The Criminal & the Community

by James Devon

The cat is a specific for the “brutes” that have not qualified for the “rope.” The argument seems to be that because a man has committed a brutal crime therefore he is a brute; as he has inflicted serious bodily injury on a fellow-citizen it is proper that someone should be employed to inflict serious bodily injury on him. But will the man whom you employ to do this laudable work not be a brute also? Does your official imprimatur remove the brutality of his act? If not, one result would seem to be that at the end you have two brutes among you instead of one.

There has never been any pretence that the executioner’s occupation is not a degrading one; never in all this country for very many years, at any rate. He is not looked down upon because by his office he inflicts pain. The surgeon in the course of his work inflicts pain, but nobody considers him any the less worthy on that account. A hand might be cut off by either of them in the discharge of his duty; but though the result may be the same to the owner of the hand, the object has been different. The surgeon has amputated the hand to save the man’s life; the executioner has cut it off to maim the man. There can be no objection to the infliction of pain on a criminal more than on others if it is incident on a course of treatment which there is good reason to believe will result in his reform; but there is no such reason for belief in the efficacy of flogging.

I do not say that nobody has been the better for a whipping. There are many men who are ordinarily as modest as those of our race usually are, and who say that they were well whipped in their boyhood with great benefit. It might be unsafe to suggest that the argument is not so convincing as it may seem to those who advance it. Sometimes there is a temptation to think that the treatment, if it were really so efficacious in making them virtuous, might with profit have been continued; but there can be no doubt they are firmly convinced that without the thrashings they received they would have been worse than they are. This hardly touches the point, for it is one thing to be whipped by an official who has no interest in the person whipped, and another thing altogether to be chastised by a parent or guardian, or even at his instance. The effect on the integuments may be the same in both cases, but there is a psychological effect which is different. Children know that wrongdoing on their part is sometimes the occasion and the excuse for an exhibition of temper on the part of their parents; and they take their punishment with the best grace they can and keep out of the way next time they misbehave. A whipping in cold blood they do not take in the same spirit; and they are right.

The great objection to any arbitrary punishment is that it may do far more harm than good. Suppose a child is disobedient and obstinate, and the father proceeds to whip it into obedience. If he succeeds the child may, through fear, avoid such conduct in the future; but if the child persists in his obstinacy in spite of the whipping, and gets into that dumb dour state in which he is likely to go off in a fit if the whipping is persisted in, the shoe is on the other foot. The father has to desist through fear, the child having met force with passive resistance is the master, and he retains the impression of his parent’s brutality and impotence. It is never wise in the case of children, or of men, to embark on a course of treatment that you cannot continue till your object is gained.

There may have been some reason in flogging men with the object of ruling them by fear, but the policy would depend on the thoroughness with which it was carried out for what success it could obtain. There would always be the risk that the penalty would make men more ferocious if it were the probable result of their misconduct, for if fear may prevent people from doing the ill they desire, it will also cause them to seek safety by attempting to destroy the evidence of their wrongdoing. Make death the penalty for robbery, and a direct inducement is offered to the robber to kill his victim and prevent him from telling tales. Flog men for breaches of the law, and if they fear the pain they will the more readily become reckless, on the principle of its being as well to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

That there is a strong feeling on the part of the public against flogging is undeniable, and it is not so much the result of reasoning as of sentiment. The process shocks their sense of propriety. The mass of men not only shrink from suffering pain, but they shrink from the suffering of others, and they are less inclined than they once were to believe in its efficacy as a remedial agent. The man who in a former day would have been flogged and set to work is now sent to hospital if the whip has scored his flesh. A surgeon stands by to see that his vitality is not lowered beyond a certain point in the execution of the sentence; it is a nice occupation for him to superintend the impairment of a man’s health, but as a compensation the rogue may become a patient and the doctor have the privilege of healing any wounds made under his supervision. The patient is now in a position to do any mischief he chooses; you have done your utmost with him and are not permitted to kill him. If as rigid an enquiry were made into the causes of men’s wrongdoing as is made into the question of their personal guilt there would be less occasion for punishment as we have had it.

Boys are still whipped for some offences and in certain cases. To say that it is better to whip a boy than to send him to prison, is only to admit that whipping is the less serious of the two methods of injuring him; and in some cases the boys are whipped for no other reason. There is a well-founded reluctance to sentence them to detention in any existing institution, combined with a belief in the necessity of inflicting some penalty on them for their misdeeds. The boy has done wrong and he must pay for it. The world is so constituted that we are all the children of our acts; payment may be delayed, but it must be made sometime if every deed carries its penalty with it; but such a belief is quite consistent with scepticism as to the necessity for the legal penalties on which so many place importance. Indeed, that they also carry their consequences is seen of all men, and there is no manner of doubt that those on whom they fall are made worse citizens by them. That might be a small matter if their degeneration did not injuriously affect the community of which they are unworthy members, but in hurting them we are hurting ourselves.

It is not so much what we do as the spirit in which it is done that causes the mischief. A person who is sick and in bed may be as much a prisoner as a man in a cell. His doctor may prevent him from seeing visitors and may sentence him to a period of something very like solitary confinement, but he knows that this is done with no intention of hurting him, but because it is necessary in the interest of his health, or that of others. The prisoner has no such opinion as to the purpose of his imprisonment, and neither have those who carry it out. He may be the better for it, though that is exceptional, but discomfort and pain is an essential part of whatever cure there is. I remember when a student a worthy old practitioner who made a point of choosing the most painful remedies for persons suffering from certain diseases, as he held the opinion that they ought to be made to suffer for their misconduct. He certainly made them suffer, but as they were not compelled to attend him they chose others who cured them more rapidly and with less pain.

It is now generally recognised that pain, or anything that lowers vitality, operates injuriously and retards the recovery of patients; and every means is taken to prevent suffering, not because it makes the patient feel bad, but because it causes him to be bad. Suppose a surgeon said to a man who appeared before him with a scalp wound received through falling on the kerb while under the influence of drink, “You have been foolish and wicked, since you have made yourself intoxicated and lost control of your senses. Your head is wounded, and it is only a chance that you have not been killed. You have disgraced yourself in the eyes of those among your friends who have any sense of respectability, and you have run the risk of losing your employment as the result of your intemperance. This I cannot permit to pass unpunished. An example must be made of you in order to deter others from following the same pernicious course. You have forfeited the right to consideration, but, though you must be made to remember that such conduct as yours cannot be lightly passed over, I shall deal with you as leniently as possible for the sake of your wife and family. You will receive an application of germs to your wound which will produce erysipelas, after which I shall proceed to deal with your cure.” The doctor who tried this method would be sent to a lunatic asylum; but it is precisely what is done in our courts. The prisoner is told he is bad—and he is; then he is sent—to be made better? Not at all.

Whatever may be said against the prisons, it cannot be shown that they ever were designed to reform those sent to them, and if they fail to do so they do not therefore fail in the purpose for which they were built, which is to detain and punish criminals. The extent to which they do punish varies greatly according to the antecedents of the person who is sent to them. On the clerk and the labourer who have received the same sentence its physical effect may differ very much. If both are put to do labouring work, as they very well may be, at the end of the day the man who is accustomed to it will be less hurt and fatigued than the man who has been used to other employment. If the object is to make them all alike uncomfortable the clerk should be set to dig a trench and the labourer to write, and at the end of the day the one would be stained with ink and the hands of the other would be stinging or blistered. As it is the work done by the labourer is child’s play to him, but it is toilsome to the man whose occupation is sedentary; to the public it is not of much utility in any case.