REFORMATIVE DETENTION

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22516, 26 September 1938, Page 16

REFORMATIVE DETENTION

TO THB BDITOB 0# rHBPBESB Sir,— May I draw 1 public attention, to an anomaly in the administration of justice? A man is sentenced by a Judge or by a Magistrate to a term of "reformative detention" not exceeding, let us say, 18 months. The prisoner thereupon is removed to Paparua prison. It then is the duty of the prison authorities, in conjunction with the mental hospital authorities, to decide whether prisoner shall serve .the sentence at a prison or at a mental hospital.-. :.-. ■■:..'-. ■:■■ ■■■■■.. . •The'decision is, let us say, that prisoner shall serve the sentence at a mental hospital. Thereupon prisoner is removed to Surinyside. There he learns: (1) that Surinyside is not only a hospital but also a prison, and that amongst the inmates are,, a great many persons who, like himself, are not under the Minister for Health but under the Minister for Justice; and (2) that whereas' at Paparua inmates receive for their labour wages, though small, inmates of Sunnyside. receive

for their labour no wages; and (3) that the sentence which the Judge or the Magistrate, as the case might be, .pronounced as being not exceeding 18 months, has automatically become indeterminable.

I myself know the case of a man who was sentenced by a Magistrate to a term of reformative detention not exceeding 18 months, and who served in fact more than 20 months. In the end he brought matters to a head by first obtaining leave of absence for two days, and, second, informing the authorities at Sunnyside, by telephone, that he had obtained employment and wished for release. The wish was respected. If this kind of thing is in accord with the intention of the law, I should like to know why Judges and Magistrates need do more than pronounce accused guilty, frankly leaving the question of sentence to superintendents of mental hospitals.—Yours, etc., E. H. C. RIDDER. Halswell, September 11, 1938.

[The Controller-General of Prisons, to whom this letter was referred, commented as follows: "Your correspondent is under a misapprehension. _' No persons, either sentenced to imprisonment or reformative detention, are transferred to a mental hospital.unless they are certified as mental defectives within the meaning rf: the Mental Defectives Act. The release of any persons so certified is contingent upon whether or not they are deemed by the medical authorities to have recovered their sanity." 1