The Daily News. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29. AIDING DISCHARGED PRISONERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 172, 29 October 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29. AIDING DISCHARGED PRISONERS.

We have lately been treated to a local j exhibition of expert handling of a incurable misdeamant. Experts decided that a person who had been declared an habitual criminal and who was therefore sentenced indeterminately was "cured" sufficiently in six months to be let loose on society. Every person who understands that to the habitual criminal cure is impossible and that emotional persons should not have control or disposition of habitual offenders, foresees that under a new system that presumes the cure of the incurable in six months we are in for an interesting time. It may be taken for granted that every habitual criminal who is discharged "cured" will return to gaol within a short period. It is absolutely logical and entirely borne out by precedent. The misguided philanthropy which looses an indeterminately sentenced prisoner on society after a short incarceration should be carefully, frustrated by unemotional officialism. . No one will gainsay the fact that crime often begins under strong temptation and that the beginner may be directed inio honest paths by ordinary everyday commonsense humanity but never by shrieking emotionalism. There is a society called the Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society, of which the Chief Justices president. We do not think there is one member of that society who believes that "habituals" should be discharged or that doles of money and bits of work on discharge would do the class a halfpennyworth of good. The Government subsidises many things that are less useful than this society, but it refuses aid in this case. The Government aids the incorrigibles. This society deals with discharged prisoners who have been sentenced to terms of from seven days to six months. That is to say, its function is to prevent, if possible, misdeamants from becoming criminals. Of the class mentioned —short-term prisoners—--800 were discharged from Wellington gaols last year and the Society helped 372. It is certain that a proportion of these misdeamants never return to evildoing, so that the work is invaluable. Society, which is a squeamish sort of an arrangement, finds people to give a person who has been convicted of a hundred or two offences a good character, but there was strenuous opposition in Wellington to the establishment by the Salvation Army of a Prison Gate Brigade Home. When it is stated that the income of the Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society last year was only £123, it is apparent that the people don't rush to really assist the fallen to rise again. There is a phase of utility in this society's work that ought to appeal to the people. In a large number of instances, the man who goes to gaol has a wife jind family. When he goes to gaol he ceases to be a breadwinner for the family, eyen if he has not ceased before. It happens, especially in New Zealand, thajt the niost deserving cases for the administration of charity have to be literally "dug out," and the Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society has found that it must not only aid ex-prisoners when they quit gaol, hut must help their families before the sentence expires. There is a deal of false sentiment wasted on prisoners and to» little of it wasted on those who suffer by the sins of misdeamants. It may be granted that the majority of misdeamants are absolutely incapable of resisting sin, but abnormalities have to be dealt with not so much for the sake of the abnormal as for the protection of the normal. We believe that a concentration of State effort on the succor of first offenders might have some useful effect. We are absolutely convinced that there never has been, nor will there be any method, either philanthropic, corrective or educational, that will make an habitual criminal quit his crime while he has a chance to commit it. If misguided socalled "experts" loose one evil character on the public after six months' detention, they should loose the whole lot in a bunch. It is unkind to those detained to discriminate. The average habitual criminal as the best behaved person gaolers know, and it is evidently for this reason that "experts" are misled. If one of the class can be recommended as a competent worker, couldn't some philanthropist or other prevail upon the authorities to let the lot out in order that they might be supplied with decent jobs in bank and shop, field and factory?