MANUFACTURING CRIMINALS.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 450, 6 May 1890, Page 2

MANUFACTURING CRIMINALS.

The Napier papers record a strange case in that town. A man named John Lewis was charged with drunkenness, and of having no visible means of support. That he was drunk may have been correct, but as he had been released from gaol in the morning, and arrested again in the evening, it is ridiculous to assume that the man would have means, and the law was never intended for such a purpose. The man was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment with hard labor for being without visible means of support, and to seven days on the charge of drunkenness, the sentences to be cumulalative. The prisoner said he had a job to go to in the country. Perhaps he richly deserved all he got, but the taxpayers ought to be considered in a matter of this kind, and not have foisted upon them the expense of keeping for a month a man like the prisoner in this case. If every man who has been in gaol is, immediately on his release, to be taken up afresh, and once more dumped into the cell, where will the thing end ? Few men have visible means of support just after being released from gaol, and it is neither fair to them (no matter how bad they are) nor to the community to sentence them to imprisonment in the way that the Napier Magistrate did in the case of Lewis.