The very considerable improvement of an administrative character which has recently taken place in some of our prisons more especially during the last five years is a practical admission that previously the system had in it much that was wrong. For it can scarcely be claimed that this tentative move in the direction of a more intelligent and humane treatment of criminals has been justified by any measurable improvement in human nature since the war. The reforms, such as they are, are not being applied to an improved and therefore a more hopeful clientele ; the material is substantially the same as it has been for the last twenty or thirty years. It is only the official mind that has become a little less criminal in its misuse of human nature ; and the neglected opportunities of a generation ago are being demonstrated by better results in this. But the improvement, though marked in certain directions under the discretionary power given to local authority, has not yet been standardised into a new system ; much of it remains permissive instead of compulsory, and depends on a magisterial enlightenment which is only operative in streaks, " fiat lux " being at present by no means synonymous with " fiat justicia." Nevertheless a movement has begun, and the movement is having results ; even in the official centre at Whitehall the outlook is beginning to change, and certain retirements from office, which took place a few years ago, are having a beneficent effect. But even where much is being attempted and something done, reform is hampered and limited by the fact that it is trying to function within the walls of an old system which means something different which means not primarily reform at all, but punishment. And if you set out systematically to put the one thing first, you cannot make the other your main result. If you mean first and foremost to punish, you are not going to get out of your criminals such good social results for the benefit of the community, on their release from restraint, as you will if you concentrate on reform. This is not a crank notion, it is a scientific fact ; and the real issue in debate over our criminal code is whether we wish our treatment of criminals to be scientifically curative or maliciously sentimental. For it is a 'base piece of sentiment to wish punishment of a kind that does harm rather than some substitute for punishment that does good. Quite definitely the will to punish stands in the way of the will to reform ; society cannot have its glut of the one without abandoning or modifying its demand for the other. At present such reformative effort as is taking place within our prisons is still based on wrong premises ; it is using the old system with ameliorative features added, and until the premises are abandoned the reform cannot be thorough. It is literally the premises, in both meanings of the word, which need to be altered. Our prisons are wrongly designed because they have been designed to a wrong end ; they stand for punishment, not for cure. If, then, the scientific case for reform has become so demonstrably strong, what stands in the way ? Two things mainly the one material, the other spiritual. A thorough reform of our prison system, though it would be economic and even remunerative in the long run, is going to begin with to cost money. And you cannot get the community to spend money largely and wisely unless it has developed a large and wise interest in the spending of it unless it sees that its interest does actually lie there. At the present moment the best prison we have in this country is that at Camp Hill, in the Isle of Wight, for " hardened criminals " under the Preventive Detention system. And that prison is in danger because we have not " hardened criminals " enough to fill it, so that the cost of its upkeep is disproportionate to its use. Except for lack of numbers which should hardly be regarded as a fault ! Camp Hill has been abundantly justified by its results. How much more might not results justify an extension of " P.D. " treatment to unhardened criminals throughout the country? It would still be only a " half-way house " ; there is no reason to think that the results would not be equally good. But it would cost money. And this brings me to the second obstacle that stands in the way the spiritual one : the community lacks the necessary interest for the large expenditure required, because it lacks the sense of responsibility for the problem which awaits solution. And it lacks the sense of responsibility because it has been trained into a self-righteous separation a moral class-distinction of the criminal from the non-criminal section of society. Just as the self-righteousness of nations is a standing impediment to the abolition of war, so is the self-righteousness of society to penal reform. In each case there is a systematic refusal of nation or of society to take to itself any share in the responsibility for having brought war or crime into being ; and from this refusal to admit a true share of responsibility, injustice is certain to result. It is impossible to have a just penal system which blinks the fact that society augustly represented by its judges and magistrates has very largely produced its own criminals ; and every court of law which, by its high ritual and ceremony, conceals that fact and substitutes the fiction of a blameless and outraged society administering justice on men in whose guilt it has no share, is stamped with a lie. This is not to say that there is never such a thing as a criminal, brutal, base, or mean, who is mainly if not entirely responsible for the crime of which he stands charged ; but it is to say that the shared responsibility between society and the criminal varies through all degrees, and that we have stereotyped our formula of justice upon the false assumption that the criminal and not society is always to blame.
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