(c) It is interesting to consider the sexual variations of criminality. Women are everywhere less criminal than men. The proportion varies, however, greatly in different countries. In France it is usually about 4 to 1; in the United States it is about 12 to 1; in Italy and Spain the proportion of women is very small. In Great Britain, on the other hand, the proportion of criminal women is, except during the last year or two (owing probably to changes in police regulations), extremely large, especially for the greater crimes. There has indeed been onthe whole a steady increase in the proportion of women criminals in England; in 1834 they were less than 1 in 5; of recent years they have been more than 1 in 4. The greater tendency to recidivism in women has everywhere been noted, and is extremely well marked in England, where it is rapidly increasing, and is associated, it seems, with growing habits of alcoholism. Of incorrigible recidivists a very large proportion in Great Britain are women; and 40 per cent. of the women committed to prison during 1888 had been previously committed more than ten times.[82]Even among the juvenile offenders discharged from reformatory and industrial schools as incorrigible, it appears that the proportion of girls is double that of boys.
While men criminals are everywhere in a more or less marked majority, there are certain crimes which both sexes commit about equally, and these are usually the most serious. Thus, as Quetelet remarked, nearly as many women are poisoners as men, and of parricides 50 per cent. are women. The crimes of women are essentially domestic, against fathers and husbands and children. A very large proportion are,directly or indirectly, of a sexual character. It is curious in this connection to note that Marro finds marked physical resemblances between women criminals generally and the class of male criminals guilty of sexual offences; such are less length of arms and hands, less cranial capacity and greater extension of the transverse curve of the head.
It is worth while to enumerate briefly the probable causes of the sexual variation in criminality. There are perhaps five special causes acting on women: (1) physical weakness, (2) sexual selection, (3) domestic seclusion, (4) prostitution, (5) maternity.
There are firstly the physical and psychical traditions of the race embodied in the organisation of men and women. The extreme but rather spasmodic energy of men favours outbursts of violence, while the activities of women are at a lower but more even level, and their avocations have tended to develop the conservative rather than the destructive instincts. Apart from this, even if women were trained in violence, the superior strength of men would still make crimes of violence in women very hazardous and dangerous. Under existing circumstances, when a woman wants a crime committed, she can usually find a man to do it for her.
I have already frequently had occasion to note the approximation of criminal women in physical character to ordinary men. This has always been more or less carefully recorded, both in popular proverbs and in the records of criminal trials. Thus Sarah Chesham, a notorious wholesale poisoner, who killed several children, including her own, as well as her husband, was described as “a woman of masculine proportions;” and a girl called Bouhours, who wasexecuted at Paris at the age of twenty-two, for murdering and robbing several men who had been her lovers, is described as of agreeable appearance, and of sweet and feminine manners, but of remarkable muscular strength; she dressed as a man; her chief pleasure was to wrestle with men, and her favourite weapon was the hammer.
Marro has recently suggested that sexual selection has exerted a marked influence in diminishing the criminality of women. Masculine, unsexed, ugly, abnormal women—the women, that is, most strongly marked with the signs of degeneration, and therefore the tendency to criminality—would be to a large extent passed by in the choice of a mate, and would tend to be eliminated. It seems likely that this selection may have, at all events to some extent, existed, and exerted influence; it is, however, not universally accepted.
The domestic seclusion of women is an undoubted factor in the determination of the amount of women’s criminality. In the Baltic provinces of Russia, where the women share the occupations of the men, the level of feminine criminality is very high. In Spain, the most backward of the large countries of Europe, where the education of women is at a very low level, and the women lead a very domesticated life, the level of feminine criminality is extremely low; the same is true, to a less extent, of Italy. In England, on the other hand, which has taken the lead in enlarging the sphere of women’s work, the level of feminine criminality has for half a century been rising. Reference may perhaps also here be made to the fact that there is much more criminality among Irishwomen in England than among Irishwomen at home who leada more domestic life. It is a very significant fact that Marro found among his women criminals, in marked contrast to the men, a very large proportion (35 out of 41) who possessed some more or less honourable occupation; a large proportion of the women also were possessed of some property. It may not be out of place to observe that the growing criminality of women is but the inevitable accident of a beneficial transition. Criminality, we must remember, is a natural element of life, regulated by natural laws, and as women come to touch life at more various points and to feel more of its stress, they will naturally develop the same tendency to criminality as exists among men, just as they are developing the same diseases, such as general paralysis. Our efforts must be directed, not to the vain attempt to repress the energies of women, but to the larger task of improving the conditions of life, and so diminishing the tendency to criminality among both sexes alike.
Prostitution exerts an undoubted influence in diminishing the criminality of women, in spite of the fact that the prostitute generally lives on the borderland of crime. If, however, it were not for prostitution there would be no alternative but crime for the large numbers of women who are always falling out of the social ranks. As it is, in those families in which the brothers become criminals, the sisters with considerable regularity join the less outcast class of prostitutes; sometimes in league with their criminal brothers, but yet possessing a more recognised means of livelihood. There will be something more to say on this point a little later on.
The strongest barrier of all against criminality in women is maternity. The proportion of criminalsamong young women with children is very small. Among men criminals the celibates are in a very large majority, but among women maternity acts as a still greater deterrent. Not only are young married women comparatively free from crime, but among married women, as Bertillon pointed out, those with children are distinctly less criminal than those without children. Of Marro’s 41 criminal women, although all but one (who was undeveloped and ugly) confessed to having had sexual relationships, 12 had never been married, 10 were widows, 14 were married, but of these 7 (50 per cent.) were separated from their husbands. There is some significance, doubtless, also in the fact that while in men the maximum of criminality falls at about the age of 25, in women this is not so. That is the age of maximum child-bearing; the age of maximum criminality in women is delayed until nearly the age of 35. In the 130 women condemned for premeditated murder, and studied by Salsotto, the average age was 34. Marro found that for nearly every class of criminals the average age of the women was much higher than that of the men. It is clear that the woman without children is heavily handicapped in the race of life; the stress that is upon her is written largely in these facts concerning criminality.[83]One might suspect this beforehand. Crime is simply a word to signify the extreme anti-social instincts of human beings; the life led most closely in harmony with the social ends of existence must be the most free from crime.
It may be said—to sum up our brief discussion of this large question of women’s criminality—that certain great barriers, partly artificial, partly natural, have everywhere served to protect women from crime. It is not possible absolutely to prove this conclusion, because women cannot be put strictly under the same conditions as men; a woman who lived under the same conditions as men, it need scarcely be said, would no longer be a woman. But it is made probable by the considerations here brought forward, and by statistics. Thus let us take the statistics for one year in a country where crime is so largely developed, and so carefully studied as Italy; an average year, 1886, may be selected. It will be found that a hundred condemned persons of each sex may be arranged according to age as follows:—
Thus below puberty the relative criminality of girls is rather greater than that of boys, to become about equal at puberty; then during the earlier and chief period of child-bearing the criminality of women falls suddenly, becoming level with that of men at about the time of the cessation of the child-bearing period; after this the criminality of women becomes relatively much greater than that of men, becoming again aboutthe same, and in some years exceeding it, at the age of 70.
(d) One is inclined on first approaching the subject to make the clear line of demarcation between crime and vice, which is necessary in practical life. From the anthropological point of view, however, it appears on closer examination impossible to draw this clear line.
In the course of Lombroso’s investigations he was surprised to find in the examination of supposed normal persons certain individuals who presented in a marked form those anthropologic signs of a low and degenerate type which he had usually found among criminals. On further inquiry it appeared that those individuals were of vicious character. Again, it is a remarkable fact that prostitutes exhibit the physical and psychic signs associated usually with criminality in more marked degree than even criminal women. While criminal women correspond on the whole to the class of occasional criminals, in whom the brand of criminality is but faintly seen, prostitutes correspond much more closely to the class of instinctive criminals. Thus their sensory obtuseness has been shown to be extreme, and it is scarcely necessary to show that their psychical sensitiveness is equally obtuse. Several valuable series of observations recently made on prostitutes in Italy and elsewhere have brought out interesting results in this respect. Thus, for example, Dr. Praskovia Tarnovskaia examined at St. Petersburg fifty prostitutes who had been inmates of a brothel for not less than two years, and she also examined, for the sake of comparison, fifty peasant women of so far as possible the same age and intellectual development. She found (1) that theprostitutes presented a shortening, amounting to half a centimetre, of the anterior, posterior, and transverse diameters of skull; (2) 84 per cent. showed various signs of physical degeneration—irregular skull, asymmetry of face, anomalies of hard palate, teeth, ears, etc.; (3) 82 per cent. had parents who were habitual drunkards; (4) 18 per cent. were the last survivors of a large family of eight to thirteen children who had died early. Prostitutes may fairly be compared to the great class of vagabonds among men, who also live on the borderlands of criminality, and who also present a larger proportion of abnormalities than even criminals. Dugdale, in his valuable and thorough study of the “Jukes” family of criminals in America, shows that while the eldest sons in a criminal family carry on the criminal tradition, the younger sons become paupers or vagabonds, and the sisters become prostitutes. Of 250 recidivists condemned five times at Paris nearly all have begun by vagabondage. Mendel has examined 58 vagabonds in the workhouse at Berlin. He found 6 absolutely mad; 5 weak-minded; 8 epileptics; 14 with serious chronic disease; in the remaining 25 there was without exception pronounced mental weakness. We see here the organic root of the hopelessly idle, vicious character of the vagabond class. A philanthropic gentleman at Paris offered employment of various kinds, with payment at four francs a day, to all those who came to him complaining that they were dying of hunger and could get no work. 545, out of 727, did not even present themselves; some came and disappeared after the first half-day, having claimed their two francs; only 18, or 1 in 40, continued to work. It is not sufficiently known that these poor creatures, whoform such an extensive recruiting field for crime, are already, by the facts of their physical organisation, cut off from the great body of humanity. They need much more intelligent treatment than the antiquated workhouse is able to supply.
We must be careful not to confuse vice and crime. At the same time we have to recognise that they both spring from the same root. The criminal is simply a person who is, by his organisation, directly anti-social; the vicious person is not directly anti-social, but he is indirectly so. The criminal directly injures the persons or property of the community to which he belongs; the vicious person (in any rational definition of vice) indirectly injures these. They are both anti-social because they are both more or less unfitted for harmonious social action, both, from organic reasons, more or less lazy. Criminals and prostitutes, as Féré remarks, have this common character, that they are both unproductive. This is true also of vagabonds, and of the vicious and idle generally, to whatever class they belong. They are all members of the same family.
(e) We saw in Chapter I. that there is a fairly well-marked class of professional criminals. They are theéliteof the criminal groups; they present a comparatively small proportion of abnormalities; their crimes are skilfully laid plots, directed primarily against property and on a large scale; they never commit purposeless crimes, and in their private life are often of fairly estimable character. They flourish greatly in a civilisation of rapidly progressing material character, where wild and unprincipled speculation is rife, as in the United States; their own schemes have much of the character of speculations, with thisdifference, that they are not merely unprincipled but are against the letter of the law; notwithstanding the ability and daring they require, they are a relatively unskilled kind of speculation.
Tarde, and perhaps one or two writers following him, have endeavoured to show that all crime is professional, and that every physical and psychic characteristic of the criminal may be explained by the influence of profession. Tarde’s always alert and intelligent advocacy makes it necessary to take note of this position, although in this unqualified shape it has not met with much adhesion at the hands of scientific investigators. I am persuaded, he says, that every large social class has its own characteristics. “If one examined hundreds or thousands of judges, lawyers, labourers, musicians, taken at random and in various countries, noting their different characters, craniometric, algometric, sphygmographic, graphologic, photographic, etc., as Lombroso has examined hundreds and thousands of criminals, it is extremely probable that we should ascertain facts not less surprising; thus, for instance, we might succeed in findinginstinctive lawyers—born to defend instinctive criminals.... I should like to see the instinctive criminal opposed to the instinctive man of science, or the religious man, or the artist. It would be curious to see him compared to the moral man, and to learn if the latter is the antipodes of the criminal physically as well as morally.”[84]
Tarde has again more recently stated his position: “One knows that at the first glance at a woman a skilful observer infallibly divines her habits of prostitution.... Among the innumerable varieties ofhuman nature which appear at the surface of a race and proceed perhaps from its lowest depths (for the variations of a theme are, I believe, its trueraison d’être, and notvice versâ), every social or anti-social profession operates a selection to its own profit; it attracts the organisms most adapted to the kind of life which it leads, and to the end which it pursues, so that if one submitted to anthropometric measurement lawyers, doctors, priests, merchants, especially those who have the most decided vocation for their profession, we should not fail to find for each category the proportional preponderance of a certain number of peculiarities, morphologic or physiologic, elsewhere in less proportion. It must inevitably be so whether a career is open to every one or shut up as a caste, for in the latter case hereditary accumulation of acquired aptitudes from the use of the same functions transmitted from generation to generation produces an analogous effect, even with superior intensity.”[85]The recent investigations of Bertillon at the Paris Prefecture of Police have shown that by large photographs of the hand it is possible to detect the worker at a large number of crafts. By such acquirement as this, as well as by a process of natural selection, the men of every class develop a special set of psychic and physical peculiarities; thus Tolstoï, in hisDeath of Ivan Ilyitch, has admirably described the special attitude and manner common to professional men generally, and in this general professional class there are subdivisions, so that every professional man instinctively recognises his fellows. It is so among criminals. Mr. Davitt sketches, for instance, the special class of “hooks,” or professionalpickpockets, “so well outlined in gait, constant use of slang, furtive looks, almost total want of tact in their ordinary conduct, with an instinctively suspicious manner in almost all their actions, that they are as easily distinguishable from the other criminals of a prison as they are recognisable to their constant pursuers, the police, when abroad in the world.”
If we were to look at the matter in a rather more thorough and scientific manner, there can be no doubt that the previsions of Tarde would be justified, and that men would fall into certain natural anthropologic groups, according to their habitual modes of feeling and thinking and acting, the nature of each person, to some extent, “subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” In each class there would be different degrees in sensory perception, in cranial shape and size, in muscular development. Such investigations will no doubt be systematically carried out in time. At present, owing to the extraordinary apathy of anthropologists, and consequently the general indifference to the importance of studies connected with the development and varieties of men, scarcely anything is known regarding the matter.
But important as professional selection is, it cannot account for everything. Indeed no serious attempt has been made to substantiate it by reference to the details of criminal anthropology. M. Tarde is a magistrate; no scientific man would have attempted to account for all the facts that have now accumulated by professional selection and acquired habits.
It is interesting to note that Topinard, the distinguished anthropologist, who has bestowed some severe and not unmerited criticism on portions ofLombroso’s work,[86]while accepting the professional theory of crime, by no means considers that it is sufficient to explain the whole of the facts; remembering the teaching of Lélut and Baillarger, under whom he had studied mental disease, he calls in the aid of the morbid element:—“Criminals constitute a special professional category in society, in the same way as men of letters, men of science, artists, priests, the labouring classes, etc., but a complex category in which the most diverse elements enter: the insane or those predisposed to insanity, epileptics and those predisposed to epilepsy, the alcoholic, the microcephalic, the macrocephalic, those predisposed by some vice of organisation or of development, anterior or posterior to birth, betraying itself sometimes by very evident anatomical anomalies, those who are predisposed by family traditions and inclinations, those whose moral instincts are perverted by individual education and social environment, and finally those who are criminals by accident, without preparation or predisposition.”[87]Professional characters will carry us a long way when we are seeking to account for natural social groups. But in the anti-social groups another and more morbid element enters. It is indeed largely the presence of morbid elements which gives these groups their anti-social character.
(f) The morbid element in criminality has sometimes been too strongly emphasised, but it would be idle to attempt to deny its importance. The frequency with which insanity appears among criminals, even when the influence of imprisonment may with considerable certainty be excluded, is wellascertained. Of recent years also the close connection between criminality and epilepsy and general paralysis has often been shown. I have several times pointed out that the resemblances between criminals considered as a class and the insane so considered are by no means great; at many points they are strongly contrasted. The resemblances with epileptics, on the other hand, are anthropologically very marked, as Lombroso was the first to point out in detail. He has also observed that those regions of Italy which produce most epileptics produce also most criminals. Epilepsy has a certain relationship to insanity; it tends naturally to weak-mindedness, although some of the world’s greatest men have been epileptics; and there is in epilepsy a tendency to the development of brutal, unnatural, and bloodthirsty instincts. The slighter and more concealed forms of epilepsy offer also a very fruitful field for investigation in this respect.[88]
But the roots of criminality are not only deeper than professionalism, they are deeper also than any merely acquired disease. I have frequently had occasion to note the remarkable resemblances between criminals and idiots. There is the same tendency to anatomical abnormalities of the muscles, arteries, bones, etc.; in both the muscular system is weak; there is the same tendency also to small and weak hearts, with valvular defects. There is, again, the same sensory obtuseness, with the same exception in the case of sight, which is remarkably good, with rarity,it seems, of colour-blindness. Criminality, like idiocy, tends to run in the line of the eldest sons, and in both the hereditary influences are frequently bad. Cranial asymmetry is common in idiots as well as among criminals; and while meningitis is a common cause of idiocy, such evidence as we possess shows that it is also common in criminals. Tubercular disease is again common in both. Epilepsy, to which so much importance has of late been attached in connection with criminality, is notoriously common among idiots, being found among nearly 25 per cent.[89]The relations of criminality to idiocy have not yet been sufficiently studied.
The criminal is, however, by no means an idiot. He is not even a merely weak-minded person. The idiot and the feeble-minded, as we know them in asylums, rarely have any criminal or dangerous instincts. Another term is frequently used to denote vicious or criminal instincts in a person who is, mentally, little if at all defective; he is said to be “morally insane.”
The term “moral insanity” was originated nearly half a century ago by an Englishman, Dr. Prichard, who in hisTreatise on Insanitydeclared that insanity exists sometimes with an apparently unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties; and the conception has been developed by Krafft-Ebing, Maudsley, and many others. The term itself is an unfortunate one; the condition described by no means falls in easily as a subdivision of insanity, and it is moreover frequently of a congenital character. There is now a verygeneral tendency to drop the expression “moral insanity,” and to speak instead of “moral imbecility.”
The condition in question, by whatever name it is called, is described by alienists as an incapacity to feel, or to act in accordance with, the moral conditions of social life. Such persons, it has been said, are morally blind; the psychic retina has become anæsthetic. The egoistic impulses have become supreme; the moral imbecile is indifferent to the misfortunes of others, and to the opinions of others; with cold logic he calmly goes on his way, satisfying his personal interests and treading under foot the rights of others. If he comes in contact with the law then his indifference changes into hate, revenge, ferocity, and he is persuaded that he is in the right. Although so defective on the moral side, these persons are well able to make use of the abstracted intellectual conceptions of honour, morality, philanthropy; such words are indeed frequently on their lips, and it is quite impossible to convince them of the unusual character of their acts. They are absolutely and congenitally incapable of social education, systematically hostile to every moralising influence. Being themselves morally blind, it is their firm conviction that all others are in the same condition; they disbelieve in the possibility of virtue, and being often possessed of considerable intellectual ability, maintain anti-social theories with much skill.
“Moral insanity” does not probably stand for any definite morbid condition. It is used as a convenient term to describe a certain group of psychic symptoms which are not found in a developed condition in the normal man. It is obvious that these symptoms closely resemble those we have already described ascharacterising the criminal in his most clearly-marked form—the instinctive criminal. The morally insane person has been identified with the instinctive criminal by Lombroso, Marro, Ferri, Benedikt, Colajanni, and many others. The fusion has, however, been rejected by some—by Binswanger and Kraepelin, for instance. There can, however, be little doubt that the two groups overlap in very large part.
The group of instinctive criminals therefore still stands fairly apart among the other groups of criminals, approximating, but not fusing with, these various morbid and atypical groups. The outlines blend, but each group is distinct at the centre. It will be the work of the future to arrange, and if necessary to re-form, these various groups.
It is much to be able to see, even so clearly as we do to-day, the human classes of arrested or perverted development who lie in the dark pool at the foot of our social ascent. Even our present knowledge is sufficient to serve as the justification for a certain amount of social action. We owe this to the labours of a succession of physiologists, alienists, anthropologists, and criminologists during the past century.
Up to recent times the criminal has been regarded as a kind of algebraic formula, to use Professor Ferri’s expression; the punishment has been proportioned not to the criminal but to the crime. We are now learning to regard the criminal as a natural phenomenon, the resultant of manifold natural causes. We are striving to attain to scientific justice. We are seeking in every direction to ascertain what is the reasonable treatment of the eccentric and abnormal members of society, in their interest, and in the still higher interests of the society to which we belong.
To seek for light in the fields of biology and psychology, of anthropology and sociology, has seemed to many a discouraging task. The results are sometimes so obscure; sometimes, it even seems, contradictory. In practice, it is said, such considerations count for nothing. Law must only concern itself with absolute certainties, with abstract formulæ, with geometrical routine. But human nature will not fit in with formulæ; when men and women are geometrical figures, an abstract legal system will answer all their needs. If the path lies through a jungle, what is the use of the best and straightest of roads that leads astray? If a critic were to point out to a biologist—to take another illustration from Ferri—the limitations of the microscope, he would be entitled to reply—But excuse me, however imperfect the microscope may be, would it be better to dispense with the microscope? Much less when we are dealing with criminals, whether in the court of justice or in the prison, or in society generally, can we afford to dispense with such science of human nature as we may succeed in attaining.
THE TREATMENT OF THE CRIMINAL.
If, as now scarcely admits of question, every truly criminal act proceeds from a person who is, temporarily or permanently, in a more or less abnormal condition, the notion of “punishment” loses much of its foundation. We cannot punish a monstrosity for acting according to its monstrous nature. Moreover, who among us is perfectly normal, and what tribunal is entitled to punish? The verdict of science is one with that of Christianity—“Judge not.”
Some such argument as this has weighed with those thinkers and investigators who have of late shown a disinclination to talk of punishment, and have instead spoken of the “social reaction against crime.” The old conception of punishment was founded on the assumption of the normality of the criminal; he was a normal person who had chosen to act as though he were not a normal person—a vine, as it were, that had chosen to bring forth thorns—and it was the business of the penologist to apportion the exact amount of retribution due to this extraordinary offence, with little or no regard to the varying nature of the offender; he was regarded as a constant factor. Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, not many years ago, “when addressing,” says the Rev. J. W. Horsley, “in our hearing, an assemblage of those who had all belonged to the criminal class,expatiated, somewhat to their astonishment and much to their gratification, on the iniquity of giving a severe punishment for a theft that was petty, even though it had been preceded by many thefts and convictions.” Obviously the punishment was directed at the offence; it was not necessary to consider the offender at all. This conception, formulated by theorists who delighted in abstract notions, has been shown to lead directly into devious paths of metaphysics and ethics; it has, consequently, been fertile of much vain disquisition. On the whole, the results of this have not contributed to confirm the credit of the notion, and it has seemed better—at once sounder theoretically and more convenient practically—to dispense with this antiquated conception of punishment. Whenever one person trespasses on the rights of another person, or of the community to which he belongs, there is an inevitable social reaction against the person who has committed the anti-social deed. Society says to the individual who has violated its social feelings—Here, my fine fellow, we are not going to stand this conduct of yours; we must have an end of this: and it proceeds to act in accordance with the varying measure of its wisdom. This is the basis of all legal action against the criminal; in its crudest form it is Lynch law; in its highly developed form it shows itself in the elaborate training bestowed on the criminal at Elmira. Such social action is a solid and permanent fact, independent of all metaphysical theories; and it is this we are concerned with when we approach the question of the treatment of the criminal.
At a very early period in the development of every barbarous race there arise two institutions for dealing with the criminal—the prison and another, still moredecisive, appearing in various forms, the cross, the stake, the gallows, the axe.
I do not propose to give more than a few words to the question of capital punishment, because it does not seem to be any longer a question of much magnitude or importance. A century, even three-quarters of a century, ago it was a different matter. In England especially capital punishment seems to have flourished luxuriantly. A writer in Elizabeth’s reign says that in Henry VIII.’s time seventy-two thousand thieves and vagabonds were hanged. The statement is set down on hearsay evidence only, but is sufficient to show that the number must have been very large. About a century ago more criminals, it is said, were put to death in England than in any other part of Europe; many persons still living remember the days of wholesale hanging, and even the execution of a child of twelve for rioting. It is less than half a century since a child of nine was condemned to death for stealing paint, value twopence-halfpenny, and since men were hanged for stealing sheep and postoffice letters.
There can be little doubt that capital punishment is dying out. In Switzerland, in England, in Italy, for example, the tendency is very clearly marked. Whether its complete extinction is altogether a matter for rejoicing is a question concerning which there is not complete unanimity among those whose opinions carry most weight. An impressive body of opinion is in favour of putting instinctive criminals to death, not out of revenge, but in the spirit in which Galen and Seneca advocated the destruction of incorrigible offenders against social life, regarding them as diseased members to be removed for the advantage of the wholesocial body. Garofalo, the distinguished Neapolitan lawyer, is perhaps the chief advocate of capital punishment among those who are working for legal reform. He points out that the death penalty is the only one the criminal really dreads, and tells of offenders who committed their crimes under the impression that capital punishment had been abolished, and that they were to be provided with food and shelter for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, it has also been shown that theéclatand public interest involved in a trial for life or death serves as an incentive to the morbid vanity of criminals. Such a penalty as burning “for example of others, as hath been accustomed,” according to the phrasing of Henry VIII.’s statute, has been an example often enough in another sense than the statute intended.
On the whole, we may perhaps be well satisfied that capital punishment—“the shameful practice,” as it has been epigrammatically styled, “of hiring for a guinea an assassin to accomplish a sentence which the judge would not have the courage to carry out himself”—is threatened with extinction in civilised countries. It has the disadvantage of being irrevocable. There would be little chance of mistake if it were only applied to recidivists; but these are a class to whom it is rarely applied. It is certain that mistakes have occurred when in the opinion of the judge the evidence of guilt was absolutely convincing. It is true that the chief cause of this extinction in democratic countries is not the benefit of the criminal, or even the welfare of society; it is a tender regard for the sentiments of the general public. “To punish murder by lifelong imprisonment,” as Sir Robert Rawlinson observed, “is a far severer fate thansudden death, but it is not so revolting.” We have to see to it that our substitutes for the death penalty are of a humane and rational character, and that they afford an equal protection to society. It should never be possible to address to society the words which the daring Duc de Montausier addressed to Louis XIV. concerning a criminal who was finally executed after committing twenty murders: “This man has only committed one murder, the first, and it is you who, by letting him live, have committed the other nineteen.” But, as Benedikt well observes, to kill the criminal is never satisfactory, because we do not kill his accomplices, bad social conditions and defective institutions; we leave untouched the false social sentiments that urged the unmarried girl to kill her own child, or the rigid marriage system that made it easier for the man to kill his wife than to leave her or to allow of her leaving him. Moreover, it must be said that murderers, whom alone it is considered justifiable to eliminate by death, are not usually the most degraded of criminals or the most dangerous to society. In Russia, where capital punishment for common-law offences was abolished more than a century ago, murderers are condemned to hard labour for a period of years, after which they are settled in Siberia. “Eastern Siberia is full of liberated assassins,” remarks Prince Krapotkine, “and, nevertheless, there is hardly another country where you could travel and stay with greater security; while the unceasing robberies and murders of which Siberia complains now, take place precisely in Tomsk and throughout Western Siberia, whereto no murderers and only minor offenders are exiled. In the earlier part of this century it was not uncommon to find atan official’s house that the coachman was a liberated murderer, or that the nurse who bestowed such motherly care upon the children bore imperfectly obliterated marks of the branding-iron.”[90]Mr. Davitt, speaking from an extensive acquaintance with criminals, says:—“The really hardened, irreclaimable criminal will never commit a murder.... The most heinous of all offences—murder deliberately intended and planned before commission—is, ordinarily, the offspring of the passions of revenge and jealousy, or the outcome of social or political wrongs; and is more frequently the result of some derangement of the nobler instincts of human nature than traceable to its more debased orders or appetites.”[91]Again, Miss Carpenter, in herFemale Life in Prison, wrote:—“Some women are less easy to tame than the creatures of the jungle.... And yet these women are not always in for the worst crimes: there are few, if any, murderers amongst them; they have been chiefly convicted of theft after theft, accompanied by violence.” These observations are entirely in accord with the results of criminal anthropology; the murderer belongs very frequently to the class of criminals by passion, the least anti-social of all, and is at other times frequently the subject of some morbid impulse, epileptic or insane.
Perhaps the most powerful reason in favour of the probable disappearance of capital punishment is the humanising influence that would be exerted on the community generally. The unreasoning outbursts of ferocity in which, especially among young and emotional democracies, some morbid and distractedcreature who fires at a political personage is hurried with glee to the scaffold, or some half-witted human thing who commits a rape is perhaps actually torn to pieces, are not wholesome manifestations of the social spirit. They are far less excusable than the deeds by which they are aroused, for the reason that they arise in more normally constituted persons. So long as capital punishment is legitimate there is, however, at least the appearance of an excuse for the development of these brutalising outbursts. All that is finest in civilisation is bound up with a self-restraint and humanity, as well as a more intelligent insight, which, while admitting a more chastened social reaction, makes ferocity impossible.
Let us turn to the prison. During the last century a vast amount of care and enthusiasm, philanthropic and administrative, have been expended on the elaboration and development of prisons. It is needless to sketch the history of this development, which seems now to have come to a standstill; it has often been done, and is easily accessible. It is however very interesting and instructive to take note of the deliberate opinions expressed during the last few years, from various points of view, by those who have had the opportunity of studying most intimately the modern developed prison.
A curious fate has befallen this ancient institution. In its more primitive form it now arouses universal disgust and horror. The Russian prisons of Siberia are, for instance, a by-word of reproach. The physical and mental torture which they inflict, wholesale and indiscriminately, on men and women, on political suspects as well as on the lowest criminals, have been described over and over again, from within and fromwithout, during the last fifty years, in Dostoieffsky’sRecollections of the Dead-House, by Maximoff, and by Krapotkine, and still, when Mr. Kennan repeats the old story, a wave of indignation passes across the civilised world. Elsewhere on the fringe of European civilisation the primitive prison is still scarcely changed. The Spanish prisons are often filthy and overcrowded, and the inmates are maintained in laziness. In the Spanish prison of Ceuta, in Morocco, there are 3000 convicts, mostly for life, and crowded together, so that 112 sleep in one room.[92]Thenative prisons of Morocco are the abodes of oppression, starvation, and filth, where the innocent and guilty are thrown in together, without any kind of work, and allowed to die slowly. “The horrors of these places are indescribable. Often they are underground, damp, and pestilential; always filthy. They are frequently very crowded, and a dozen or more poor wretches may be fastened in one chain by their necks, with heavy irons on their wrists and ankles, unable to stir a foot away from one another for any purpose all night, and often all day.”[93]“On the highest authority,” says Mr. Cook, “I am able to say that the prison population of the city of Morocco equals the free population.” In the interior, where there is no dread of European influence, things are naturally much worse. In Egypt the prisons are filthy andfilled with untried prisoners. In Greece the prisoners are, “if possible, dirtier than those of Egypt, no work, no books, and but little food. Some of the rooms containing ten prisoners were less than twelve feet square.” Many of the prisons of South Africa are in a wretched condition, and some of those in the United States are little better.
A century ago most of the prisons of England could fairly have been included in any such enumeration as that I have just attempted. “They are ironed,” wrote Howard of the English convicts of 1773, “thrust into close, offensive dungeons, and there chained down, some of them without straw or other bedding. They continue in winter sixteen or seventeen hours out of the twenty-four in utter inactivity, and immersed in the noxious effluvia of their own bodies. Their diet is at the same time low and scanty; they are generally without firing; and the powers of life soon become incapable of resisting so many causes of sickness and despair.” There was not, as a recent writer remarks, so much consideration for prisoners in Britain as there had been in the reign of the Emperor Constantine, for the Romans of the fourth century did not permit the imprisonment of men in the same room with women. Howard found a girl locked up all day with two soldiers in the Bridewell at St. Albans, and in many of the gaols there was insufficient provision for the separation of the sexes.
We have changed all that. The best prisons of England, France, the United States, Belgium, Italy, and some other countries, are models of ingenuity, cleanliness, and routine. It cannot be said, indeed, that we have succeeded in hindering communicationbetween prisoners, or in preventing an illicit traffic in tobacco, etc., or even the practice of unnatural intercourse; and we do not trouble ourselves too much to reform the prisoner. Yet even these laxities of discipline have added materially to the prisoner’s comfort; and if we have not reformed the prisoner we have at least reformed the prison, an easier task, and one which shows more tangible results. “The prisoner of the present day is well cared for,” remarks Dr. Gover, the medical inspector, in a recent Report of the Directors of Convict Prisons; “he is supplied with all the necessaries, and not a few of the comforts of life; and his existence is, to say the least, rendered very endurable. The labour exacted from him is not irksome in its character, and he is not subjected to any depressing punishment unless it be for idleness or for serious misconduct.” But the work is not of an exhausting character, so that there is no very strong motive to laziness. “Hard labour,” Mr. Horsley remarks, “is such that no prisoner could get a living outside if he did not work harder.” It is not surprising that under these circumstances the prisoner flourishes. “In our prisons now there is,” says Dr. Richardson, “a lower mortality and probably a lesser sickness than in the most luxuriously appointed and comfortable houses in the commonwealth.” And what, he asks, is more natural when we find “epidemic poisons shut out of our prisons; famine shut out; luxury shut out; drink shut out; exposure to cold and wet shut out; the acute and most destructive kinds of mental worry shut out; the hungry strain for to-morrow’s bed and board shut out; the baneful association with criminal life at large shut out!”
And yet we are dissatisfied! This comfortable, easy-going routine of the modern prison is viewed with scarcely more approval by the thoughtful investigator of to-day than the horrors of the primitive prison. It is deeply interesting and suggestive to take note of the opinions expressed during recent years by those most intimately acquainted with the modern prison. “Why are our prisons failures?” asks Mr. Horsley, who is as impressed as much as any one by the material progress of prisons. “Men are asking, and will more loudly ask, ‘Why are our prisons such utter failures?’ In the face of the phenomena of recidivism, and men and women with hundreds of convictions, it is absurd to imagine that they are as deterrent as they should be.” The prisoner is, he points out, but temporarily suspended from habits of crime by circumstances not under his own control: “He may even boast of his intentions, but out he must go, with as much safety to the State as if all mad dogs were muzzled for twenty-four hours and then all unmuzzled, because it had been found that in that period a certain proportion ceased to be dangerous; or as if all small-pox patients were discharged from hospital so many weeks after reception, whether cured or not.”[94]Another prison chaplain (Rev. C. Goldney), speaking from an experience of twelve years, writes still more recently:—“I say, unhesitatingly, that if a society for the manufacture of criminals were set on foot, that society could in no better way further its aims thanby pressing for the imprisonment of every little boy and girl who could, on any decent pretext, be brought before a bench of magistrates. Prison officials well know the hardening influence of gaol life on the young, and statistics show how unlikely it is that the first term of imprisonment will be the last in the case of children of tender years. They learn the secret which should jealously be kept from them—that a short imprisonment is after all no such very terrible punishment.” Mr. Michael Davitt has learnt by actual experience the realities of English convict life at Dartmoor, Portsmouth, and Portland, and the valuable book in which he has summed up those experiences is full of wise and fruitful suggestions. After pointing out that philanthropic intentions on the part of the heads of a department are no guarantee for their administration at the hands of warders and assistant-warders, he continues[95]:—“Penal servitude has become so elaborated that it is now a huge punishing machine, destitute, through centralised control and responsibility, of discrimination, feeling, or sensitiveness; and its non-success as a deterrent from crime, and complete failure in reformative effect upon criminal character, are owing to its obvious essential tendency to deal with erring human beings—who are still men despite their crimes—in a manner which mechanically reduces them to a uniform level of disciplined brutes. There is scarcely a crime possible for man to be guilty of, short of murder, which should not, in strict justice, be expiated by seven years’ infliction of a punishment that has been brought to such a nicety of calculation that there is the closest possible surveillance of every oneundergoing it night and day, together with an unceasing conflict between every feeling in the prisoner that is superior to a mere condition of animal existence and the everlasting compulsion to refrain from almost all that it is natural for man to do, and to do what it is to the last degree repugnant for any rational being to consent to perform. Yet wretches who have had a London gutter or a workhouse for their only moral training-school, and who have been subsequently nurtured in crime by society’s other licensed agencies of moral corruption, receive ten, fifteen, and sometimes twenty years for thefts and crimes which should, in justice, be expiated by a twelve months’ duration of such punishment. It is these horribly unjust penalties that beget many of the desperadoes of Portland, Chatham, and Dartmoor, the murderers of warders, the malingerers, and the partial maniacs, and which implant in the minds of convicts that ferocious animosity against law and society which turns so many of them into reckless social savages.” Prince Krapotkine has also had practical acquaintance with prisons, and his conclusions also are deserving of study. In his very interesting book,In Russian and French Prisons, after describing the routine of the Maison Centrale at Clairvaux, one of the best-arranged of modern prisons, he adds:—“Such is the regular life of the prison, a life running for years without the least modification, and which acts depressingly on man by its monotony and its want of impressions; a life which a man can endure for years, but which he cannot endure—if he has no aim beyond this life itself—without being depressed and reduced to the state of a machine which obeys but has no will of its own; a life which results in an atrophy of the best qualitiesof man, and a development of the worst of them, and, if much prolonged, renders him quite unfit to live afterwards in a society of free fellow-creatures.” And again he remarks:—“The real cause of recidivism lies in the perversion due to such infection-nests as the Lyons prison is. I suppose that to lock up hundreds of boys in such infection-nests is surely to commit a crime much worse than any of those committed by any of the convicts themselves.”[96]M. Émile Gautier, a companion of Prince Krapotkine’s, who has written a series of remarkable articles on this subject,[97]calls the prison a hot-house for poisonous plants. He points out what has often been remarked by others (Mr. Davitt, for instance), the great difference between the “bon détenu” and the “bon sujet.” “The recidivists are always the most easy to manage, the most supple—or the most hypocrital—and therefore the favourites with the officials. The misfortune is that this ‘bon détenu,’ according to the formula, soon becomes under thisrégimeas incapable of resisting his comrades, instinctive criminals or professional evil-doers, as the warders, and as little refractory to temptation, to unwholesome stimulus, to the attraction of an illicit gain, or to the contagion of bad example, as to discipline. He can only obey—no matter whom!” And elsewhere he says: “It is well to remark that there is not one of the passions, natural or factitious, of man, from drunkenness to love, which cannot find in prison at least a semblance of satisfaction.... It need not be said that the prisoner afterwards carries out withhim into the world all these abnormal vices in a more developed form. The prison indeed, as it is organised, is a sewer throwing out into society a continuous flood of purulence, the germs of physiological and moral contagion. It poisons, brutalises, depresses, and corrupts. It is a manufactory at once of the phthisical, the insane, and the criminal.” Dr. Napoleone Colajanni, the eminent criminal sociologist of Naples, confirms from personal experience the evidence given by Prince Krapotkine and M. Gautier. A writer who is peculiarly well informed as to the manners and customs of the criminal classes in England writes:—“Looking at our present system of dealing with thieves, examining it from every side, it is clear that nothing can be more clumsy and inefficient—except for evil. Let any one of robust health fancy himself a prisoner within four walls, employed day after day in severest labour, without a face to look at except that of the tyrant warder or the scowling criminal, without relaxation or kindly intercourse of any kind; with nothing, in short, to subdue the darker feelings, but with everything to nourish them. Let any one of robust health fancy himself enduring this year after year—for a fifth, a fourth, or even half of a life—and then say what sort of creature he would probably become. Then there is the expense of a system which does not reform nor get rid of the thief—in old days gaol fever did the latter when the halter failed—but merely hoards him up for a while to turn him loose on society more wolfish than ever. As we deal with the thief he is our most costly national luxury.”[98]The courts of Paris and of Bourges have not hesitated to declarethat the chief cause of recidivism is to be found in the prison and itsrégime.[99]In one of the foremost American States, Ohio, an influential committee, including the Governor of the State, has reported: “With less than half-a-dozen exceptions, every gaol in Ohio is a moral pest-house and a school of crime.” The Lord Chief Justice of England (Lord Coleridge) is reported as saying, in 1885, that “there were few things more frequently borne in upon a judge’s mind than the little good he could do the criminal by the sentence he imposed. These sentences often did nothing but unmixed harm, though he was sure that throughout the country the greatest pains had been taken to make our prisons as useful as possible in the way of being reformatories. But, as a matter of fact, they were not so.”
M. Laloue, inspector-general of prisons in France, stated before a commission that “with our existing system, twenty-four hours’ imprisonment suffices, under certain circumstances, to ruin a man.” The following conversation ensued.M. Tailhand: “There is perhaps some exaggeration in the statement that twenty-four hours’ imprisonment can ruin a man.”M. Laloue: “I do not exaggerate. I say what I have seen. The prisoner meets a corrupt recidivist; they appoint arendez-vousoutside, and that man is lost.”M. Tailhand: “He must be a man of very weak character.”M. d’Havssonville: “It is such characters that succumb.”
Professor Prins, inspector-general of Belgian prisons, and the chief authority in Belgium on these questions, writes:—“What is the advantage, unless the necessity is absolute, of putting into prison the head of a familyto devote him to infamy, to compromise him in the eyes of his fellow-workmen, of his wife, and of his children? Is it not to condemn these latter to abandonment, misery, and mendicity? Is it not to join to the wretchedness which is the act of destiny, a wretchedness which is the act of law? Is it not, in short, to degrade and ruin the delinquent, thus to deliver him over to the suggestions of despair, and to risk making him a recidivist?”[100]
Garofalo, the eminent Neapolitan lawyer, certainly one of the most sagacious of those who have in recent years studied the treatment of the criminal, writes:—“Suppose that in some legendary country an austere king forbade all flirtation with married ladies, and that the punishment threatened to the guilty one should be a prohibition to leave during several weeks a certain club, a magnificent hotel, with gardens and terraces, where this gentleman would find his best friends, his old comrades at board and game, who, far from blaming him, would be glad to do the same. In this sympathetic environment we may be sure they would treat with much contempt the absurd law and the punishment it inflicted. Who would not laugh to think that it should be pretended that after such a punishment this individual would not recommence his ordinary life and commit again the very offences for which he has been punished?”[101]
“Imprisonment,” affirms Reinach, in his often-quoted work,Les Récidivistes, “especially if short, is an excitation to crime.” “As to the reformation of the criminal,” remarks Dr. Paul Aubrey, in a recent and able study,Le Contagion du Meutre, “that is amyth; the prison is still the best school of crime which we possess.” “The houses of correction are much more houses of corruption,” said a young Italian thief. “Clever robberies are arranged in prison,” a thief told the Abbé Moreau; “the prisoners all know each other; once at liberty they can find one another.” “I have seen young men enter the Grande Roquette,” the Abbé observes elsewhere, “guilty, but not corrupted, who went out decided to commit crimes which a few months before they would have regarded with horror.”
It is unnecessary, I trust, to accumulate further evidence on this point; it is a melancholy though far from a difficult task. It must be sufficiently clear that the modern prison, with its monotonous routine of solitary confinement, varied by bad company, is fruitful of nothing but disaster to the prisoner and to the society on which he is set loose. Such mitigation of its influence as may be found is chiefly due to voluntary charitable agency.
There is one group apart from the chorus of damnation which has of late years greeted the modern developments of the prison. Unfortunately it is a sinister and terrible group of exceptions. The prison is an incubator for those who are young in crime, a place of torture for those who possess the finer feelings of humanity, that is precisely the class of people, usually, who ought not to be sent to prison; but to habitual offenders, the confirmed recidivists, precisely the class of people on whom the prison ought to work as at once a reforming and deterring influence, it is simply a welcome and comfortable home. It is a well-known fact that the prison is preferred to the workhouse. “Wholeclasses,” as Mr. Horsley truly remarks, “are brought to consider that, from several points of view, the prison is preferable to the workhouse.” “Amidst the mass of our fallen sisters in gaol,” a prison matron observes (Female Life in Prison), “there are these strange practical philosophers—women who have weighed all the chances between the workhouse and the prison, and who, being compelled to choose between one and the other, strike the balance in favour of the gaol. A little less liberty, but more kindness and attention; better food and more friendly faces—only the key turned upon them, and their sleeping chamber called a cell!” “It is a painful fact,” remarks Mr. F. W. Robinson, “that the ordinary female convict considers herself above the woman in the Union. ‘Look at these shawls,’ was said once by an indignant prisoner upon a new style of shawl being introduced into the service; ‘do they take us for those poor workhouse wretches, I should like to know!’” The author ofFive Years’ Penal Servitudesays—“A farm-labourer has told me frequently that he worked far harder for his eleven shillings a week than ever he had at stone-quarrying or anything else in prison. When at home he seldom, if ever, had meat of any sort, and his bed was but a poor affair compared to his prison couch. Here in prison, comparatively speaking, he fared sumptuously every day, and I can assure the reader he considered the living luxurious compared to what he had at home.” “There can be no doubt,” as Beltrani-Scalia remarks, “that the life of a prison is superior, from a material point of view, to that which most prisoners are accustomed to lead in liberty.” To the habitual criminal that is everything. The perpetrationof offences for the purpose of obtaining admission to prison is far from uncommon, and the criminal slang of various nations with its friendly synonyms for the prison is very significant on this point. There is a popular Sicilian song which says: “He who speaks evil of the Vicaria [prison of Palermo] ought to have his face cut. He who says that prison punishes, how he is deceived, poor devil!”[102]And again: “Here only will you find your brothers and friends, money, good cheer, and a peaceful time; outside you are always in the midst of your enemies, and if you cannot work you will die of hunger.”[103]Reinach mentions a mason who at the beginning of winter committed a small offence in order to spend the winter comfortably in a warm prison. The prison of Vienne (Isère) has, it is said, long been a favourite place of resort during the winter. Several of the hundred prisoners studied by Rossi had sought in prison a winter refuge. One who had frequently been in prison before for short terms, said—“Now I’ve had the good luck to get six months.” A German criminal, who had just been released from prison, attempted rape. He received a sentence of eight years’ imprisonment. He rose, thanked the court for the sentence, regretting, however, that it was not for a longer period, and adding that he had only committed the offence as an agreeable way of returningto prison, where alone he found pleasant society and a life free from care. Manduca speaks of a man, advanced in years, who had just completed a long term of hard labour, and finding himself without means of subsistence, killed without any cause an old friend of his childhood. Bretignères de Courtelles found that 17 out of 115 prisoners entered prison in order to restore their health.
The habitual criminal who has grown accustomed to prison life cares for no other, and is suited for no other. “I have seen men,” said Lauvergne, “almost dying from home-sickness because they must soon leave the prison.” Jules Vallès spoke ofl’air vénérableof the old convict; Émile Gautier calls itl’air reposé. Prison, he adds, is a kind of nirvana, and he tells of an old convict who possessed in a high degree thisair vénérable, closely resembling Thiers, who, at the end of five years’ sentence passed at Clairvaux, wrote as follows to the director:—“Sir, you know me. You know who I am, what I am worth, and what services I can render you. Now I am about to be thrown up again into the world, where I shall not know what to do. As soon as I have consumed my allowance in having a good time I shall immediately get myself arrested. May I beg of you to have the extreme kindness, as soon as I am again condemned to several years’ imprisonment, to claim me for Clairvaux? I will inform you as to time and place, and in the meanwhile kindly reserve my place. Neither you nor I will have to repent of this agreement.” That letter, more pathetic than amusing, is the logical outcome of our prison system quite as much as of our social system.
The haphazard fashion in which the period of aprisoner’s detention is fixed on beforehand is quite in harmony with the unsatisfactory character of the results obtained. It is well known that the criminal courts are prevented from awarding any sentence between two years, the longest period of imprisonment, and five years, the shortest legal sentence of penal servitude. Yet, as the Directors of Convict Prisons point out, “now that penal servitude is always carried out in prisons at home, there is no fundamental distinction between the two classes of punishment.” On the 31st of March 1888 there were in English convict prisons 6970 persons. Of these, 3034 were undergoing penal servitude for 5 years, the lowest term permitted by law; in the case of one solitary individual the exact period of 6½ years was required, while 1387 needed 7 years of prison treatment. Only 6 persons had been guilty of an iniquity equal to 9 years’ penal, but no fewer than 1022 had committed an offence equivalent to 10 years’ penal servitude, while 1 person only in England, having managed to just surpass this sum of iniquity, was in for 11 years. There were 240 in for 20 years, but only 3 for 21 years, and to 1 individual had been meted out exactly 29 years. It would be interesting to know by what delicate and complicated considerations this precise sum of guiltiness was reached. If we turn to the statistics of the United States at the same period we shall find the same peculiarities, though the variations in the periods doled out to long-term prisoners are spread over a wider field; they begin at 1 year, and include 18 for 50 years, and 82 for 99 years. “The favourite sentence,” as Mr. Wines remarks, “seems to be two years; then five, then three, then one, then four, then ten. There is throughout a tendency apparent tochoose sentences, the numbers representing which terminate in the figure five or a cypher.”[104]In England the decimal unit is held in chief favour by judges, whether or not they realise what it may mean to the man who afterwards thus tells his experience:—“There on my cell wall was the card; it bore my name and my sentence—20 years. No wife to cheer, no children to prattle at my knee; 20 years! O God! will it ever end? 20 years,—240 months,—1040 weeks; oh, this dread future!” The sentence may be just or not, but, whether he will or not, the judge must fix on some definite term, with such results as we see. When Pantagruel arrived at Myrelingues, he found that Judge Bridoye, after carefully considering all the facts of a case, was accustomed to decide it by means of dice; and Pantagruel fully admitted the humility, piety, and impartiality of this method. If our judges, before pronouncing sentence, were first to determine the years to be awarded by a solemn casting of dice, the result might be as good as those reached by the not very dissimilar system now adopted. “Are prisons necessary?” asks Prince Krapotkine, and the question has been variously and timidly echoed in modified forms. Necessary or not, the institution is still so deeply rooted in civilised societies that it isidle yet to talk of overturning it. In spite of its acknowledged inutility we are content to pay very large sums in maintaining it, and no other method of treatment could be suddenly substituted. In England in 1889 there were 6405 persons undergoing sentence of penal servitude; in the United States there were recently 31,000 long-term prisoners; the various species of prisons in Italy contain some 70,000 persons, including 5000 incarcerated for life; in Germany, during six years, according to Professor Liszt, no fewer than 10,000,000 persons are imprisoned or fined. It is clearly idle to talk yet of the abolition of so flourishing an institution: can we give it real social utility?
The key to the failure of the prison, and a chief clue in its reform, lies in the system of administering definite and predetermined sentences by judges who, being ignorant of the nature of the individual before them, and therefore of the effect of the sentence upon him, and of its justice, are really incompetent to judge. Enough has been said of long sentences, the justice of which, it is obvious, must be quite a matter of chance. But the short-term imprisonments reveal quite as clearly the inadequacy of the system. The newspapers constantly tell of old offenders who have been in prison for over a hundred short periods. In a recent report of the Prisons Board of Ireland, the case of a woman is mentioned who was committed to Grangegorman prison thirty-four times during 1888, and never received a sentence for a larger term than fourteen days. This woman had been committed 146 times in previous years, so that she has undergone in all 180 imprisonments.
Society must say, in effect, to the individual whoviolates its social instincts: So long as you act in a flagrantly anti-social manner, I shall exercise pressure on you, and restrain, more or less, the exercise of your freedom. I will give you a helping hand, because the sooner you begin to act socially the better it will be for both of us. I shall be glad to leave you alone, and the sooner the better; but so long as I see that you are a dangerous person, I shall not entirely leave my hold on you.