Review: Punishments of Former Days
| DOI | 10.1177/002201834000400215 |
| Date | 01 April 1940 |
| Published date | 01 April 1940 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Review
PUNISHMENTS
OF
FORMER
DAYS.
By
ERNEST
W.
PETTlFER,
Clerk
to the West Riding Justices.
7!
X5 in. No date
(but
published
in 1939). pp. xxiv, 192. 37 plates.
Price:
5S.
net. Obtainable
from the Author, West Riding Court House, Doncaster.
Aperusal of this very interesting book is likely to give
the
thoughtful reader something of a shock. We English are accustomed
to look upon ourselves as being second to none in humaneness
and
as the leading social reformers among the nations.
Our
treatment
of criminals, we are convinced, really leaves very little to be
desired:
every year we
treat
them
with more and more consideration.
Last
year they had .
talkies';
this year they can
smoke;
next year
there
will be a wireless set in every cell.
Indeed
it seems as
though
it will
be only a
matter
of a few years before prisons are abolished altogether
and
their inmates sent to nursing homes, there to undergo a
course
of treatment at
the
hands of trained psychiatrists.
And yet
....
It
is not so very long ago
that
we were treating
our
criminals in much
the
same way as
the
Germans, to-day, are
treating
the inmates of
their
concentration camps. A
hundred
years ago we
hanged children of 14 for petty offences; in 1862 a child of 8 was
sentenced to fourteen days' imprisonment and a flogging for stealing
half a dozen
plums;
a boy of 13 received three months for stealing
an umbrella. Only seventy-two years ago an execution was still a
popular public diversion. In 1895 we had thirty-nine tread-mills
in use, where
men
were compelled to act daily much as a squirrel in
a cage. ..
The
compartments (on the tread-mill) are
small,"
wrote
aprison visitor, ..
and
the
air becomes very hot, so
that
the
heat at
the
end
of a
quarter
of an
hour
renders it difficult to
breathe."
In
1901 this
stupid
form of
punishment
was still being meted out.
Truly
the
tale of these things makes woeful
reading;
yet even they pale
before
the
punishments which we in this country inflicted in
the
past-burning
alive, branding, flogging to death, cutting off ears and
noses, stretching on
the
rack, loading with heavy irons. Indeed we
seem to have overlooked no single form of cruelty in treating those
of
our
unhappy
fellow creatures who, usually through poverty which
we had neither
the
sense nor
the
humanity to relieve, laid hands on
the Englishman's most cherished
possession-his
PROPERTY.
253
To continue reading
Request your trial