In Scotland in a single year not fewer than “six hundred and ninety persons were committed to prison who had been in confinement at least ten times before. Of these, three hundred and ninety-three had been in prison at least twenty times before, and twenty-three at least fifty times!” (Hill on Crime, p. 28.) These figures speak for themselves. Our whole system is glaringly unscientific. We do not remove the conditions that act as causes of crime. We punish, and sometimes severely, yet we let loose again offenders not one whit more prepared than before to withstand the temptations of freedom. We calmly support and approve an enormous expenditure of public funds upon criminals and crime; we carefully select good men to be prison managers, officers and chaplains; we secure cleanliness and sanitation within the prisons, and so forth; but these efforts are utterly futile because the system is wrong—the criminal law of Great Britain is based upon a false, an irrational principle.
The causes of crime within our province to deal with are of a two-fold nature—objective and subjective. Poverty, i.e. hunger and want, a slum environment, rough handling in infancy and childhood, a mischievous training and the absence of all conditions favourable to gentle, virtuous life—these are some of the objective causes creating crime which society is bound to remove. Among causes deciding the innate character of every newly-born babe, the forces of heredity stand out conspicuously. I have demonstrated that aggregate humanity, in a scientific age, has the means of controlling these forces and directing them to the production of physical, mental and moral health in the individual, and consequently in the community. The born criminal type may become gradually improved by careful and wise treatment under life-long restraints. Meanwhile, to seek reformation of this type, by prison discipline alone, and treat it by methods adapted to corrigible culprits, is a folly dishonouring to the developed reason of man. We have abundant evidence that the type exists. Mr. Frederick Hill, late Inspector of Prisons, says: “Nothing has been more clearly shown in the course of my inquiries than that crime is hereditary to a considerable extent ... it proceeds from father to son in a long line of succession.” (Hill on Crime, p. 55.) Mr. J. B. Thomson, Resident Surgeon of the Perth Prison, states of the facts of prison life: “They press on my mind the conviction that crime in general is a moral disease of a chronic and congenital nature, intractable when transmitted from generation to generation.” And Mr. George Combe, speaking of prisons in the United States of America, wrote: “I have put the question to many keepers of prisons whether they believed in the possibility of reforming all offenders. From those whose minds were humane and penetrating, I have received the answer—they did not, for experience had convinced them that some criminals are incorrigible by any human means hitherto discovered. These incorrigibles,” says George Combe—and this is the point to observe, “were always found to have defective organizations; ... they are morally idiotic; and justice, as well as humanity, dictates our treating them as patients. They labour under great natural defects; ... to punish them for actions proceeding from these natural defects is no more just or beneficial to society than it would be to punish men for having crooked spines or club feet.” (George Combe’s Moral Philosophy, p. 306.) And I could refer to many more authorities on the subject were it necessary.
Accepting the theory that our born-criminals are victims of moral disease, the question arises—how should we treat them? Fifty years ago we sorely maltreated our victims to mental disease. We bound them hand and foot, we punished them sternly for their congenital defects, we shunned and hated them, and because they were martyrs to a pitiful disease we made them also the victims of unnecessary and cruel sufferings. Few men to-day could glance without a shudder at the record of our treatment of lunatics. We consign the history gladly to oblivion, and point to changes betokening the better feeling of to-day. “No one thinks of sending a madman to a lunatic asylum for a certain number of days, weeks or months. We carefully ascertain that he is unfit to be at large, and that those in whose hands we are about to place him act under due inspection and have the knowledge and skill which afford the best hope for his cure; that they will be kind to him, and inflict no more pain than is necessary for his secure custody ... we leave it to them to determine if, or when, he can be safely liberated.” (Hill on Crime, p. 151.)
These are the lines on which also should run our treatment of moral disease. If a man is unfit morally to be at large, we must narrow the conditions of his life, but make it as enjoyable within the coercive restraints as is compatible with improvement. And on no account must we restore his liberty until those who professionally and officially watch his daily conduct are convinced that he will not again be likely to abuse that liberty.
But apart altogether from individual delinquents, the subjective racial tendency to crime demands special treatment, and in this regard I maintain that the enlightened action of an advanced society will be analogous to the ignorant action of an earnest church in the Middle Ages with precisely opposite results. “The long period of the Dark Ages, under which Europe lay, was due, I believe, in a very considerable degree,” says Francis Galton, “to the celibacy enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature that fitted him or her to deeds of charity, to meditation, to literature or to art, the social condition of the time was such that they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the church. But the church preached and exacted celibacy. The consequence was that these gentle natures had no continuance, and by a policy so singularly unwise and suicidal that I am hardly able to speak of it without impatience, the church brutalized the breed of our forefathers. She acted as if she aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community to be alone the parents of future generations. She practised the arts which breeders would use who aimed at creating ferocious, currish and stupid natures. No wonder that club law prevailed for centuries over Europe; the wonder is, that enough good remained in the veins of Europeans to enable their race to rise to its present very moderate level of natural morality.” (Hereditary Genius, F. Galton, p. 356.)
A humane society, guided by rational forces in the epoch of conscious evolution, will practise the policy of the church of the Middle Ages on a different class of subjects. It will gather poor criminals into its bosom, and secure for them a safe and happy refuge while exacting celibacy. The racial blood shall not be poisoned by moral disease. The guardians of the present-day social life dare not be careless of future social life and the happiness of generations unborn; therefore the criminal breed must be forcibly restrained from perpetuating its kind. Now mark the result. Not gentle natures—as in the case of the church—but the innately vicious natures will have no continuance. The criminal type slowly but surely disappears.
To promote the contentment and comfort of congenital criminals within their asylum or prison home an alternative to celibacy might be offered, viz. surgical treatment, to render the male incapable of reproduction. (The treatment indicated is not the operation ordinarily performed upon some domestic animals; this, applied to human beings, would be morally and physically injurious. Particulars of the appropriate method were published in the British Medical Journal as early as May 2, 1874, at p. 586.) Were this course voluntarily chosen, the sexes might intermingle without danger to posterity; and since fuller social life tends to make all human beings happier, these convicts would become more manageable, and coercive restraints cease to be indispensable.
But the criminal stock is not great when compared with the actual crimes of to-day. Crime in a vast measure is simply produced by the outward accidental conditions of life—an evil environment and a grossly inadequate training. If we alter the environment of our masses—by establishing a new industrial system that banishes poverty from the land, by initiating a Malthusian and neo-Malthusian practice that puts the physical life on a healthy basis, by creating a family life suitable to man’s emotional nature, and supplying a true education that embraces scientific restraints on all anti-social tendencies—then, but not till then, will crime and the criminal type alike become things of the past.
We are surrounded to-day in our reformatories and board schools, in our homes and on our streets, by children of naïvely-disobedient or rebellious tendency. These are the embryo criminals of a few years hence. When a clever romanticist makes one his hero, and describes the development of trickiness in the child, and how he uses it as a weapon of defence against the “polissman” whom he defies, trips up and otherwise evades (Cleg Kelly, by Crockett), we read the account without compunction, nay, we relish the humour of the situation, and half approve the issue! Yet this assuredly is no legitimate outcome of childish bravery and sportiveness. Our levity arises from the underlying conviction, or the universal feeling begotten of genetic evolution, that the policeman’s jurisdiction here is flagrantly inappropriate.
Infantile disobedience and full-fledged crime seem far apart, but they are united by an inward deteriorating process, an outward chain of trespasses more or less petty. The links are all there, connecting the tender babe and fascinating street-arab with the thief and murderer. Similarly, on the moral plane, flow the sequences of cause and effect that bring retribution—that inalienable feature of the law of evolution. The crime that society deplores is the natural penalty for society’s neglect of children; and there is no escape from the penalty as long as the cause continues. Nor can society plead ignorance here. Herbert Spencer and Ruskin have spoken out plainly on this subject. “What we need is cessation from all these antagonisms which keep alive the brutal elements of human nature, and persistence in a peaceful life, giving unchequered play to the sympathies.” (Herbert Spencer on Arbitration.) “It is,” says Ruskin, “the lightest way of killing to stop a man’s breath. But if you bind up his thoughts by lack of true education, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body and blast his soul ... this you think no sin!” Verily, there is sin, acknowledged by the noblest, wisest of men, and brought home to us on the lips of babes—“Why kill the man, since when he is dead we can never make him good again!”