Conditional sentences.
For first offenders condemned to imprisonment, with or without For offences punishable by
sureties for three years imprisonment.
<p 207> __Imprisonment_ (for an indeterminate period, a maximum and minimum
being enacted). Separate confinement—six weeks to two years.
House of detention (separate for 2 to 15 years (with police
one year, then gradual relaxation supervision and assistance of
discharged prisoners)—or for life.
Indemnifications (always as a civil liability) added to other penalties.
I believe, however, that it is necessary, before laying down practical and detailed schemes, more or less complete, to establish certain general criteria, based upon the anthropological, physical, and social data of crime, such as may lead up to a positive system of social defence.
These fundamental criteria, it seems to me, can be reduced to the three following:—(1) No fixity in the periods of segregation of criminals; (2) the social and public character of the exaction of damages; (3) the adaptation of defensive measures to the various types of criminals.
1. For every crime which is committed, the problem of punishment ought no longer to consist in administering a particular dose, as being proportionate to the moral culpability of the criminal; but it should be limited to the question whether by the actual conditions (breach of law or infliction of injury) and by the personal conditions (the anthropological type of the criminal) it is necessary to separate the offender from his social environment for ever, or for a longer or shorter period, according as he is or is not regarded as capable of being restored to society, or whether it is sufficient to exact from him a strict reparation of the injury which he has inflicted.