Institutions for Minor Offenders
Punishments should vary according to the type of criminal, distinction being made between criminals of passion, criminaloids, and born criminals.
Criminals of Passion. The true criminal of passion suffers more from remorse than from any penalty the law can inflict. Additional punishments should be: exile of the offender from his native town or from that in which the person offended resides; indemnity for the injury caused, in money, or in compulsory labour if the offender is not possessed of sufficient means. Recourse should never be had to imprisonment, which has an injurious effect even upon the better types of law-breakers; and criminals from passion do not constitute a menace to society. On the contrary, they are not infrequently superior to average humanity and are only prompted to crime by an exaggerated altruism which with care might be turned into good channels.
This applies equally to political offenders, for whom exile is the oldest, most dreaded, and most efficacious punishment, and the disuse into which it has fallen does not appear to be justified, since it admits of graduation, is temporary, and an adequate check on any attempt at insurrection.
Criminaloids. Repeated short terms of detention in prison should be avoided and other penalties substituted for petty offences against police regulations, cheating the Customs, etc., when committed by criminaloids who are not recidivists and have no accomplices. A short term of imprisonment, which brings this type of offender into contact with habitual criminals, not only does not serve as a deterrent, but generally has an injurious effect, because it tends to lessen respect for the law, and, in the case of recidivists, to rob punishment of all its terrors; and because criminaloids, when once branded with the infamy of prison and corrupted by association with worse types, are liable to commit more serious crimes.
For all minor offences, fines are more efficacious than imprisonment and, in the case of the poor, should be replaced by compulsory labour at the discretion of the magistrate. Binding over under a guarantee to make good the injury done, corporal punishment, confinement to the house, judicial reprimands and cautions are applicable to offenders of this type, as is also the system of remitting first offences used in France with great success by Magnaud. Under this system, the offender is sentenced to an adequate penalty, which, however, is only inflicted in the case of recidivation.
An efficacious, and at the same time, more serious method of dealing with criminaloids, is by means of the probation system and indeterminate sentence. The offender is sentenced to the maximum penalty applicable to his particular offence, but it may be diminished after a certain time if he shows signs of improvement. During this interval he is on probation, that is, under supervision, much in the same way as juvenile offenders.
The probation system is extensively and successfully adopted in America, either singly or in conjunction with other penalties, as shown above.
The Probation System
This is an ideal manner of dealing with offenders of a less serious type, minors and criminaloids, who have fallen into bad ways, since, instead of punishing them, it seeks to encourage in them habits of integrity and to check the growth of vices by means of a benevolent but strict supervision. The offender is placed under the guidance of a respectable person, who tries in every way to smooth the path of reform by providing his charge with employment if he has none, or putting him in the way of learning some trade if he is unskilled, by isolating him from bad company, by rewarding any improvement, and reporting progress to the central office, which has to decide whether the period of probation is sufficient, or, in cases where it has not been efficacious, to have recourse to sterner measures.