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Preface.

The suggestions contained in this essay were first presented in a short paper offered to the "Sydney Morning Herald" some fifteen years ago—they were not then thought to be of sufficient general interest to warrant their publication.

The essay itself was written two or three years ago. It is printed practically as it was then written, though the writer, had he followed his inclination, would have added a large amount of matter to it. The temptation to enlarge was chiefly from the historical and statistical points of view. But the student of penology will find an excellent historical summary under the heading "Prison Discipline" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Mulhall (from whom the Statistics in Section II are taken) contains an enormous mass of figures from which the laborious investigator will gather much food for thought; it was not therefore necessary to add to the length of the essay with matter which can be so readily obtained elsewhere.

It would have been interesting, too, to have pursued further the considerations as to the physical characteristics of the criminal; but for this the reader must be referred to Lombroso's principal works, "The Criminal Man," "The Criminal Woman" and the "Man of Genius," all of which have been translated into English.

In addition to the books mentioned above and in the essay, the writer would express bis obligations to Wine's "State of Prisons," Mr Horsley's "Prisons and Prisoners" and many papers and reports, Winter's "New York State Reformatory at Elmira," many reports of American prisons, of the Prison Reform Association of England and the National Prison Association of America, and much periodical literature.

Upon one point only does he think it necessary to add to what he has written. It may be disputed that crime is increasing. That petty offences are decreasing and page 4 that property and person are becoming more secure, that' the general average of morality in the world is rising, is no doubt the case, but that serious crime is for the present on the increase seems to be certain. Mulhall's Statistics unfortunately come down, with any fulness, only to the year 1889, but as far as they go they prove the point incontestably and especially with regard to some of the more dangerous forms of crime. If the increase of crime has been less marked since then, as is probably the case, it may be fairly argued that the improvement is, in part at least, to be attributed to the great advance in prison reform which the last ten or twelve years have witnessed. And this becomes the more certain when it is pointed out that the improvement is greatest in countries in which reform has made the most progress. In America it is said there is marked difference between the different States in this respect. But even when the fullest allowance has been made for such improvement the fact remains that even to the present year serious crime is still generally increasing. An exception was made in favour of the United Kingdom, but there are some who think that even this exception ought not to be made, that, if Reformatory populations and the known criminals at large be considered, the United Kingdom would show much the same symptoms as the rest of the world. In 1889, according to Mulhall, besides 21,919 criminals in prison and 3,230 children in Reformatories, there were 28,730 known adult and 4,870 known juvenile criminals at large. And in the "Nineteenth Century" for January, this year, appears a remarkable and somewhat disquieting paper by Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of Police in London, in which the growth of serious crime in London is made very evident. According to this reliable authority, while felonies generally fell between 1868 and 1899 from 22,083 to 16,149, burglaries increased from 345 to 447, or taking together burglaries, house-breaking and shop-lifting, these crimes increased from 163 in 1848 to an average of 2,443 in 1899, some fifteen-fold, while felonies generally increased only from 13,142 to 16,149, in other words, largely diminished in proportion to popu- page 5 llation. The paper inveighs strongly against our present absurd system of imprisonment, and argues, without using the phrase, in favour of the indeterminate sentence. With it, it urges, these crimes might in a short time be practically stamped out in London. And very much to the purpose of the present essay is the quotation from a well-known authority on prison discipline, Major Arthur Griffiths. Taking prisons as they are, the Major says their "population may be classed in two grand divisions, those offenders who ought never to have been sent to prison at all and those who ought never to be released."

But surely in New Zealand crime is decreasing? Does not the "Year Book" say that the statistics "show a marked decrease in crime"? Statistics of crime are made up so differently in different countries that it is impossible to institute satisfactory comparisons between them, but as far as figures can guide us, crime appears to be very much greater here than in the United Kingdom. In the latter the total of all offences was 2,780 to 100,000 persons in 1887, while in Australia it was 3,650 in 1888, and here in New Zealand 3,088. In France at nearly the same time it was 2,940 and in Italy 3,340. In New Zealand it is now, in 1898, 3,019. But it is the increase of crime with which we are concerned. In 1894 the proportion of crime was 2,555 per 100,000 persons, in 1897 it was 2,765 and in 1898, 3,019. The "marked decrease" is not very perceptible here. But in 1882, says the "Year Book,' it was 4,341 and in 1885, 3,961 and the decrease to 3,019 in 1898 is now very marked. No one doubts the diminishing of petty offences and especially of drunkenness, the committals for which fell from 1200 in 1885 to 520 in 1898, and it may be that crime generally has decreased since 1882, in which case we should be concerned to maintain and accelerate the decrease, but the comparison is not very reliable, and the blindest optimist cinnot deny that crime is now (since 1894) on the increase, nor, in view of many recent utterances of our judges, that it is "assuming a peculiarly dangerous character."

But while concerned not to allow any false hope that crime is dying out the writer does not want it to be sup- page 6 posed that he is in any way hopeless for the future. On the contrary he believes that man is always progressing and that the world is always growing better on the whole. As the wave advances and then retires but on the whole the tide is rising, so is it with mankind. Nor does he think even the present growth of certain graver forms of crime a reason for discouragement. Even this may make for progress. Pain, says one, is the danger signal pointing to some diseased condition in the body. Only a generation ago our people awoke to the fact that hospitals were then producing rather than curing disease. For generations men had gone on living with little or no regard to sanitary laws; it was the will of God, they said, that disease should carry off so large a proportion of the race, and they bowed to the evitable. But the time came when they learned that disease was not inevitable, then hospitals become no longer charitable homes for the sick but places for their cure, then their defects for this purpose became evident and then the many and excellently designed establishments we now possess began to be erected. In the same old days crime, too, was thought to be a necessary condition of things; it was due to the wicked obstinacy of the criminal, it was always wrought instigante diabolo, no thought of its cure or prevention could be entertained, it could only be punished. And even when it was thought possible to prevent it even then no one thought of curing it. But when at last we began to see that crime, like disease, is not only prevenible but curable, then means began to be adopted for its cure; these means were naturally inefficient at first and it was soon found that institutions which were set up for the punishment of the criminal could be of little use for his reformation, that they really increased the crime they were attempting to cure; then the cry arose and: has long been sounding for a "rational system" of dealing with this moral disease. Thus as the increase of physical disease, due to, but in excess of, the increase of population, owing to insanitary conditions generally and especially in the hospitals themselves, led to the vast improvements of the present day, so will the corresponding, increase of moral disease, due to analogous insanitary page 7 conditions in the region of morals, and especially in the institutions devoted to its cure, lead in the near future to corresponding improvements in these conditions and in these institutions.

New Zealand is passing through a critical period o her brilliant youth—just as all of us pass through critica periods in our youth What her future will be depends very much upon the wisdom of her rulers now. If they expend their energies in vapouring about the admitted glories of their country but fear to attack the evils which they well know, the sores which are eating into the body of the State, lest their personal popularity should suffer, then the prospect for the future is dark indeed. But let them manfully fight these evils and though the multitude may curse them now, many generations of prosperous citizens of the land they have redeemed will bless them in the golden days that are to come. One of these evil symptoms is the prevalence of crime, and it is the humble object of this essay to show, not how crime may be prevented—that is a larger and grander subject—but how existing crime may be dealt with. The criminal exists because of the imperfect moral conditions which the rulers of the State at present deliberately permit, because no efficient means have been adopted for building up his character, when alone character can be built up, in his childhood and his youth—he has therefore, in simple justice, the strongest claim to be treated with every consideration, with every reasonable kindness indeed, until those glorious days come, as they surely will come, when by the gradual but sure operation of true educational principles, rationally applied, crime itself shall be destroyed.

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