CAPITAL PUNISHMENT OR
BY an undesigned but interesting coincidence, while the Home Secretary was on Tuesday expounding to the House of Commons a Penal Reform Bill whose whole tendency was to lay emphasis on the reformative rather thanthe' deterrent character of punishment, a lecture by Col. G. D. Turner, till- recently an Assistant Prison • COminissionet under Sir Samuel Hoare, on ".Some Alternatives to Capital Punishment," was being delivered elsewhere in London. That title bespeaks at any rate an 'open mind on the question of abolishing capital pun- ishment altogether, a subject on which public attention was at least momentarily focussed a fortnight ago, as the result of'the Passage by the House of COmmons of Mr. Vy&yan Adams' resAition urging complete abolition for an experimental period of five years. The adoption of the resolution has, of course, no legal effect, for it was only an.-expression of opinion, not a Bill, that secured a favourable vote of 11¢ to 89, and Mr. Geoffrey Lloyd for the Home Office declared himself definitely hostile to the proposal. But the question of the desirability of continuing practide which most people would prefer to see abolished if they were satisfied that abolition would entail no consequences dangerous to the community has been forcibly pressed on the Government's consideration, and will no doubt bepressed on it again. • It is essentially a question on which the public must pronounce. Indeed one of the arguments used in the debate by opponents of abolition was that the Government could not run ahead of public opinion, the presumption being that if it abolished capital punishment it would. That may well be doubted. If most reasonable people were questioned they would agree that by the twentieth century some improvement on the primitive principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth should have been devised, and admit that hanging is only to be tolerated because no adequate alternative to it has been evolved.. Even so the arguments for retaining capital punishment are only decisive if it can be estab- lished that hangin3 does in fact act as a deterrent and that without it the number of murders would be likely to increase. That clearly cannot be established. No- thing but experiment can prove it, which is a good ground for Mr. Vyvyan Adams' proposal that the experiment be tried for an initial period of five years. If Mr. Lloyd is right in contending that that period is too short to yield decisive results the contlusion to which that points is that the experiment shoUld be given a longer trial, not that it should be given no trial at all. For if; which is highly iinprobable, it appeared that the abolition of the capital penalty was leading directly to an increase in murders, Parliament would certainly not hesitate .t:o4 reimpose it before the end.of the trial period. - The arguments . in favour of the capital penalty are not impressive. It is said, for example, , that life-, imprisonment, or some shorter term,. would not be a deterrent in the same way as hanging is. Yet as things are more murderers are imprisoned than hanged. Mr. Lloyd stated that in the years 1932-1937 the number , of, capital sentences passed in England and, Wales was,, 115. But the number of executions was not half x 15. (The figure for 1935 was eight, for 1936 nine and for /937 eight.) Reprieves were more numerous . than , hangings. And if to the murderers is added, as it logically should be, a by no means inconsiderable, number of persons whom nothing but sheer luck caused to be convicted of attempted murder instead of murder, though the intent was the same/it is clear that the capital penalty can have only a very limited effect, since in fact the majority of murderers and potential murderers do not suffer it. )i And some the argument often used in connexion, with some peculiarly brutal murder that this is manifestly a case which justifies the retention of the death penalty, the obvious answer is that the 'very fact that such a crime could be com- mitted demonstrates the inefficacy of the deterrent.) , We have to decide, moreover, whether in the case of murder every aspect of punishment except deterrence is to be ruled out. More and more, through the whole of our penal system, the reformative element is being given prominence. That was the keynote of the Home Secretary's speech in the House of Commons on Tuesday. Does even just sympathy for the victim and just anger at the crime give warrant for a penalty which so far as this world is concerned excludes all possibility of reform? 'Murderers are not always shot through with vice. The author of a crime passionel may be a man who in general character is as likely to be above as below the level of his fellow-citizens. For whose benefit is he to have his existence ended because of the principle that a life must be paid for with a life ? We are accepting from the Home Secretary the verdict that corporal punishment is no deterrent, and its abolition is provided for in the Bill debated in Parliament this week. Public opinion appears to be ready, and rightly so, for the much more serious step of abolishing capital punishment likewise, at any rate for an experimental term.
But abolishing it in favour of what ? • To the solution of that problem Colonel Turner in the lecture already wi mentioned made an arresting contribution. Briefly, he 181, would pass on the murderer ,an " indeterminate " sen- tence, consisting of imprisonment for a fixed period definitely as penalty, followed by treatment for such length of time as the Hoine Secretary might decide designed to- fu him for an ultimate return to normal life. (If the idea of the return of a murderer to live the ordinary life of the community causes alarm, it is worth remembering that many reprieved murderers are doing that today.) But the essence of the punishment should be a complete break, not indeed with life itself as now, but with all the criminal's past life. He should be deprived of his name and given a new one, cut off from all contact with family or associates ; every rela- tionship should be severed ; the purpoXe would be that the man should almost literally " rise on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things." That during the penalty period. in the reformative period, by ingenious but by no means impracticable methods which Colonel Turner outlined, he would be found work, while still a prisoner, with ordinary workmen in some factory or other undertaking convenient to the prison, the date of his complete release being determined by the prison authorities and the Prison Commissioners. It is a highly suggestive project, and fully in line. with modern doctrines of penal treatment, but Colonel Turner would be the last to claim that the only choice lies between his proposal and the present practice. There are various other possibilities, each of them -sufficient to shake the faith of those who have mechanically accepted capital punishment as inevitable. It may still be hoped that Sir Samuel Hoare will make his Home Secretaryship historic by abolishing the death penalty._
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