18 FEBRUARY 1938, Page 6

The Home Secretary, in his address to the Howard League

on Tuesday, spoke of the rebuilding of some of our older prisons as one of the aims he had in view, though he added, not surprisingly, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a not negligible factor in the case. The need is urgent. Parts of Dartmoor, for example, have survived from the old war-prison built for the American war-prisoners of 1812, though these are used today only for evening rtcreation, and contain no cells. But ideas in penal treatment have made great advances in the past fifteen years, and prisons planned a couple of generations or more ago are fatal obstacles to the application of principles of treatment that everyone wants to see applied. Payment for good conduct, permission to smoke, wireless, occasional films, are all valuable as keeping a man human and helping him to get a fresh start on an equal footing when he comes out of prison. But the sombre gloom of some of the London prisons in parti- cular, notably Pentonville and Wandsworth, is bound to have the worst kind of mental effect. The only way to deal with that is to scrap them, and build new ones on modern lines in the suburbs or the open country. The sites are so valuable that the cost of substitution should not be formidable. The Abyssinian film matinee at the Phoenix Theatre on Tuesday was a curious affair. The features of the show were to have been an official Italian film of the military operations, a Russian film showing the same operations in another light, and the Emperor of Abyssinia, who was to make a little speech. But two out of the three, the Emperor and the Italian film, were absentees. The Emperor, it appeared, had been announced in error. As for the Italian film, it had duly reached this country and then been diverted, by means mysterious but assumed to be darkly sinister, to the Italian Embassy. Anyhow it never got to the Phoenix Theatre. The performance was organised by friends of Abyssinia, but there was a substantial Italian or pro-Italian element present, and pictures of Signor Mussolini were greeted with cheers in one quarter and vociferations of opposite intention in the other. The Russian film gave irrefutable evidence of the bombing of a Red Cross station, but that had been established on irrefutable evidence already.

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