THE JUDGE AND THE CRIMINAL
• [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sue,—In your issue of March 5th, you draw attention to the marked recrudescence of crimes of (inky alio) robbery with violence by motor bandits. Unfortunately, this cannot be gainsaid and is amply borne out by statistics. You add,
however, that this fact raises a doubt as to the efficiency of our police methods. There I differ from you. While this particular form of crime has increased, so also have the prosecutions, and, in nearly all other forms of serious crimes, there has been an almost spectacular decrease. Thus in Scotland crimes against the person have fallen from 2,182 in 1914 to 1,037 in 1930.
The increase of burglars and robbers may be partly explained by the greater difficulty of detection due to the rapid meads of transport of which the criminals avail themselves in escaping with their booty to places far removed from the scene of their operations. Still more, I believe, it is due to the failure of our judicatories to deal adequately with the criminals when they are detected mid brought up for sentence. Most of the serious burglaries are committed by a limited number of professional criminals who would mostly have been rendered harmless if the Prevention of Crimes Act, 1908, had been utilized as its author intended. Unfortunately Parliament added to the original definition of un habitual criminal a clause that he must be one " who is persistently leading a dishonest or criminal life." The astute criminal.
by doing some work between his intervals of confinement in prison, saw his way to evade this definition, and the Act has consequently become a dead letter. In view of this the older method of giving increasingly long sentences of penal servitude to oft-convicted burglars might have reduced substantially those who were at liberty. instead, a misplaced and false sentimentalism seems to have infected even the High Court Judges, and one finds men who have served two or more sentences of five or seven years penal servitude being let off on a tenth conviction with three years penal servitude and so let loose to prey on the public after an interval of only two years and three months. That they are incurable is quite well known.
Most serious of all is the fact that the English Court of Criminal Appeal has recently further discouraged the adequate sentences for such crimes. In a ease where Mr. Justice.
McCardie had imposed a sentence of four years penal servitude on an oft-convicted burglar, the Lord Chief Justice, in moving the court to reduce the sentence, to one of eighteen months imprisonment, appears to have laid it down that it was wrong to take into account previous convictions, as that would be punishing a man twice for the same offence, and that when a man has served his sentence he has expiated the offence for which he served it. This is an entirely novel view and appears to be directly at variance with The Larceny Act, 1916, and the Coinage Act, both of which prescribe heavier penalties for second offences ; and to the principles underlying the Prevention of Crimes Act, 1908. Probably if a drastic punishment were awarded to a first offender he would be deterred from his evil courses, for robberies and burglaries are the only kind of serious crime which can be made to pay, and are the only ones which are charged repeatedly against the same person. With the Law as at present administered we arc daily manufacturing habitual criminals and when they arc detected and convicted we afford them an early opportunity of resuming their old life. No wonder these crimes are increasing at an alarming pace for, not merely are we increasing the number of habitual criminals, but we are giving each of them a far wider scope for their activities.—I am, Sir, &e.,
EDWARD T. SALVEREN.
Dean Park House, Edinburgh.
Previous page
