Juvenile offenders / by William Douglas Morrison.

  • William Douglas Morrison
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Juvenile offenders / by William Douglas Morrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    conditions of a community are not normal—when, for example, considerable sections of the community are actively hostile to the law—then the value of conviction ceases to be a sound test, and the value of trials or cases reported to the police increases in significance. The reason of this is obvious. It is exceedingly difficult to procure convictions when the population is out of sympathy with the law. When circumstances of this character arise juries will not find the prisoner guilty, no matter how strong the evidence may be against him ; witnesses will not come forward, even if they have seen the offence committed. Ireland furnishes an interesting example of the effect of social and political conditions on the import of criminal statistics. As far as ordinary crime is concerned the Irish returns relating to convictions are a trustworthy test of its extent and seriousness. This arises from the fact that as far as regards ordinary crime the Irish population is in sympathy with the law. But there is one class of offences in which the Irish returns relating to convictions cannot be accepted as an approximate measure of their prevalence in the com- munity : I mean agrarian offences. Where it is a question of agrarian offences the Irish people as a body are more or less hostile to the law. As a result of this condition of the public mind it is exceedingly difficult to get evidence in connection with these offences ; it is also exceedingly difficult to get juries to convict. Convictions accordingly lose their ordinary value as a test of the extent of agrarian crime. In such circumstances the best test is the number of offences reported to the police. What holds good with
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