TENDER-HEARTEDNESS AND CRIME.
THE Home Office appears to be thrashing out the problem of crime for itself by a process of presenting rival opinions on the subject, and trusting that eventually light will dawn on the contradictions. We trust it may. It is all very well to " ventilate " a difficulty, but unorthodox ventilation in a Government Department may end in a very draughty kind of administration 4 Perhaps there is more to be said for the old-fashioned plan under which a Department solved its problems in secret and spoke to the world with one voice. However that may be, Mr. H. B. Simpson's introduction to the lately published Blue Book of Criminal Statistics is very interesting. Its doctrines are not less likely to be true because they oppose the spirit in which Mr. Churchill and Mr. Lloyd George have taken re- cently to speaking of crime and punishment. The Blue Book shows that in the last fifteen years there has been a rise in the number of persons tried for indictable offences. The annual average from 1894 to 1898 was 52,000; from 1904 to 1908 it was 62,000; in 1909 it was 67,000. This result, if it does no injustice to the facts, is certainly discouraging. Here are we educating ourselves, studying crime as it has never been studied before, evolving the most scientific principles on the effects of punishment, and generally putting to shame in theory the good old rules and simple plans of our ancestors— and yet crime increases. Mr. Simpson's introduction attempts to explain this distressing paradox. But a glimmer of hope that the statistics may be misleading comes to us from a suggestion in the Times that the modern fashion of short sentences may cause habitual offenders to serve more sentences than formerly, and thus be counted over and over again. Mr. Simpson, however, so far from admitting the possibility of mistake, suggests that the increase in crime is even greater than appears, owing to the disinclination to prosecute thieves who would receive a very light sentence, and particularly owing to the indulgence displayed towards first offenders.
In his explanation of the facts he points out that there in a tendency to regard the criminal with pity rather than with censure. The criminal is an interesting specimen to be studied ; he is a " case " to be considered pathologically or physiologically. He is the victim of heredity or environment, or of anything but his own baseness. He is scarcely a conscious agent. (We paraphrase Mr. Simpson's argument.) This is the fault no doubt of the repercussion on English thought of the advanced doctrines of the criminologists, who would almost tell us that a man is governed through life by the shape of his mouth, or the setting of his ears, or the quality of his hair. Mr. Simpson, in fine, believes that public opinion has run to sentimentality, and thus a strong barrier which held back incipient criminals by a communal indignation against crime has been broken down. Another of Mr. Simpson's points is that crime is looked upon as a revolt of the poor against the rich, and, as such, earns a good deal of political sympathy in some newspapers. We are not ourselves inclined to discover very much in this argument. The absence of class bitterness is remarkable in England. And aahough half-educated criminals often speak of themselves in court as the victims of the social system, and socialistic doctrines have the effect of condoning crime as an explicable protest against an intolerable system, we doubt whether the working class is much infected by such thoughts. The British workman is a self-respecting fellow with a great deal of common-sense, and he thinks well of the plain rule that "He what prigs what isn't his'n
When he's cached must go to prison."
Yet, again, Mr. Simpson thinks that the habit of turning crime into a kind of romance in fiction and plays has made people think of it as an adventure rather than as an offence. There is something in this, too, no doubt, but the point may easily lie exaggerated. Plays like Raffles and Arsene Lupin were not the first to offer a moderate halo to the robber. Harrison Ainsworth wrote gentlemen of the road into fame long ago ; and the "penny dreadful" is not contemporaneous with the recent increase of crime : it flourished alike in the lean and the fat years of crime.
Though there may not be any signal revelation in any of Mr. Simpson's statements, they do pick out the tendencies of our day which in their varying degrees and in the aggre- gate account for the facts. The growth of sentimentalism is by far the most important tendency which Mr. Simpson mentions ; beside that nothing else much matters. It is solely responsible for such a distortion of facts as Mr. Simpson records in one case which he traces through its stages of sentimentalisation :- "A man of 28 was charged with trespassing on railway premises. He pleaded that he was gathering flowers to lay on his father's grave. As his father had been dead some five or six years and be was found in the company of two known poachers and a lumber dog, he could scarcely have expected his excuse to be taken seriously by the Bench, who, in fact, imposed a penalty of 6s. 6d., to include the costs, or in default to go to prison for seven days in the second division : a fortnight was allowed him in which to pay the fine. But the story was presumably meant for a wider audience, and was eagerly taken up by reporters wearied with the dull records of the police courts. It was repeated with various embellishments and perversions of
fact in the press of this country, and finally appeared in an American newspaper in the following form :— ' Plucked Flowers for Father's Grave, and 11 year-old-Boy is Jailed. "'Because the T . . . Magistrates imposed a prison sentence upon an 11-year-old boy, whose offence was venturing upon the South Eastern railroad right of way here, to pluck flowers for his father's grave, the entire Bench will have to do some explaining to the Secretary of State for Home Affairs.
"The boy protested that, being too poor to get a floral tribute for his father's grave, he thought there would be no harm in taking wild flowers from an uncultivated plot. The Bench, however, pointed out with great severity that the rising genera- tion of Englishmen must be taught respect for the rights of others. The boy was fined $1.55 and costs, amounting to $7.50, which he could not pay. He would have been sent to prison had not generous persons paid the fine.' "
The remedy for such distortions as that is never to allow the heart to run away with the head or to allow theory to get the better of experience. An even wider and deeper know- ledge of heredity and the influence of environment must, of course, be to the good, but not if it is allowed to affect the judgment outside the natural range of such forces. However much the criminal may be the victim of derived im- pulse and the prey of external moulding agencies, it still cannot be right to tell him in effect that he is without re- sponsibility. One is rather inclined to say that the weaker the human being, the greater is the need for him to be pro- tected against his own failings by simple and clear knowledge of how painful will be the results of yielding to temptation. Of cotu-se, if the condition of " habituality " in crime is estab- lished the treatment might be different altogether. If it is ascertained that a criminal really cannot help himself, it is cruelty to punish him. At the same time it is preposterous that he should be an unnecessary burden of expense on the State. He should be kept apart, not in a lunatic prison like Broadmoor, but in some segregation colony where life should be pleasant but where the Urinates should be prevented abso- lutely from preying upon their fellow men. We must get rid, too, of the pernicious sentimentalism which sanctions such ugly anomalies as letting off with little or no imprisonment a woman who has murdered her illegitimate child, on the prin- ciple that she is more sinned against than sinning. This is putting a premium on murder, for the woman who does her duty by her child is branded with living evidence of her shame, while the other gets off almost free of trouble and expense. Mr. Holmes, secretary to the Howard Institution, said, in an interview with a representative of the Westminster Gazette a few days ago, that he knew of no instance in which magistrates or judges had made an order under the Probationers Act of 1908 for a young thief to restore the money he had stolen. Surely this is amazing. If restitution is not insisted on, young offenders will never learn that theft is an offence not only against the State but against the individual. Many of the new methods of reclamation, as distinguished from penalisa- tion, might work very well indeed if it were understood that of their very nature they must be long, not short, processes. A probation of three months is a hopeless substitute for three months' imprisonment. A short Borstal sentence is a contra- diction in terms. The Borstal method aims at a radical change of habit and outlook in life; it exacts hard work, but does not impose an altogether unpleasant life. It is useless to suppose that a change of habits can be effected in a few weeks, yet judges sometimes inflict a short Borstal sentence, with the result that the prisoner is neither reclaimed nor deterred. We by no means disbelieve in new treatments, but they must be properly applied. Science and compassion have undermined the old simple vision of crime as always and simply a matter of responsible guilt. There seems to be no possibility of returning on our tracks, nor do we recommend it ; but we do protest against the flabbiness which neither applies new principles boldly nor preserves the deterrent forces of the old-fashioned penal code.
Previous page
