They saw him looking, like Stephen, into the open heavens, and heard him say, “I know not what is the matter with me, but I see light.”
And the waiting angels bore his spirit away to the land of eternal day.
EVENING
The evening session was held in Beth Ahabah Temple. Homer Folks, Secretary of the New York State Charities Aid Association, presented the following report of the Committee on Prevention and Probation:
“To the average person the word ‘crime’ suggests some isolated act of an individual, having as to its origin little relation presumably to his other acts, still less relation to other persons, and no relation whatever to the community at large, except in its unfortunate effects. The instinctive feeling of the average person to the criminal is that he is an irrational being, and our hope is that he may be put away, or at least kept a safe distance from us. The average person’s philosophy of crime is intensely individualistic.
“There are those, however, who challenge this view and deny it absolutely. Crime, they say, is not essentially individual; it is actually a social product, the result of a faulty social system. Adopt their plan of social reorganization and in their opinion crime will disappear. Without accepting the too easy optimism of the reconstructors of society, it is evident that their point of view is a valuable corrective of the extreme individuality of our earlier views. It must be evident to anyone who keeps his eyes open and tries to be honest with himself that crime is a joint product of the individual and his environment. A crime is not an isolated act; it is, as a rule, the last step in a long process. It is at once a symptom and a result; a symptom of instability, a result of deterioration. It is the appearance at the surface of a stream whose source is far back, but which is for the greater part of the distance entirely hidden or not easily observable. It is an unwelcome fruit, but it has slowly ripened, in our presence, and on a tree which we have permitted to grow. The process of deterioration ending in crime is the resultant of the reaction upon the individual of the sum total of influences, economic facts and associations constituting his environment.
“Seen from this point of view our subject becomes bewilderingly comprehensive. The prevention of crime is one of the important results hoped for from the long process of civilization. It is an end toward which many diverse influences are consciously or unconsciously directed. Many laborers in many fields, unknown to each other, are working for this result. Among them we may mention every church which is teaching the subordination of the present pleasure to the future greater good; every home circle in which dignity and strength of character are being built up; every health officer who is conscientiously laboring to restrict the ravages of preventable diseases; every teacher who inculcates self-mastery by precept and by example; every public official who is striving to make effective the public will for better things; every employer who seeks to soften the iron law of competition—in short, all those who, in individual effort or in organization, are trying to build up a saner, more wholesome, better-knit community.
“As many forces are working for the prevention of crime; so also many are working for its production. Wherever the illusory pleasure of the present is exalted above the ultimate good; wherever luxury is ostentatiously displayed; wherever human weakness is exploited for financial gain; wherever the public will is thwarted; wherever the heart becomes hard and the eye steely; wherever duty is evaded; wherever disease is unchecked—in all these ways crime is encouraged and promoted.
“The prevention of crime, therefore, is a topic not for a brief paper for a portion of one evening’s exercises, but for a constructive program for generations. We may, nevertheless, single out two or three factors in the production of crime, as to which the time seems peculiarly ripe for corrective action.
“We would mention first the frequency with which the very agencies established and slowly worked out by the community for the punishment of crime, or for its prevention, become agencies for precisely the opposite result; and by their action tend to increase and to propagate crime rather than to diminish it. I have in mind specifically our criminal courts and our penal and reformatory institutions. Who has had opportunity for close observation of our criminal courts without being impressed by the extraordinary element of chance that enters into all their operations! How many chances there are that the offender will not be arrested at all; and how many chances there are that if arrested the technical legal proof will be wanting; and how many chances there are that if the technical legal proof be forthcoming the resources of an ample purse will be sufficient to tie up the proceedings in an endless tangle of complications which an ordinary lifetime is too short to unravel. Under these circumstances the offender almost invariably feels himself the victim, not of his own wrongdoing, but of chance. He regards the operations of the law not as expressing slowly but surely the community’s sense of right and justice, but as the gambler watches the cards or the dice, and, with all the gambler’s belief in luck, is confident that the penalty will not finally be actually inflicted.