The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 1910. PRISON ADMINISTRATION.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 897, 17 August 1910, Page 4

The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 1910. PRISON ADMINISTRATION.

The extraordinarily lengthy and very interesting speech, in which the Attorney-General explained tho aims of his Crimes Bill last week might have, been made a dozen times as long without exhausting the questions which arise from almost every clause of that measure. A complete consideration of the problem of the criminal—if such a thing were conceivable—would requh'e a long and careful exploration of many vast and difficult regions of thought. We have no intention, even if we had the space, for consider tho Bill in all,- or even in very many, of its details, either now or in the future. The most that criticism can hope to do will be to secure the revision of any doubtful proposals in the measure.' In the meantime we would direct attention to a series of articles on "Prison Administration" which have been appearing in the London Times, the tenth and concluding article appearing on July 4. The writer does not attempt to dogmatise, as too many people do who write or speak on the subject. He has no complete /cut-and-dried system for the conversion of tho prison system into a useful and valuable social institution, which, whether they know it or not, ■ is really the idea inspiring most of the. "prison reformers." All he does is to put his finger on tho weak spots and show just where the system is grossly bad.

Tho great fact which is brought into relief in these, valuable articles is, not that there is. inefficiency or indifference in the prison officials, but that there are appalling difficulties in the way of every honest attempt at wise-and humane administration—"not cruelty, but perplexity; shortcomings not due to lack ot! zeal, but to inherent difficulties; not the refusal to adopt proposals which critics submit as panaceas, but 'the inability of the prison authorities to set right things which are wrong in society itself, and to make good citizens out of poor material." Excepting in the national balance-sheet Dr. Findlay's. reform Bill will probably have no material result that will be either plainly visible or easily measurable within the lifetime of its authors. It may not have any effect on the criminal statistics, but evon if it had an identifiable effect, it is a notorious fact that nothing is more misleading than these statistics. The best thing that can be said for the Bill, and it is the most important thing to be said about it, is that some of its leading principles are manifestly sound. "To distrust the efficacy of mere punishment, to seek to save the young and juvenile adults, and to restrain the mature and incorrigible offenders"—this is part of the advice contained in the articles in the Times, and it is the attitude which the Attorney-General has taken from his study of the question. Since human society is, in all deep and vital respects, the same in New Zealand tb-day_ as it was in any of the ancient civilisations, we cannot refuse to accept crime as a permanent clement ol life. No amount of scientific laws and i scientific prisons will of themselves prevent crime, any more than all the laws ever passed have appreciably altered human nature. We can, however, prevent the criminal law and the prison system from making between them a now and independent criminal-manufacturing machine; and we caii at any rate get some economic benefits from the waste products of society. These are objects which the Crimea Bill tends to achieve, yet it is just, here that the door is opened to new and grave dangers. Not long ago we welcomed an excellent statement by Dβ. Gibb upon the modern tendency to call sin anything'but sin—to call it a disease, a product of environment, or what not. This tendency to shunt the blame on to an abstraction called society is the great weakness in most prison reformers, and we aro not sure that Dr. Findlay is not in some measure affected by it. Professor. Munsterbero has lately said that "criminals arc not born, but made—not even self-made, but fellow-made." If this doctrine wore quite true, and its complete truth is very doubtful indeed, it, would be .Very easy to err grossly in acting upon it. Nothing,, as the Times points out, can avail* if there be no stable character to work upon : "to build up character when there may be next to no foundation to rest upon is hard." ,We should like

to call special attention to this passage in the Times's article: "The most dangerous enemies to true prison reform are those excellent persons who persist in looking upon a criminal as a mere victim of circumstances"; which statement is true [only] in the sense that the criminal is in prison not because other people aro wicked or negligent, but because he has beaten, hurt, cheated, or deirauded some one, or has been grossly sell-indulgent. To say to two men who started life in much tho same circumstances, the ■ one drunken, brutal and unrestrained, the other sober and self-disciplined, "You are' both fine fellows, but one of you has had bad luck," is not to exercise charity; it is merely to muddle facts. v There are obvious weaknesses in the Crimes Bill, some of which time may ■ accentuate while it may point the way to remedying others. Perhaps the greatest immediately visible arises out of the impossibility of deciding when a prisoner is "reformed. But serious as, in our opinion, are the dangers contained in those clauses of tho Bill which deal with the reviewing of indeterminate sentences, no danger in a;ny scheme of prison reform can 'be so ■ great in the long event as the danger of allowing the penal character of imprisonment to be sacrificed to other considerations.