Victimising Ex-convicts The appeal for restraint on the part of
the Press in writing about ex-convicts which Mr. J. A. F. Watson, vice-president of the National Association of Prison Visitors, has made this week in a letter to The Times merits a response to which there ought to be no exceptions. The public, as he points out, take their lead from the Press, and their reaction is not likely to be charitable so long as a newspaper is capable of publishing, as one did this month, the morning after a man's release, details of his is-years-old offence, no effort being spared to revive public interest in a crime for which he had 'suffered a terrible penalty and which had been rightly forgotten. Even the name of the town to which the man travelled to make his home and begin work was given. The Newspaper Proprietors' Association recently circulated to news editors an appeal by the National Association of Prison Visitors and some newspapers are, of course, conspicuous for their restraint in these matters. Those journals which still regard the forecourts of prisons as happy hunting grounds for copy undo at a stroke much of the work of the prisoners' aid societies.
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