y of cases a pardon is granted. The New
Zealand prison regulations contain this section (116) "No rule for the
remission of life sentences will be laid down. Such sentences are passed
on persons guilty of the very gravest offences; and the Governor will
only extend the royal prerogative of mercy to such persons in
exceptional cases." Under certain conditions life imprisonment is the
only way of dealing with criminals who refuse to reform. Those
conditions do not exist in our New Zealand prisons, and a life sentence
served within their walls is the most cruel form of punishment our laws
allow. The prisoner enters the gaol with a long, dark, hopeless future
before him. As the years roll by not one ray of light brightens his lot.
He can never better himself. He suffers, he is meant to suffer, the loss
of all he holds dear (and even a murderer holds some things dear). This
absolute loss, this complete severance of all ties, produces a most
agonising mental state and afflicts the poor wretch with untold horrors.
He is made to drag out an existence under most unnatural conditions,
conditions in which every effort he makes towards self-improvement is a
useless one, every aspiration is routed, the natural affections crave in
vain for an object to fasten upon, and where an artificial atavistic
process is set in motion so powerful as to defy the resistance of all in
time. This is no imaginary picture, a man is a man, and one of the
cruellest tortures to submit him to is to deprive him absolutely of hope
and make good his evil because it requires an effort which is useless,
and evil his good because it is easier and costs the loss of nothing.
Perhaps the majority of lifers are those whose sentences have been
commuted from the death penalty. Such a sentence is in reality the death
penalty carried out under slow process extending over many years.
Gradually remorse and despair do their work upon the natural instincts,
the mind and the body. The man becomes brutalised, insane and dies. An
exception here and there may be pointed out; but given twenty men of
same age and good health, and sentence ten to twenty years, and ten to
life imprisonment, and the chances are that (under reasonable
conditions) the ten with the defined sentence will survive it, whereas
of the lifers the majority will be insane within twelve years. The
following testimony will, however, be of greater weight:--

The Directors of the State Prison in Wisconsin in their