Article August 13, 1932 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Francis B. Sayre, Lewis E. Lawes, Grant Shepard, James Reid

[Professor Francis B. Sayre, in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, Cambridge, Massachusetts]

Crime is a problem, not of law or legal machinery, then, but of human behavior; and as such, if real results are desired, it must be grappled with during young boyhood before the law or the courts have touched the individual child. What practical steps can educators take to cope with this problem? May I make two brief suggestions?

The first I shall borrow from a man who, as superintendent of the Australian penal settlement on Norfolk Island, where England's worst and most hardened convicts were sent, manifested so keen an insight into the ways of criminals and proved so practical and outstanding a prison administrator that in four years he had reduced a turbulent population of the most hardened cutthroats and murderers into comparative order. This gifted Irishman—Captian Maconochie of the English Royal Navy—published a notable paper in 1855, in which he discussed the problem of education and crime. This is what he wrote: "In reasoning on education, it is usual to assume that developing the intellect of our lower middle classes will, almost as of course, diminish crime; but I saw much in the penal colonies generally, and more especially in Norfolk Island, which led me to question this sequence. ... On the contrary, moral principles and worldly intelligence seemed rather inverse quantities; as one rose the other appeared to fall."

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