BOOK ON PRISON LIFE

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24905, 19 June 1946, Page 8

BOOK ON PRISON LIFE

“PRO-CRIMINAL BIAS” CRITICISED

CONTROLLER’S VIEWS (P.A.) WELLINGTON, June 18. That the pro-criminal and anti-au-thoritarian bias was developed to a reprehensible degree was a statement made by the Controller-General of Prisons (Mr B. L. Dallard) in criticism of the book by Ormond Burton, "In Prison,” during an address to the Wellington Rotary Club. Mr Dallard said jit was a book that had been favourably reviewed and recommended to readers by several papers, including church publications, as an outstanding objective study of crime and prisons. Mr Burton’s solicitous tolerance for the criminal was in marked contrast to his unctuous disparagement of the “screws,” as in the vernacular he termed warders. “It rather staggers me that of all papers, church magazines should endorse morbid and mischievous philosophies,” said Mr Dallard. “It is positively dangerous for fanciful speculators to presume to give opinions in these matters. He entirely overlooks the ever-widening range of moral rot and contamination resulting from bestial practices, yet church magazine reviewers commend the book. No doubt Mr Burton would regard as boyish horseplay the cowardly battering by lour prisoners of a kindly dispositioned old warder to insensibility and living death. The frightening and assaulting of women in lonely places often has infinitely more far-reaching effects than the mere physical damage done. The dastardly assault and near throttling of an old lady of 84, reported recently, is apparently a mere peccadillo in Mr Burton’s eyes. In his over-emphasis on his concern* for the criminal he, like so many sentimentalists. entirely forgets about the victims.”