BRANDING FOR CRIMINALS

Hokitika Guardian, 14 December 1923, Page 3

BRANDING FOR CRIMINALS

HOW THE TURK FACES A PROBLEM. Constantinople buds itseil hroiight. face to luce with » problem iu crime ilnit demands solution, ihe lurkislt police are eontemliug against a horde oi eiiminal.s inllamed with all the passion an.| fatalism of tlm East, olf-scoiirings of a dozen races and lands, who have found in the city on the Golden Horn a rich domain for plunder. Every large city knew what it was lo cope with a marked outbreak of crime after the war New York vividly l'g members its on "wave'." Conditions

in llit' Bone, never too tratK,uil in Us (i-itninal depths. have been '"’coining intolerable since tlie end nl the campaign against llie Creeks. Camp l"l----).avers, trudging llie trad nl Kemal s armies, will, an eve for bun : unpaid irregulars and all llie rill-tali' last adrift bv war have poured across llie Bosphorus. Willi these newcomers istales a correspondent "1 the. HV Veil; •Times') added to the criminal population. with murder, robbery, anil violence increasing daily. the pnlue have tlc.-i.10.l on stern repressive measures. The latest word is to the cttcct that the Turkish authorities have plmC noil in follow the nneieut custom, and brand habitual criminals Whether such a drastic procedure can check the activities of Constantinople’s plunderers ami mt-throats remains to | H , M ,eit. In the England and Era lire of other days the branded rogue "as a marked man anion-; his lellows. who desired. above all else, to keep away from a similar degradation, (lime railed, according to some chroniclers. wl,en the authorities applied the hot iron. The Turkish police, it is reported, roly on partlv tatnoing and partly oil hunting to serve their purpose. As ri'gards tatooiug. they are merely following a precedent observed m the Sntisl, Arntv as late as IS7H. Hrandmg was abolished in IS-’ff, except tor Army deserters, upon wlmm the letter "1> was imperishahly imprinted with fatt ming or gunpowder, while notoriously had characters in the ranks were marked “B The British Mutiny Act -if l-C.s i-avc power to a court martial to decree the marking of a .“IV on an incorrigible near the left armpit, am this punishment was permitted to stand t .„ the books for twenty-one years. Iu the carlv history of Ihigland brand was meted out for offences that to-dav would seem absurdly trivial. Vagabonds and perpetual brawlers were stigmatised with the hot iron under the of the Statute of Vagabonds in the fifteenth century. Cutting off criminals’ ears also was a method of identification of malefactors. Elizabethan literature is full of references to crop-eared rogues.”