SIR,—Kathleen Smith's article is one of the finest pieces of
commonsense constructive thinking we have ever come across. We live here in a newly developing society, have some responsibility for its future, and wish strongly to support her genuinely social resolution of crime and punishment—which recon- ciles ideals and morality with current materialistic values and the demand for rational justifications: always the essential synthesis, but now more difficult than ever.
Miss Smith's suggestions seem to cover everything, With labour and liability she offers the best methods of corrective training which would draw convicts back into society by the re-establishment of the two bonds which make it civilised : mutual obligation and responsibility; the need to earn a lawful living. And, as she shows, punishment related to such principles avoids the destruction of self-respect— rather, the fulfilment of such punishment encourages its growth.
Her solution is simple, fair and realistic. It makes crime and punishment something within society, not an irrelevant abstraction which takes place in a vacuum and allows—as now—the convict to continue in what is surely his most significant conviction—that of irresponsibility for his actions. Since the reaction against the eighteenth-century penal code and bestial prison conditions humanitarians—and psychologists —have properly concerned us with society's shared responsibility for crime and criminals. But to very many people the principle of humane reforms—with one important exception—has been carried far enough when it clearly allows the prisoner to become• a parasite, thus doubling the injury to society and adding insult. (The one exception—abolition of capital punishment—Miss Smith's compendious re- form also provides for.) Without rejecting the need for civilised treatment of prisoners, Miss Smith corrects the balance and seeks to re-establish every individual's responsibility to society in a way every- one but the insane can understand.
Miss Smith's synthesis is also the typical British one of new methods with old principles. Financial liability--by the wergild—was the Anglo-Saxon basis for justice: one imagines Alfred and me would approve, and they seem to have been good judges of human nature. It is a useful lesson to demonstrate to a young and often dismissive society that the past is still with it.
West Sussex
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