ABSTRACT
W.D. Morrison was assistant chaplain of Wandsworth prison and a criminologist. His criminology was an eclectic, often contradictory, mix of ‘positivism,’ prison experience, and Christian socialism. His book, Crime and its Causes first brought him to public attention. This was followed by Juvenile Offenders. He was sufficiently the ‘positivist’ to insist that sentences needed to be individualized according to the characteristics of offenders, but he rejected the view that crime was associated with distinctive physiological or mental characteristics. He also came to appreciate the injustices to which indeterminate sentences could lead. By its insistence on relentless discipline, uniformly applied, argued Morrison, the existing prisons were breeding grounds of the habitual criminal. As he concluded in his article in the Fortnightly Review: From every point of view the time has come for a searching inquiry into the various causes which are augmenting the proportions of recidivism.
