The Criminal

l condition, the notion of "punishment" loses much of its foundation. We cannot punish a monstrosity for acting according to its monstrous nature. Mo

d 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

o institutions for dealing with the criminal-the prison and another, still more

riter 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

ocated the destruction of incorrigible offenders against social life, regarding them as diseased members to be removed for the advantage of the whole social 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

"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 wa

ge 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 capita

eedless 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

s 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] The native 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 an

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 priso

sults. "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 ou

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 one undergoing 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 qualities of 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 this régime as incapable of resisting his com

ing 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 p

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 w

y 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

; 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 o

y clear that the modern prison, with its monotonous routine of solitary confinement, varied by bad company, is fruitful of nothing but disaster to th

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 of Five Years' Penal Servitude says-"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 perpetration of 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

this air 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

ng 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 to choose 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 t

ge. 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 r

ou, 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 bo

misery, the ruin of his family, and the cost of the State, might with absolute safety to the community be liberated to-day; it is unnecessary to speak further of the thousands for whom society, inside or outside prison, has done nothing, and whom it liberates, with full knowledge that they proceed at once to prey upon its

vided by law for the offence for which the prisoner was convicted. Several thousand criminals have passed through Elmira, and only a small percentage prove recidivists. Before a prisoner is paroled a suitable situation is, if possible, arranged for him. To an Englishman, Frederick Hill, belongs the honour of first suggesting this fruitful reform, the indeterminate sentence, and his brother, Matthew Devonport Hill, vigorously supported the principle. In 1880 Garofalo-independently, it appears-advocated indefinite imprisonment in a pamphlet entitled Criterio positiva della penalità, published at Naples, and in his great work, La Criminologie, he wisely and consistently advocates the abolition of the

m, if our prison system is to be redeemed from the charges that n

the prison warder of to-day is about as well fitted for the treatment of criminality as the hospital nurse of a century ago was fitted for the treatment of disease. Every one now recognises the immense importance for the inmate of a hospital of good nursing by a trained nurse; the doctor himself is the first to proclaim the essential nature of skilful and intelligent nursing. Yet the criminal, in all his manifold variations, with his ruses, his instinctive untruthfulness, his sudden impulses, his curiously tender points, is just as difficult to understand and to manage as the hospital patient, and unless he is understood and managed there is no hope of socialising him. In Italy, France, Belgium, and Switzerland there are, I believe, institutions for the training of prison attendants, but as yet they h

world. In some of the colonies, it is said, good results have come of voluntary visiting. It is necessary, however, that this should be judiciously regulated so as to exclude fanatical, inexperienced, and merely curious persons. Mr. Tallack tells us some amusing stories concerning the results of allowing ignorant and foolish visitors. Thus a gentleman, by talking of hell-fire, succeeded in so thoroughly exasperating a prisoner that the latter seized him, and exclaiming, "I have hell enough here already without you bringing me more of it," would have administered summary chastisement had not a warder appeared. It is obvious that the more we restrict the intercourse of criminals in prison between themselves the more necessary it becomes to supplement the limited staff by assis

ake the criminal a reasonable human being is as rational as to suppose that it will tend to make him a soldier or a sailor, a doctor or a clergyman. The mistake here is the old one that has vitiated so much of human action where the criminal is concerned-the mistake, that is, of supposing that at all points he is an average human being. Solitary confinement on a refined and cultured human being may produce a deep and lasting impression; a period of solitude, indeed, is for every intellectual person of immense value in helping him to know himself; though even here, if compulsory and unbroken, it can scarcely be without demoralising effect. But the case is quite different when we turn to the vacuous-minded, erratic, and animal person who i

vict should be so employed in his shop-work and school duties as to leave him no leisure moments in which to revive the past, and live over again in me

arned a trade, but all had made a precarious living as common labourers, tramps, hostlers, and street-loafers. One was convicted for assault in the first degree; five for burglary in the third degree; one for grand larceny in the first degree; three for grand larceny in the second degree; one for rape, and one for attempted rape. The environment of most of the men previous to conviction was bad, many of them confessing to have had intemperate parents, while one told of an insane, and another of an epileptic mother." All however were well nourished, and their functions, save that o

assage, gymnastics, and a continuation of the usual school-w

instead of, as usual, in the cells, in unrestricted quantity. The experience at Elmira shows that better results are obtained when the amount of

himself for fifteen minutes or longer. From the tub he was placed upon a marble slab, where he was drenched with hot and cold water and sponged. After this the body was spatted until the skin was in a glow, the muscles pinched and kneaded, passive motions of the joints employed, followed by a brisk rubbing with a coarse wash-towel or Turkish bathing mitten, all thi

ll employed in the case of raw recruits, supplemented by dumb-bell exercises. At first they were an awkward squad, slow to c

ontinued, and the men were assigne

by, and the entire muscular system acquired firmness and power. The setting-up drill improved the carriage and conferred a rapidity of action not before indulged in. The aimless shuffling gait gave way to a carriage inspired by elastic muscles and supple joints. The faces parted with the dull and stolid look they had in the beginning, assuming a more intelligent expression, while the eye gained a brightness and clearness that before was conspicuous by its absence. With physical culture and improvement there came a mental awakening, a cerebral activity never before manifested in their prison life. The purely animal man with his ox-like characteristics seemed to recede before the intellectual. Their progress in school-work was not steadily

Here," Dr. Wey tells me, "we propose to treat those who are in arrears both in body and mind, and prepare them for work and study in the schools of letters and t

of drill daily, which was sufficient to prevent them from rusting in their cells. By this means the health of the men was maintained, and opportunity was afforded for increasing the scope of school-work, trades, and letters. A drum corps was formed, and instruction given others in instrumental music, with the sequence that to-day [29th October 1889] we have a drum and fife corps of about twenty, and a band composed of twenty or more wind instrument

rtioned to the various prisons, one prison not to compete with another, and the number of men engaged in any one industry in a prison not to exceed five per ce

aluable feature in the work. The ?sthetic culture has been chiefly carried on by means of the systematic study of literature. The results in this department have been unexpectedly encouraging. At first the men met the attempt with sullen stupidity as a new task imposed upon them. Gradually this impression was conquered; the men slowly began to acquire an eager appetite for Chaucer and Shakespeare, for Emerson and Browning. The applications for admission to the English Literature class became very numerous, and at one time there was so great a run on Jowett's Plato at the Reformatory library that a special regulation had to be made concerning its issue. It is satisfactory to learn that this taste has, in many cases at all events, survived incarceration, as a wholesome recreation for leisure hours. "In my work with the class in English Lite

ose who are working with him, have clearly realised this; the training they give is rational and scientific, and hence its success. During the thirteen years from the opening of the Reformatory to the end of 1889, n

eresting sight," remarks Dr. Wey, "when the school is in session, to see a group of men, felons every one, gathered about an instructor, intently listening as he makes clear some step in the work in hand not fully or clearly understood, going through the various processes, one by one, and explaining until the dullest mind can comprehend. It is not expected that, with the comparatively limited time for instruction, these men will become skilled mechanics. But rather the idea has been to train the hand and eye, and teach the use of tools, to awaken an ambition to pursue a lawful calling, and appreciate the value of a practical knowledge of a trade, so that when the time shall come that they pass beyond the prison doors, and again come into contact with society, they will not be handicapped by the same condit

unishment, which is brutal like flogging, is comparatively free from the brutalising influence of flogging. The method of flogging is so obviously unfit to humanise and socialise any human being, that the impulse to inflict it can only spring from a relic of savagery of the same kind as that which inspires the criminal, without his excuse of a morbid or defective organisation. It can only be said in excuse of those who advocate it that they have no experience in the matter. Those who have witnessed it have, however, recorded their experiences. Thus, to mention one instance, Sir Robert Rawlinson, after giving a vivid account of flogging as he has himself seen and heard it, adds:-"I will strive in my mind to judge those members of Parliament who now advocate the revival of corporal punishment charitably, by considering that they have never seen it as I have feebly attempted to describe it: the degraded man lashed to the triangles, the white clean skin of an Englishman exposed to the cool morning air, to be scored, cut up, and scarred into a pulpy, blood-smeared lump of living human flesh. Take the vision away: it is too hid

o revocation in case of misbehaviour. It is not, however, necessary to insist on this, as the principle has long been practically recognise

st form was thus generally described by M. A. Bertillon a few years ago (Revue Politique et Littéraire, 28 April 1883). Suppose we have 80,000 photographs. They are first divided according to the sex, the men on one side, the women on the other. These latter do not reach 20,000. The 60,000 men who remain are divided into three classes according to height; the short numbering about 20,000, the middle-sized numbering about 20,000, and the tall 20,000. Each of these divisions is divided into three series according to length of head. These new divisions, to the number of nine, contain rather more than 6000 each. Each of these sub-divisions is then divided into three groups acco

t file through a police court is an ignorant and dangerous policy; there is little hope of good result, and a considerable chance of evil result. If the period is for a few weeks only no permanent beneficial end can be anticipated, even under the best of conditions; while during so short a period no useful wor

with rational principles, of forming what is called a "Star" class of convicts-that is, a "special class of those not versed in crime." The authorities "cannot speak too highly of the general tone and behaviour" of these men, their "decidedly good disposition," "keen anxiety to gain a knowledge of some sort of trade," sense of "the moral degradation in which they have placed themselves,

and is deserving of extension to all those cases to which it may prove adapted. This plan has been adopted in the United States and in Denmark. A very large proportion of small offenders can be dealt with adequately by means of a fine. This should not be of too trifling a character when the offence has been frequently repeated, and the means of the offender are ample. Nor does it appear desirable that the offender should be allowed at will to choose between fine and imprisonment. The notion of reparation should be combined with the fine when possible, the offender, as Garofalo proposes, paying an indemnity to the injured person, and a fine to the community. With our abstract and impersonal method of dealing with crime, we are much too apt to forget the recompense that is due to the injured person. Féré has suggested that the State ought to undertake this reparation; the community, he argues, has failed in its duty of protec

be attained by a formal "caution." The publicity which this involve

es can only be dealt with fairly when they are recognised as diseased persons, to be treated on rational principles, and to be saved, whether they will or not, from doing injury to society and to themselves. It is incomprehensible that in so drunken a country as England this question should not before now have had serious attention

e treatment of the criminal which

s complete extinction, because lifelong imprisonment, under existing conditions, is

will no longer be dangerous to society. In place of mere routine and surveillance, he must be subjected to intelligent and energetic treatment. While he should usually be guarded from contact with his fellow-prisoners, it is desirable, with due restrictions, to promote his intercourse with selected pe

stem of recognisances and of fines to the community, together with reparation to the injured individual, should be developed and extended to all cases

requires special and compulsor