The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1907 YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS OF THE LAW.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3756, 26 February 1907, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1907 YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS OF THE LAW.

The law in New Zealand is very lenient in the case of youthful first offenders. At the Supreme Court sessions just held the calendar, containing a large number of cases of crime by young people, and the Judges seemed to have been in a very amiable mood. Three cases against young offenders occur to us. In the first case a boy, who was the son of wealthy parents, was found guilty of one of the most serious offences known in law, an offence in fact for which the maximum penalty is imprisonment for life. The boy had corrupted the whole school of which he was a pupil. He is probably a moral pervert who can no more help being a pervert than some people can help being good and honest and upright. The law does not treat a moral pervert as a maniac. It either imprisons him like it would a burglar or a thief, or it gives him the benefit of the First Offenders’ Probation Act. The Judge’s cure for this case of moral perversion is that the boy shall report himself to the Probation Officer every week for six years. This is, of course, a lenient treatment of

the case. A few years ago the offender would have been regarded as a responsible criminal and treated as such. To-day it is believed that espionage and a certain amount of imposed discipline will help to <;ure the disease of perversion. This treatment of a form of mental disease suggests that cancer patients should be charged with contracting the disease and be made to report every week. If they are guilty of having cancer at the end of six 3'ears they shall be punished. One may be sorry for a criminal whose crime is the result of a mental condition he is incapable of overcoming, but one doesn’t suggest that he shall be given six years facility to continue the carrying on of the crime. To boil the matter down, what’s the good of lecturing a diseased man? Not all the speeches that judges ever made cured a disease. Another case was the admission to probation of a young man in his teens. He had been guilty of forgery. He probadly couldn’t help being guilty of forgery, but this is no reason why he should be permitted to forge. The forger has a decadent mind. He is a fungus growth. The fact that he has commenced young and has been able to commit a crime and obtain probation, isn’t in our opinion a deterrent to him. People don’t commit a forgery in a moment of excitement. It is a deliberate thing, and however sorry one may feel for a young forger, one may be permitted more sorrow for the public who are certainly not very well protected by this frequent stretching of the First Offenders’ Probation Act. The other instance of the extension of this Act was in the case of a young man found guilty of breaking, entering and theft. This was proved to be the outcome of a “ drunken spree.” The young man was of good character, highly thought of by his mates who were also of good character, and he was trusted by his employers. What he stole was recovered intact. This is, in our opinion, the kind of case the First Offenders’ Probation Act was designed to deal with and not of gross sexual crimes and crimes showing a high criminal skill. It is also our opinion that such a man should be forced to abstain from drink. Crimes and criminals is an absorbingly interesting stndy, and the more the subject is studied the more one must see that in nearly all cases of the commission of crime the criminal is an irresponsible person. Punishment is not a corrective, it is palliative, and the withdrawal of the criminal is but a temporary protection for society, which is exploited again six times out of seven when the criminal has undergone his punishment. The fact that one class of crime will be treated by different juries and different judges quite distinctly and punishment meted out in different quantities, is the clearest evidence that judges and juries do not deal with crime with any competency. We are assured that prisoners in our gaols are not outy punished for their crimes but are “ treated ” for their crimes, although we have not yet been able to discover anything in the prison system that had a healing effect. It is as everyone knows quite possible for a confirmed criminal to be a charming person, and even an honest upright man, excepting for his one “ kink.” The duty of the law is not to punish the person for a misfortune he can’t help, but to straighten out the “ kink.”