It may be curious to note the relation between insanity, pauperism and crime:
In 1850, there were fifteen thousand insane; in 1860, twenty-four thousand; in 1870, thirty-seven thousand; in 1880, ninety-one thousand.
In the light of these statistics, we are not succeeding in doing away with crime. There were in 1880, fifty-eight thousand prisoners, and in the same year fifty-seven thousand homeless children, and sixty-six thousand paupers in almshouses.
Is it possible that we must go to the same causes for these effects?
IV.
There is no reformation in degradation. To mutilate a criminal is to say to all the world that he is a criminal, and to render his reformation substantially impossible. Whoever is degraded by society becomes its enemy. The seeds of malice are sown in his heart, and to the day of his death he will hate the hand that sowed the seeds.
There is also another side to this question. A punishment that degrades the punished will degrade the man who inflicts the punishment, and will degrade the government that procures the infliction. The whipping-post pollutes, not only the whipped, but the whipper, and not only the whipper, but the community at large. Wherever its shadow falls it degrades.
If, then, there is no reforming power in degradation—no deterrent power—for the reason that the degradation of the criminal degrades the community, and in this way produces more criminals, then the next question is, Whether there is any reforming power in torture? The trouble with this is that it hardens and degrades to the last degree the ministers of the law. Those who are not affected by the agonies of the bad will in a little time care nothing for the sufferings of the good. There seems to be a little of the wild beast in men—a something that is fascinated by suffering, and that delights in inflicting pain. When a government tortures, it is in the same state of mind that the criminal was when he committed his crime. It requires as much malice in those who execute the law, to torture a criminal, as it did in the criminal to torture and kill his victim. The one was a crime by a person, the other by a nation.
There is something in injustice, in cruelty, that tends to defeat itself. There were never as many traitors in England as when the traitor was drawn and quartered—when he was tortured in every possible way—when his limbs, torn and bleeding, were given to the fury of mobs or exhibited pierced by pikes or hung in chains. These frightful punishments produced intense hatred of the government, and traitors continued to increase until they became powerful enough to decide what treason was and who the traitors were, and to inflict the same torments on others.
Think for a moment of what man has suffered in the cause of crime. Think of the millions that have been imprisoned, impoverished and degraded because they were thieves and forgers, swindlers and cheats. Think for a moment of what they have endured—of the difficulties under which they have pursued their calling, and it will be exceedingly hard to believe that they were sane and natural people possessed of good brains, of minds well-poised, and that they did what they did from a choice unaffected by heredity and the countless circumstances that tend to determine the conduct of human beings.