English Prisons To-day was a great book, and turned a
searchlight on our penal system in all its badness. A New Way with Crime (Williams and Norgate, 7s. 6d.), by one of its editors, is simply not in the same class. Mr. A. Fenner Brockway forgets that moral indignation against society is as bad an approach to the problem of crime as is moral indig- nation against the criminal. He turns what might have been a valuable contribution into an emotional and ultra- Socialistic diatribe against the social system which permits poverty and unemployment. He is not even justified in his initial assumption that these evils are largely responsible for crime ; since out of every hundred men who are most sorely tempted, only one, at most, succumbs. While paying occa- sional lip-service to the need for protecting society, he argues sophistically that deterrence and reform are incompatible, and that the latter should therefore be the sole aim of the Law. In insisting on the importance of catching the criminal young he is in accord with the best modern criminologists ; and it is useful to have the correspondence stressed between delin.
quency and puberty.
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