Credo of a penal reformer
Sir: I overlook Mr John Braine's charming irrelevancies and non-sequiturs (Letters, 30 August). But I don't think that I ought, for his own sake, to allow him to rewrite history, lest it be suspected that he has not broken as com- pletely as he supposes with his wicked leftist past.
It is simply untrue to suggest that a declared reformative penal policy did not begin until the Labour party came to power in 1945. On the contrary, in 1938 (a particularly unfortunate year for Mr Braine to have chosen for his false antithesis) Sir Samuel Hoare, Tory Home Secre- tary, told a cheering House of Commons that there was 'no place for the remnants of a period that looked at the treatment of crime principally from the angle of retribution and deterrence.'
Go back a further twenty-eight years to the words of another (not precisely leftist) Home Secretary : `The mood and temper of the public with re- gard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm, dispassionate recogni- tion of the rights of the accused, and even the convicted criminal—a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment—a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry those who have paid their due in the coinage of punishment: tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerative pro- cesses : unfailing faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man.'
A mere idle dreamer, the man who said that? Perhaps. But I still think it deplorable that so miserably little has been done or is being done to try to translate his dream into reality. His name, of course, was Winston Churchill.
Previous page
