The limitations of Maltese methods of treating the offender

Abstract

At the ultimate stage of the penal process the Courts are faced with a problem: the selection of the appropriate treatment for the guilty. The problem of the treatment of the offender will remain a perennial problem as long as there exists the problem of crime and the criminal. Throughout this dissertation I try to keep in mind what I believe should be the fundamental aim of every penal system, namely the rehabilitation of the offender, a belief endorsed by several judgments of the Court of Criminal Appeal and recently in Parliament. It is the aim which ought to pervade all legislation relating to crime and the criminal. The offender is a social animal just as you and I: but while we have stopped at parking in a no-parking zone, or at fiddling with small numbers in our income tax returns, he has gone further to commit an offence that is socially frowned upon and for which society believes that he must be punished – the retributive undertone that is sometimes reflected by official attitudes. Punishment is many a time necessary, especially when the offence is a particularly heinous one. But punishment does not mean continuous punitive treatment throughout the duration of the sentence. The sentence of imprisonment itself is thus punishment enough; during the offender’s stay in prison, those dealing with him must look outwords towards his return to the community and not see a spell in custody as a self-contained episode. Hence the emphasis which is being put on treatment within the community rather than on institutional treatment. And in a compact society like the Maltese community, social control should act as a further help to the offender undergoing such treatment. Between probation and total institutionalisation, the Maltese penal system, as well as other systems, still provides no form of intermediate treatment; probably because society wants punish and feels, rightly, that custodial treatment is still quite punitive. Offenders are often the victims of circumstances and have not been sufficiently trained in self-discipline to avoid being tempted. Childhood deprivations are one such cause: the young thief whose father is unknown and whose mother is an alcoholic; the rapist who may have been subjected to cruel maternal beatings; the child molester who may have himself been the victim of sexual deviants: people with major or minor character abnormalities traceable to childhood incidents and/or abnormal or subnormal hereditary traits – hence the importance of the psychiatrist and the psychologist in the proper treatment of the offender. For a number of such offenders who do not constitute a danger to the public, the most appropriate treatment would be intermediate treatment: semi-liberty for the adult offender with a job, attendance centres for the juvenile offender. Whatever the form of treatment employed – “treatment” both in the generic sense of the measures imposed by the Courts and as a specific reference to those methods adopted in the course of sentence or, in probation, during the probation period – the offender is a member of society: the importance of treating him within the community and, where institutional treatment has been prescribed, the participation of members of the community in his treatment both while he is in custody and after release, cannot be underestimated. [...]