OUR PRECIOUS PRISONS.

NZ Truth, Issue 110, 27 July 1907, Page 8

OUR PRECIOUS PRISONS.

THE HELL AT HANMER SPRINGS. Gaoler Reid's Rotten Rale* How Prisoners are Reformed. It has long been recognised by students of criminology tbat gaol is no reformatory, but is too often the incubator where the future criminal is batched. A dim recognition of these faqts is forcing itself upon the authorities m New Zealand, who are experimenting i* a departure from the brutalising usages of ordinary goal life. The tree-planting gangs m various parts of this recently promoted Dominion are a brave attempt to drag tbe merely casual and likewise tbe confirmed convict out of the unnatural and unhealthy mode of life that he has chosen for himself, or which has been forced upon him by uafriendly. circumstances. At the tree-planting depots the prisoner . is interested m bis work, and works m tlie open air,, he is doing something useful and knows it, he has a certain amount of freedom, and be is not paraded before tbe city multitude m a shameful uniform. The mode of life is calculated to uplift and not depress the prisoner, and even if he has a heretitary, tendency to crime, the removal of /

THE TYRANNOUS RESTRICTION of the _ ordinary Government prison will do much to discourage any development of that tendency. This is a brief description of the tree-plant-ing stations as the authorities know them, or want them to be, but it is nossible to make' a tree-planting station a hell on earth for the prisoners by tbe mere importation of ordinary gaol methods into the,<iepot. Thus the whole of the reformatory benefits that ought to be derived from tree-planting are rendered nugatory and abortive by some blastiferous gaol-ei whose comprehension of a gaoler's .-duty is to make tbe life of the prisoners so awful that they daily wish -that they had never been born. '•Truth-" m the past has given a considerable amount of its precious space to the relation of dreadful occurrences m the Lyttelton inferno, otherwise knowa as 'a gaol, on the portals of which there should be inscribed m flaming letters, "abandon hope all ye who enter here" ; it is now our duty to throw the searchlight of publicity on the* branch perdition at Hanmer Springs, -where the humane method of the tree-planting system is robbed of its efficacious character by •__

DUNDERHEADED BRUTE OF A 1 GAOLER

named Reid. This man appears to be incapable of kindness, which is one of the essentials m the treatment of prisoners. *Reid controls about twenty-five prisoners, everyone of • whom hates him as badly as Mary Ann Aitken hates the Pure Foods Bill. The gaol boss is an overheating person who regards the prisoners as some lower form of animal life, and he never speaks to any of them except to hurl a violent order at them. If a prisoner wants to see the gaoler he has to stand humbly with his hat m his hand until that superior person deigns to aotice h-im, and if the regulations would allow it, Reid would have the men crawl to bim on all fours, with their noses m the dust. He is an unnecessarily rigid disciplinarian, and imposes punishments forthe smallest voluntary or involuntary offences. One* prisoner closed his window with a slam one night and disturbed Redd m the midst of his prayers, or something else (probably something else), an-d the unspeakable gaoler fined the offender a week's marks and tobacco for the crime. Indisposed! prisoners are afraid to sneeze on the premises. One young fellow was laid up with influenza, and Reid dragged him out of his hut and sent him to work. He said he would have no malingering there. They want a death or two at Hanmer Springs, under brutal circumstances, to draw attention to the methods of con%tol. But probably they would be hushed up. It is advisable for discharged prisoners to put a long distance between them and Reid when they do get out of his clutches. One exprisoner got work at 8s a day on the local waterworks, and the insufferable gaoler saw the management and mentioned the convict's last employment, with the result that the man got the sack. This is the way men who have expiated their offence by serving their sentences are hounded down and prevented from earning an honest living. One man m thc gang bad broke» boots, and as snow was lvine on the ground he went to ramping Reid and asked if he would be kind enough to get them mended. Rapscallion

■ REID WAS MUCH AMUSED and said he didn't keep a bootmaker's shop for every drunk on the road. His own officers are full up of him, and it is an open secret that when the tree-planting is concluded, they intend asking for a shift, and it may be interesting to Reid to know that they purpose giving their reasons. But what "Truth" wants to know is, why should the Hairmer Springs prison be handed over to an unsuitable person like ihis to spoil with his brutalising influence and incapability ?