PUNISHMENT OR REFORMATION?

White Ribbon, Volume 23, Issue 265, 18 July 1917, Page 3

PUNISHMENT OR REFORMATION?

In tdays, ’alien a religious opinion or an adverse criticism of the (iovernment's policy may bring the dire penalty of imprisonment, the question of prison administration is an important one. Recent complaints with regard to conditions in the Auckland Prison make us question whether the reforms wrought by John Howard and Elizabeth Fry have in any way been extended and amplified, or whether we have been lethargic and allowed the system to become retrograde. Bad light, dampness, imperfect sanitation, and proximity of healthy and diseased prisoners through the absence of any system of classification, are conditions that must tend to lower the physical, mental, and moral tone of the inmates. We wonder whether the case of the women prisoners is the same, if so, we can imagine the permanent evil effects of the impress of such an experience. It is well to remember that the ultimate aim of all punishment should be the restoration of the offender to society through his reformation, and as so much attention is being givep now-a-days to the study of the principles of general education, 1 would enter a plea for the study of those principles in their ethical relationship to the mental and moral needs of prisoners. If sue h were undertaken by all who have the control and administration of prisons, the personal qualifications of humaneness and sympathy, so necessary to all who undertake reformative work, w ould have som s chance of cultivation and expression.

The late W. T. Stead advocated that all magistrates and judges should fit themselves for their office by actual experience—as prisoners- of prison life. Some such experience on the part of jailers and warders would undoubtedly make for sympathy, and quicken the imagination of those who at present may be mere officials carrying out the letter of an antiquated penal system in a more or less perfunctory manner. The present system by all its negations —its silence, its absence of beauty, its restriction of many forms of w holesome self-expression—all tending to atrophy of the will, must be productive of the “corrosive evils” of brooding and hopelessness which de-

prive tin' unfortunate individuals of the chance of re establishing their own self-respect, or of practising those vir tues which might have so strengthen ed their character that thev would ic solve to wrestle anew with their particular besetment, and thy» be restored to their place in the social world. A prison system, which physically or morally devitalises, imposes disabdities that may long outlast the term of the sentence, and so, like Shylock, it has taken the life-blood as well as the pound of flesh. Of the prisoners, as well as of those who have never seen inside prison walls, it should be true that they might rise “On stepping stones Of their dead selves, to higher things.” Shall we not by infusing sympathy into all our penal systems help towards this end? K. P. CATO.