Youthful Criminals

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 394, 30 June 1928, Page 8

Youthful Criminals

HABITUALS AT EIGHTEEN WHEN a man is declared by a Judge to be an habitual criminal, he enters prison for a "Kathleen Mavourneen” sentence, which, in the spirit of the Irish folk song, “may be for years, and it may be for ever.” Penal reform workers believe that men should not be declared habitual criminals until they reach a certain age, but men of the law, with long experience of prisoners and their peculiarities, discount this as an academic attempt to solve what really is a practical problem.

It is only under pressure of tile gravest provocation that a Judge of the Supreme Court brands a man with the life stigma of criminality and banishes him to prison at the pleasure of the State. It is permissible, according to law, to “declare” a man after the commission by him of a certain consecutive number of offences of specific gravity, but Judges use this power very sparingly when placing a check upon law-breakers with chronic tendencies; and in the past very little complaint has been made, even by humanitarian institutions, to the steps taken by the Bench in this direction. Recently, however, the question of the age of habitual criminals has been discussed, and among some social workers a suggestion is advanced that, until a man attains certain years, he should not be marked with the brand of habitual. One of the chief objections to youths being declared habitual criminals is that mentally they are younger than their years, and that careful and judicious reformation rather than the cold

and uncompromising gaol conditions, should be applied to them. Greater attention, it is said, should be paid to the employment of the men so that they receive the work to which they are most adapted. In Mt. Eden prison this is difficult, because the scope of the work for the 400 prisoners is limited to quarrying and two or three classes of lighter jobs around the gaol itself. There are those who believe, however, that the day is not far distant when Mt. Eden gaol will have to be shifted from its present site and placed in the country, where its opera-

tions will not be so restricted. There are those, in fact, who see no reason why the community should not be given the use of the prisoners* services on the lines of a modified “honour system,’* such as operates now’ in the United States. The chaplain of Mt. Eden prison, the Rev. Charles Chandler, is among those who believe that no man should be made an habitual criminal until he reaches the age of 28 or 30 —particularly if he is at the same time sentenced to reformative detention. When asked for his opinion upon the question, Mr. Chandler quoted the cast, of a youth of 18 who was banished for a period of reformative detention and declared an habitual. This he considered to be a glaring inconsistency on the part of the law, because in giving a sentence of reformative detention, the Judge held hope for the recovery of the youth’s character, but in the declaration of habitual criminality, he gave up hope even of ultimate reform. “Deadwood Dicks” A youth with advanced criminal tendencies at 18 was, in reality, of the “Deadwood Dick” type, and although a thoroughly bad lad, punishable only by detention, the permanent stigma should be held from him until his mentality was fully developed. The Rev. Jasper Calder, City Missioned went further. “It is Hellish that a man should be made an habitual criminal before he reaches the age of 25,” he said. “It is wrong that one Judge should have the power of finally deciding upon this question. A properly constituted board should have the final say and decide upon the merits of the criminal.”

The establishment of any stage in life when a man may be branded an incorrigible menace to the community is not viewed with approval by Mr. Allan J. Moody, whose experience in the law courts of Auckland has brought him into touch with the good and the bad in the law-breaker. He says that too much attention is being paid to the academic side of prison reform, and too little discrimination being made in the proper training of those who display tendency toward leading cleaner and more orderly lives. Governed by Crime

With the correct method of training, he says, many of the men who occupy our prisons to-day could be used so effectively as to become eminently unseful to themselves and to the country. They, by their crimes, had made the community suffer; they, in turn, should be made to give to the community at least some service in expiation of their offences. In his opinion it would be impossible even approximately to assess a stage in life at which a man could qualify for the state of habitual criminality, which must be governed by the nature and the frequency of his crimes. A man was thoroughly bad when a New Zealand Judge branded him thus, and he possessed faith in their discretion. The subsequent treatment of prisoners was an entirely different thing.