The Causes and Treatment of Crime
| Author | Cecil R. Hewitt |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X3500800405 |
| Published date | 01 October 1935 |
| Date | 01 October 1935 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The Causes and Treatment
of
Crime
By
INSPECTOR
CECIL
R.
HEWITT
City of
London
Police
I
GENERAL PRINCIPLES
FOR
centuries thinking men have been vaguely uneasy in
their attitude to crime and punishment.
For
the last
fifty years they have been acutely troubled.
The
last fifty
years have, accordingly, witnessed a remarkable change of
attitude to crime and the criminal, with an accompanying
impetus towards law reform and a steady growth of individual
liberty. There is much yet to be done. Posterity will laugh
at some of our crimes and shudder at some of our punishments.
The
ethics of community vengeance still survive in some of
our penal laws. But the essence of this new approach to
a great social problem lies in the transferring of attention
from the criminal " class " to the criminal himself. Every
member of the community must be recognized as a potential
criminal, restrained from crime by a conventional conscience,
anatural benevolence, a lack of imagination, or a healthy fear
of the law. Every case of crime must be studied on its merits,
and if classification is to be attempted at all it must be the work
of the psychologist and a first step towards reclamation.
The
very word crime has lost much of its former signifi-
cance.
The
Common Law of England contemplated only
that type of offencewhich to-day is described as " indictable",
but
the growing complication of human affairs has brought
into being a mass of prohibitory law administered in courts
of summary jurisdiction. Breaches of that law fall naturally
into two categories, the boundaries of which are drawn by
every man according to his sense of social responsibility.
412
THE
CAUSES
AND
TREATMENT
OF
CRIME
413
Those two categories have been aptly described as (I) offences
which are mala in se and (2) offences which are mala quia
prohibita; they are either wrong in themselves or wrong
because the law says so. A new class of potential law-breakers
has been established by a spate of recent legislation not sup-
ported by public favour. Yet the citizen probably gets the
legislation which his own apathy deserves, and that sinister
Aunt Sally who, masquerading as a benevolent old lady and
spoken of tolerantly as " Dora
",
decides so strictly what he
shall do with his leisure, is a monster of his own creation.
However, a discussion of serious crime and its treatment
should not concern itself with
"Dora's"
prohibitions,
beyond pointing the obvious moral that amultiplicity of minor
laws tends to bring the whole legal system into the contempt
proverbially bred by familiarity.
Let
us, therefore, give
the word " crime " the narrower meaning usually accorded to
it-the
meaning which confines it to those major offences
against persons, property, and the State which are punishable
with penal servitude or imprisonment.
The Administration
of
the Criminal Law
Acraftsman given poor tools cannot be blamed for
inferior work, and the executive officer of the criminal law
is a craftsman with poor tools.
The
policeman, above all,
is the initial interpreter and administrator of most of the
criminal law, and yet not only is he generally unequipped, so
far as an adequate knowledge of it is concerned,
but
such a
knowledge, if and when acquired, could only serve to reveal
to him difficulties of interpretation which might well shake
his confidence.
There
is no reliable classification of crimes,
for example, which he may use as a guide to police action in
street emergencies, and it is felt by many policemen that
the problems of prevention and detection alike are closely
identified with the need for a codified and simplified criminal
law. Laymen generally, and policemen in particular, can
see nothing
but
good in the plea for codification. This view
is not based on a mere desire to make it easier to catch criminals,
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