It may be stated broadly that to France and America must be given the credit for the impulse and energy which lit and kept alive the torch of prison reform during those years of the last century, say 1830-70, when, by reason of dynastic changes on the Continent, and political struggles at home, the flame might have been obscured, or even extinguished. Although, in many countries, as in our own, eminent men and women, whose names will always live, had even from the middle of the eighteenth century, inspired by a lofty humanity, raised their voices in protest against the callous indifference which tolerated much cruelty and barbarity in the system of punishments, yet, the main impulse came, on the one hand, from the religious zeal of the Pennsylvanian Quakers who tried to utilize deprivation of liberty, by means of imprisonment, as an instrument for effecting the spiritual regeneration of the offender; on the other, from the political zeal for the rights of man—even the reversionary rights of the prisoner,—which dominated French thought, under the influence of the encyclopædists. These currents, reacting on each other, determined the course of public opinion in the direction of regarding a good, just, and humane prison system as the index of a progressive civilization. It was the combination of these two influences in concrete, which, just fifty years ago, inaugurated what may be called the 'modern system.' The famous Commission of enquiry into the state of Prisons, appointed by the National Assembly in France in 1871, and with which the names of d'Haussonville, Bérenger, and Félix Voisin will always be honourably connected, was followed immediately by the mission to Europe of Dr. Wines, the Secretary of the Prison Association of New York. To his energies we owe the London Congress of 1872, the parent of the International Prison Commission, established on a secure and lasting basis a few years later. In 1877, was founded in Paris the Société Générale des Prisons—the French Academy of penal science—a body of men distinguished in law, medicine, science, and philanthropy, who have consistently since that day, through their Journal, 'La Révue Pénitentiaire'—a monthly publication,—informed and educated public opinion throughout the civilized world on all questions relating to the treatment, and, notably, the prevention of crime.
The first International Congresses—known generally as 'Prison' Congresses, were concerned more with 'Prison' than with penal law, with visits to penal establishments, and with comparisons of Prison systems. The régime pénitentiaire was the principal pre-occupation, but the subjects of discussion soon outgrew the original limits. The sphere of inquiry gradually broadened. The prison régime is only the expression of the penal law, which itself again is only the expression of the public sentiment or opinion, which is the final arbiter in deciding the methods to be followed in maintaining the rights of the community against those who threaten its peace and security. Succeeding Congresses, therefore, as was to be anticipated, composed, as they were, not only of Prison officials and experts in prison management, but of persons from all countries, distinguished in law, medicine, and science, claimed for themselves a larger field and a more ambitious title. La 'Science' pénitentiaire is declared to be the new scope and title of the work. It is an all-embracing phrase, and, from the necessities of the case, of ambiguous meaning. It includes both practical knowledge of administration, and the knowledge by which Science, in its strict sense, can inform and instruct in dealing with the problem of crime, and of criminal man. To these must be added Social Science, and all implied by that wide term. The reaction that became manifest at the close of the last century was against what is called the "classical" conception of crime and punishment. Professor G. Vidal, the eminent author of 'Droit Criminel et la science pénitentiaire' has shown how rigid and mechanical, under the influence of the French penal code, the administration of criminal justice had become. The accused was simply a 'type abstrait' a "mannequin vivant sur lequel le juge colle un numéro du code pénal." A reaction against this abstract conception of crime came in the early 'eighties from a school of Criminologists known as the Italian School, of which the chief was Lombroso. Theories of the criminel-né—i.e., a human being fore-doomed to crime by atavistic propensity, and distinguishable physical stigmata, or 'tares physiologiques'—created considerable sensation at the time, and it cannot be denied that, though refuted by later enquiry, they exercised a profound influence in Europe, and gave a direct impulse to the scientific study of the causes predisposing to criminal acts. This study has since become the principal pre-occupation in all countries of those interested in what, by a misnomer, is spoken of generally as Prison Reform. The phrase remains, but it refers no longer to questions concerning the construction and management of prisons, the comparative merits of the cellular or associated plan, forms and methods of prison industries, staff and discipline. The Prison Reformer of to-day has adopted from Continental writers a phrase, which is at once the motto and the principle of his faith. 'L'individualization de la peine' sums up concisely the new tendency. This phrase aptly expresses the efforts now being made throughout the civilized world to grapple with the problem: not by dealing with prisoners as 'abstract types,' or in the mass, by imposing hard and fast regulations to be adopted for one and all irrespective of individuality, but to deal with each case on its merits: to note its peculiarities, and above all things, by 'preventive' measures to avert an otherwise certain gravitation towards crime.
In the working out of this problem, the International Commission is a sort of 'League of Nations,' ever striving by the invention of new Preventive measures, not so much to improve the habitation, custody, and treatment of offenders who are committed to prison, but to prevent them from arriving at that stage where commitment to prison becomes necessary, for long or short periods, in the interests of the security and protection of the community.
The aid of science is more and more invoked, and it is with reason and good purpose that the International movement professes to be a movement for the discovery and propagation of 'la science pénitentiaire.' Of all the sciences invoked in the cause of prison reform, medical science is assuming more and more a preponderating rôle in the domain of criminal justice. The mysterious laws of 'psychiatry'—a word of common use and application in all discussions in the problem of crime,—now engage, especially in the United States, a keen and close attention. The 'psychical laboratory' is, in many States, a necessary appanage of a penal institution. In theory, the knowledge of the mental state of a person committing an offence is a condition precedent to a correct assessment of guilt. Such investigation includes not only the diagnosis by scientific test of mental state, but of all those pathological conditions resulting, perhaps, from physical or external causes, hereditary or otherwise, which may be held to attenuate responsibility for any given act. The psychical laboratory as a system in aid of justice assumes, of course, a normal or reasonable being, and to such a being alone can full responsibility be attached. It is obvious to what extravagance such a system can be pushed, but the underlying principle is sound, and a perfect prison system, based on science, would adapt its treatment to a far greater degree than at present to the varying categories of offenders, who, under the old classical system, which recognized only the uniform and abstract type of crime and criminal, would be consigned equally to the one abstract and uniform type of penalty—the prison cell.
But it is not only medical science which claims this preponderating rôle. If the Lombrosian School erred in asserting the predominant influence of what was called the 'physio-psychical' conditions of crime: if the right to punish man be based not on the character of the crime, but on the constitution of the criminal, the doctor would usurp the function of the judge, and the bankruptcy of the old penal system would be complete. It was in protest against this extravagant assertion of the claims of medical and mental science (medico-légale expertise) that a succession of Congresses was held on the Continent in the latter part of the last century (Congrès International d'anthropologie et sociologie), at the last of which—the Congress of Geneva, 1896—the English Government was represented. The general result of the discussions that took place was to reject the Lombrosian idea of the physical or constitutional causes of crime, and to assert the importance of 'milieu' (nurture and environment) as the predisposing factor in anti-social conduct,—in the words of Dr. Lacassagne, Professor of Legal Medicine at Lyon—words which sum up tersely the familiar view that crime is entirely the result of social conditions, 'le milieu social est le bouillon de culture de la criminalité, le microbe c'est le criminel.'
The relative part played by inherited propensity and social environment remains to-day the leading subject of controversy with those interested in the philosophical aspect of crime. England has contributed its share to this controversy in the remarkable work of Dr. Goring "The Study of the English Convict," of which I have given a brief account in the Chapter "A Criminological Inquiry in English Prisons." His early death has robbed penal science of a brilliant and earnest votary; but his work will always remain as the first attempt to analyze the causes of crime by strictly scientific method. An abridged edition of his work has lately been published, with an Introduction by Professor Karl Pearson, under whose auspices and guidance it was compiled at the Biometric Laboratory of the London University. An Introduction by Professor Pearson not only marks the great scientific value of this attempt to probe the causes of crime, but gives a just and merited appreciation of a singular effort by a very remarkable man to test the observations and experience that came to him as a Medical Officer of Prisons by the latest methods of scientific investigation.
On the Continent of Europe there has been proceeding since 1869 an attempt to reconcile the extreme views of the Italian School as to the predestination by atavistic or innate disposition to criminal acts with the theory that the causes of crime are to be sought exclusively in social condition. In that year, was founded l'Union Internationale de droit pénal, of which the most distinguished founders were three Professors of Law—Van Hamel, Prins, and Von Liszt, Professors of Law at the Universities of Antwerp, Belgium, and Berlin, respectively. Since that date, Congresses have been held at Brussels, Berne, Christiania, Lisbon and Buda-Pesth. The object of this School, while admitting the value of experimentation by anthropological and sociological study and research, was to encourage preventive work, so that the occasion of crime might be anticipated, be it that of social circumstance which induced the predisposition to the anti-social act (the occasional criminal), or the psycho-physiological state which, unless discovered and checked in the beginning by appropriate preventive handling, medicinal or institutional, is likely to become the parent of conduct dangerous to the community (the habitual criminal). The two factors, external and internal, often co-exist, and the difficulty of the problem must be intensified by their co-existence. It is, therefore, only by the 'individualization of punishment' i.e., by a careful, and exact, and scientific system of preventive diagnosis that a true and correct assessment of criminal responsibility can be attained. This is the modern system—the point to which the long road of penal device, theory, and invention leads. The problem is scientific and social. To deal with it effectively we require not only what science can disclose in the sphere of mental diagnosis, and therapeutics (psychiatry), but what the improvement of social condition can effect in raising the standard of life.
It may not occur to those who observe casually, and perhaps carelessly, the phenomenon of crime to what an extent it depends on, and can be explained by, strictly social conditions. What is summarized by criminologists under the title of 'l'hygiène préventive' comprises all those social and political reforms which make up the 'Social Programme,' which is engaging the attention of our statesmen to-day. Better housing and lighting, the control of the Liquor Traffic, cheap food, fair wages, insurance, even village Clubs, and Boy Scouts, in fact, all the special and political problems in vogue to-day—all react directly on the state of crime. The great War—terrible and hard school of experience though it has been—has given us the great object lesson of what new conditions of life, resulting notably from the control of the Liquor Trade and facility of employment, can effect. A century of legislation directed to the changes of the penal code, or the methods of punishment, would not effect what social legislation, induced by the War, and affecting the daily habit and living of the people, has revealed during the last five years,—the numbers coming to prison reduced 75 per cent! 71 per 100,000 committed to prison in 1918, as against 369 in 1913: the committals for Drunkenness reduced from 70,000 to 2,000: the almost complete disappearance of Vagrancy—a reduction from 24,000 to 1,200—the "plaie sociale"—the despair and the problem of the prison and social reformer.
By recapitulating shortly in this Preface the history of punishment in its successive phases since the question of Prison Reform first began to occupy the minds of statesmen and philanthropists in the middle of the eighteenth century, I have endeavoured to make it clear to those who, in the future, will be responsible for the law and practice of Prisons, the direction in which progress lies. Given firm, thoughtful, humane administration in all that concerns the actual custody of all offenders of both sexes of the various categories, given a wise classification and treatment according to age, sex, and nature of the offence—the future lies in Preventive Science; on the one hand, medical science, strictly so-called, which shall, by diagnosis and therapeutics of the mental and physical state, in early age before it is too late, correct and restrain by suitable preventive means, institutional or otherwise, the tendency to anti-social conduct; and on the other, social or political science, which, by raising the standard of life among the masses, will re-constitute the 'milieu' whence vice and misery spring. Let not the reproach again be made by an English historian that "England falls shamefully below the level of foreign countries" in this great matter. If foreign countries rightly admire the method, discipline, firmness, and impartiality of our penal system, let them also recognize that we are not behindhand in what Preventive Science has to teach in the domain of medicine, law, and social hygiene. While firmly maintaining the system of human rights unimpaired, and while not failing in the protection of the State from any attack made on that system by persons, individually or collectively, let us exhaust every means for saving the potential offender from succumbing inevitably, in the absence of prophylactic methods, to the temptations to commit anti-social acts, which from causes mental, physical, or social he is unable to resist. This is the meaning of the 'individualization of punishment'—it is quite consistent with a firm administration of penal justice, but it destroys for ever the old classical idea of the 'abstract type of criminal.' In other words, justice demands that the old formula of 'Imprisonment with or without hard labour' indiscriminately applied, shall no longer be held to satisfy all her claims.
The reaction against this so-called 'dosimétrie pénale' i.e., the abstract conception of crime and the mechanical application of punishment 'according to code' is a growing force. It is marked in the United States of America by the universal adoption of the 'Indeterminate sentence,' and on the Continent of Europe by various degrees for conditional conviction and liberation which find their place in the latest penal codes. In England and America, Probation: in France and Belgium, the 'sursis à l'exécution de la peine'—all mark the reluctance to resort to fixed penalties when Justice can be satisfied by other means. England, I believe, stands alone in its adoption of the system of Preventive Detention—one of the most notable reforms of recent years for dealing with the Habitual Criminal. The success of the system, so far as it has gone, goes far to justify belief in the virtue of Indetermination of sentence. Public opinion may not be ripe for this yet, as applied to ordinary crime, but the principle which the system of Preventive Detention illustrates, viz:—the careful observation of the history, character, and prospects on discharge by an Advisory Committee on the spot, with a view to the grant of conditional freedom, furnishes in a different sphere an interesting example of the value of 'individualization.' The strict condition of release is that a man places himself under the care and supervision not of the Police, but of a State Association, organized and subsidized by the Government, but entirely controlled by a body of unofficial workers, who keep him under strict but kindly supervision, provide him with employment and lodgings, but unfailingly report him to the Authorities if he fails to observe any one of the conditions on which freedom has been granted. The singular success of this system applied to the worst and most inveterate criminals, each of whom has been found by a Jury to belong to the habitual criminal class, has naturally induced the opinion which is gaining ground, that similar methods might, with advantage, be used in dealing with the ordinary penal servitude population, and be substituted for the old ticket-of-leave system, under which remission of sentence can be earned by a more or less mechanical observance of prison rules, on the condition that the unexpired portion of the sentence is passed under Police Supervision. It is possible that comparison of the two systems may engage public attention in the future, when interest in prison reform, obscured and diminished by the greater problems which the war has created, again asserts itself.