ABSTRACT
The preparation and passing of important new penal legislation has always provided an opportunity for a critical discussion of the country’s penal system in general. The present writer, who has been privileged to study the penal system of this country during the past five years as an outsider, has no intention of competing with their published comments, as he cannot claim that specific knowledge which only inside experience of the daily working of such a system can give. A closer investigation, the results of which the author hopes to publish elsewhere, shows that in England the War and post-War period have seen far less drastic changes of this kind than in other parts of the world. Emile Durkheim bases his objections against any confusion of crime and moral wrong-doing upon the idea that legal definitions as contrasted with the vagueness of moral ideas must be neat and precise.
