Read the passage and answer the following question
“The Law is an ass’, declared Mr. Bumble in “Oliver Twist”, and it often seems he was right. For punishment does not always fit the crime and it rarely happens that a prison term reforms a criminal.”
Consider the following two cases. The first one had happened in a village in Madural District. One Gopal Yadhav, a hard-core criminal undergoing life sentence in the Madural Prison came out on ball for two days to perform the last rites of his mother. But he was rearrested on the same evening on the charges of murdering his neighbour’s son to settle old scores.
The second case too came to Madural Court recently. Deserted by her husband a drunkard, his grief-stricken wife mixed rat poison in the food and gave it to her four children aged between 1 ½ and 9 years. Before she could swallow the same food she was unable to bear the pitiable sight of her children writhing in pain. She rushed them to hospital where she disclosed everything. She was able to save the lives of the first three children, but the law of the country awarded her two years imprisonment (later commuted to one year) on the charges of plotting to kill her children. Would you say women like her are a danger to the society? Would you call them criminal? It is high time that we found other ways of registering our disapproval of wrong doing. To imprison the bad is expedient – when they are dangerous. To imprison the mad and the merely sad, as we do, is not only unnecessary, it is uncivilized.