DECREASE OF CRIME.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10478, 15 November 1911, Page 4

DECREASE OF CRIME.

Our forefotbeans thought that thie way to cure orimie was to treat the criimifciall with great severity. The ntbipping post, the stocks, the gallowis, and the horrors of the Fleet were all witness to this. Nowadays we are Isjcwly discovieriaig that the way to cure crime as to treat the criminal (reasonably. Every increase of kindness and humanity in our attitude towards convicted prisoners has- ibeem followed by a decrease in offences. Here and there, for a short-tame, some form, of firaud or violence has seemed to go up., hut if we compare figures over a Hong period the tendency fhas been, downwards, and strongly down wards. The Daily Mail points out that the report of the Commissioners of Ptrisons, wjhich has just been issued, rightly emphasises this fact. In half a century .the number of convicted criminals Unas faffiJen from 276 to 187 per thousand of the population. One admits, of course, that .tlue olassificatribni is not quite the same to-day as (half a century ago- Men were cjonvicted. then wihb are now (released on pffobation, and the courts had to deal with charges that never would •be 'before- them now. Still', J there is an undioubted and amazing \ dowaiward movement. The most re~ . assuring sign of aid is that fewer of the young people are being found in our prisons. The old criminal, the mam. wiho learned crime forty or fifty years ago, and who ihas been in orison possibly six or eight times, is hard to reclaim. The lad ca.ugh-t for the first time is to-day treated not so much as ai criminal to be punished as a being (of diseased inclinations to be pured. We treat them by the Borstal isystem and by other means, ai.d thje cure is often effective.