PRISON SYSTEM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 November 1942, Page 4

PRISON SYSTEM

FAULTS IN NEW ZEALAND CHAPLAIN’S CRITICISM. PLEA MADE FOR REFORMS. The New Zealand prison system lias often been criticised by well-meaning theorists armed only with second-hand knowledge, states an article in the “New Zealand Herald.” It is a different matter when someone from inside —a prison chaplain of 13 years’ standing and still in harness —comes forward and publicly indicts the system as archaic, inhumane and unworthy of an otherwise enlightened British democracy. The indictment is contained in an “autobiography” of the Rev. G. E. Moreton, Anglican chaplain to the Mount Eden prison, a book which has just been published in Auckland under the title of “A Parson in Prison.” The writer is a fellow-clergyman, the Rev. Melville Harcourt, but, as Mr Moreton accepts full responsibility for them, the sentiments expressed may be treated as entirely his. What he has to say gains all the more weight because his criticism is made by a man who has to live with the present penal system and intends to go on working under it. ENGLISH PRISONS VISITED. Mr Moreton became chaplain at Mount Eden in December, 1929. In 1936 he made a trip to England, and while there visited Wormwood Scrubs, where he met Mr Walter Young,.its governor, and one of the men most responsible for enlightenment and progress in English prisons. He also inspected Maidstone, the country’s “star” prison, and his description of these institutions tells its own story. Before leaving New Zealand he had interviewed the then Prime Minister, Mr Savage, and had offered to make a comprehensive report on the prisons and Borstal institutions in Britain and Australia if the Government would grant him the small sum of £5O for incidental expenses. He received a letter declining the offer. “Evidently,” he writes, “the authorities considered that we had nothing to learn from the contemporary systems in other countries.” Only the main points in Mr Moreton’s indictment can be given. He concedes that the Borstal institutions of New Zealand, which he has visited, are far ahead of the prisons in their treatment of inmates. It is of the prisons, which receive many young offenders, that he has to speak. He regards the system as still substantially the harsh English system of 60 years ago, a legacy left by Colonel Arthur Hume, an English prison official and disciplinarian, imported about 1880. UNTRAINED OFFICERS. With few exceptions, says Mr Moreton, the prison officers are men with no specific training for the specialised job in hand, and their educational level is not sufficiently high—factors which militate strongly against the modernisation of the system. Initiative among them is discouraged, and their isolated reforms are apt to be countermanded. There is still a tendency to treat the individual prisoner as a cypher instead of a human being to be- fitted for his return to society. Young offenders and hardened criminals are allowed to associate, yet all prisoners are kept far too many hours in their cells —from 4.30 p.m. on Saturday to 9 a.m. on Sunday, for instance —and in their cells they must eat all meals. Little is done in the way of vocational and cultural education or evening lectures. Trained psychiatrists and psychologists have no place in the system, and only physical ills seem to be considered. INQUIRY AND REFORMS. The author does not attempt to draft a complete new system, but he suggests that a’few of the ablest officers be sent to the Imperial Training School for Prison Officers at Maidstone, England, that when they have completed the course a training school, even if a small one, be started in New Zealand; that a trained psychiatrist be placed on the medical staff of each prison; that archaic buildings, such as that at Mount Eden, be abandoned, and that the present controller-general of- prisons be relieved of his multifarious other offices. These and all other relevant matters, Mr Moreton believes, should be submitted to a Royal Commission with full powers of inquiry, and prison reform should be given its proper and necessary place in post-war reconstruction. .