Punishment
MRS. Wrcsor/ writes so well that one is in danger of reading her book, so attractively produced by Mr. Cape, for the sheer joy of it. And that would be a pity, for Mrs. Wilson has not laboured for our pleasure. The wife of a prison Governor, she was driven almost against her will, she tells us, to consider the problem at her doors ; and she began to study the treat- ment of the lawbreaker.
The more she came into touch with the problem at first hand the more astonishment she felt. She discovered, for instance, that a fourth of our entire prison population were not criminals at all but were imprisoned for debt. " A poor man cannot go bankrupt." She came into touch " with women whose husbands, because they would not support their families, were shut up with enough to eat in a prison where they could not possibly support their families who therefore were dependent upon the guardians." She talked " with mothers whose sons because of ignorant adolescent sexual perversion were sentenced to prison for long terms where anything but inversion was impossible to them."
She kept on enquiring into the real reasons for sending men to prison and made the shattering discovery that " there is no acceptable reason for shutting four-fifths of the present prisoners in prisons and none for letting the other fifth out." And so this book, which was designed as an outline of the punishment of crime, became an indictment of the crime of punishment. It is by far the most penetrating analysis of our penal systems that we have seen in recent years and written with a freshness and an originality all its own. It would have been more valuable still had the author given more references to her many authorities.
Mrs. Wilson traces the development of punishment from the penal methods of bygone days, the ducking stool, the pillory flogging, transportation and wholesale death, to the prison systems of the last hundred years. She writes with a knowledge of both English and American conditions and with instructive comparisons between them. Nowhere in the book does Mrs.
Wilson allow one to lose the true perspective in a maze of superficial contrast, but with many an apt phrase the reader is brought up against reality and made to think funda- mentally :—
" Would not a crucifix, an innocent man on a cross, be a better symbol of the workings of Roman justice than a blindfolded goddess with scales ?
" Laws are not holy things to be worshipped but efforts of the human -mind to be judged and weighed. "
"As long as disreputable law goes on perpetrating cruelties liko the present prison system she will avail herself of all possible legal lipsticks in vain."
Many people, of course, will dislike Mrs. Wilson's book. It is sure to be called sentimental by those whose minds are so warped or atrophied by passion, prejudice or primitive impulse that they no longer recognize " love and fine thinking " when they see it. But our treatment of the lawbreaker would be drastically changed if every magistrate, teacher and clergyman could be made to read and to understand this book.
We wish there could be a cheaper edition.
This other volume, different as it is, should help Mrs. Wilson in her crusade, for it certainly shows to what a large extent crime is due to factors over which the individual has little or no control. With the co-operation of Bavarian Prison officials, Dr. Lange has traced thirty pairs of twins, one of whom in each case had been in conflict with the law. Thirteen of these were what are known as "monozygotic " twins and were practically identical in physical and mental make-up ; the remaining seventeen pairs were dizygotic, and had no greater similarity than that which exists between ordinary brothers and sisters. These two types of twins are commonly recognized to be of different origin, monozygotic twins springing from the same ovum and dizygotic twins from two ova fertilized simultaneously. In the former case the inherited characteristics from the parents should be similar ; in the latter, they may differ since there is no uniformity in
the relative inheritance from the two parents as between one fertilization and another. Therefore, argues Dr. Lange, if the conduct of monozygotic twins has a greater similarity than dizygotic pairs, this is a clear indication that heredity is a more potent factor than environment. And sure enough Dr. Lange finds that of the thirteen monozygotic pairs, both twins had been sentenced in ten cases, while in only two out of the seventeen dizygotic pairs had both twins come into conflictwith the law. These results are impressive, but without minimizing the value of Dr. Lange's painstaking and honest research—which is a real contribution to knowledge—it is not unfair to say that no results based upon so few cases can possibly be conclusive. This must be said even though we recognize the difficulty of tracing a sufficient number of criminal twins upon which to base reliable deductions. We hope Professor Haldane's racy introduction does not mean that criminology is in future to be regarded, like religion, as a field into which people who have earned well-deserved reputations in other branches of knowledge can rush with unsupported theories. Professor Haldane asserts that Roman Catholics believe in free will, while Protestants or Freethinkers are often determinists. And since, in proportion to population there are twice as many Roman Catholics in prison as non- Catholics, a belief in free will is a less successful guide to conduct than determinism. I cannot agree with Professor Haldane, that things are as simple as that.
E. ROY CALVERT.
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