119,000 but on probation and the Prisons Board only £3929. What did the Prisons Board really cost? Probationers paid back in restitution and costs more than £2900 last year, so they really cost the country very little. Mr Laing’s letter on reformative detention tells facts that should reallj be better known. “The facade a mountain, the fact behind a mouse, would well sum up our present pretence at an efficient penal system. The new Minister for Justice lias an infinitely better grasp of his subject than any wo have had for long enough. I hope lie will look into these matters of reformative detention, of probation, of the name, selection and tile methods ot the Piisons Board, and also into our habit of far 100 hastily “declaring an habitual criminal"; 1 hope he will help New Zealand to got child-guidance clinics, and bring in Bills that, like the recent English Acts, will stop the penalising of poverty, abolish the “crime of sleeping out.” But will he not go further yet and help New Zealand to get her every law-breaker properly and thoroughly examined, with a view to developing his latent good citizenship? “Wo can understand the criminal belter when we remember that he is an individual who has never been adequately initiated into the fellowship of human beings," writes a scientist, and nothing can he Iruer. Why not base our penal system on the recognition of this need so to he initiated, and of ours so to initiate him? We shall never do it by “taking a life for an eye" and squashing liis every instinct, good and had alike, in prisons (on “reformative detention." for-soolh, if you like!). But it has often been done, already, through friendly 'developing of all his belter points; and wild the help of scientists and social workers for the probation otlleor, it could l)i! done a hundred limes more I boroughly and widely to the great benefit of us all. — 1 am, etc., B. H. BAUGIIAN. Akarou, December 10.