A colony on these lines would be suitable for the large mass of habitual criminals, who, although unable to resist the temptations of ordinary life, are capable of useful work under supervision, and under such conditions may prove beneficial to themselves and to the community.
Institutions for Born Criminals and the Morally Insane
Asylums for Criminal Insane. We have still to consider born criminals, epileptics, and the morally insane, whose crimes spring from inherited perverse instincts. These unfortunate beings cannot be consigned to ordinary prisons, since, owing to their state of mental alienation, they do not possess even the modesty of the vicious—hypocrisy—and they never fail to pervert those criminaloids with whom they come in contact. Malcontents by nature, they distrust everybody and everything, and as they see an enemy in every warder and official, they are the centres of constant mutinies.
To confine them in common asylums would be still more injurious, for they preach sodomy, flight, and revolt and incite the others to robbery, and their indecent and savage ways, as well as the terrible reputation which often precedes them, make them objects of terror and repulsion to the quieter patients and their relatives, who dread to see their kin in such company.
Ordinary asylums are equally unsuited to those victims of mental derangement who, although devoid of the depraved instincts of the morally insane and generally of blameless career up to the moment in which they are led to commit a crime by some isolated evil impulse, have a bad influence on the other inmates. Unlike other lunatics, they do not shrink from the company of others, whom they torment with their violence and contaminate with that spirit of restlessness and discontent which distinguished them even before they became insane or criminals. Firm in the belief that they are always being ill treated and insulted, they instil these ideas into their companions and suggest thoughts of flight and revolt, which would never occur to ordinary lunatics, absorbed as they are by their own world of fancies. The condition of the inmates is thereby aggravated, and it becomes impossible to accord them that large measure of freedom advocated by all modern alienists.
To leave these madmen at large would be more dangerous still. Beneath an appearance of perfect calm and mental lucidity are hidden morbid impulses, which may give terrible results at some unexpected moment.
All these offenders—insane criminals and the morally insane whose irresistible tendencies are detrimental to the community—should be confined in special institutes to be cured, or at any rate segregated for life. No infamy would attach to their names, because their irresponsibility would be clearly recognised, and society would be secure from their attacks.
England was the first country to provide asylums for the criminal insane. In 1840 a portion of Bedlam was set aside for this purpose. Fisherton House, a special private asylum of this kind, was opened in 1844, and later others were instituted at Dundrum (Ireland) in 1850, at Broadmoor in 1863, and at Perth (Scotland) in 1858, to receive criminals who commit crimes in a state of insanity, or become insane during their trial, and all prisoners whose state of lunacy or imbecility renders them unable to conform to the discipline of a prison. Of course sanguinary and violent scenes often occur in these asylums, where the pernicious influence this type of lunatic exercises over his surroundings in ordinary asylums or prisons is multiplied and intensified a hundred-fold. Conspiracies, almost unknown in common asylums, and the murder of warders or officials are very common. Despairing of release and conscious of their irresponsibility, these wretched beings attack the warders, destroy the walls which confine them, murder and wound others and themselves; but at any rate the injury is limited to a small circle, and both harmless lunatics and common criminals are not contaminated. Moreover, even in criminal asylums, long experience with these strange pathological types and the adoption of subdivisions like those recently introduced into Broadmoor by Orange have done much towards improving the general condition and eliminating many drawbacks. According to this classification insane criminals are divided into two classes, unconvicted and convicted, the former class being subdivided into untried and tried. Untried offenders, those who are considered to have been insane before committing the crime, are sent to a common county asylum, where are also confined persons convicted of minor offences and declared insane (the percentage of cures in this class is considerable) and others suspected of shamming insanity. In this way, the better elements are eliminated and the inmates of the criminal insane asylum reduced to the worst and most dangerous types only.
Capital Punishment
When, notwithstanding prisons, deportation, and criminal asylums, individuals of ineradicable anti-social instincts make repeated attempts on the lives of others, whether honest men or their own companions in evil-doing, the only remedy is the application of the extreme penalty—death.