Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)

by Theodore Parker

There are now in this land, I think, sixteen men under sentence of death; sixteen men to be hanged till they are dead! Is there not in the nation skill to heal these men? Perhaps it is so. I have known hearts which seemed to me cold stones, so hard, so dry. No kindly steel had alchemy to win a spark from them. Yet their owners went about the streets and smiled their hollow smiles; the ghastly brother cast his shadow in the sun, or wrapped his cloak about him in the wintry hour, and still the world went on though the worst of men remained unhanged. Perhaps you cannot cure these men!—is there not power enough to keep them from doing harm; to make them useful? Shame on us that we know no better than thus to pour out life upon the dust, and then with reeking hands turn to the poor and weak and say, "Ye shall not kill."

But if the prevention of crime be the design of the punishment, then we must not only seek to hinder the innocent from vice, but we must reform the criminal. Do our methods of punishment effect that object? During the past year we have committed to the various prisons in Massachusetts five thousand six hundred sixty-nine persons for crime. How many of them will be reformed and cured by this treatment, and so live honest and useful lives hereafter? I think very few. The facts show that a great many criminals are never reformed by their punishment. Thus in France, taking the average of four years, it seems that twenty-two out of each hundred criminals were punished oftener than once; in Scotland thirty-six out of the hundred. Of the seventy-eight received at your State's prison the last year—seventeen have been sent to that very prison before. How many of them have been tenants of other institutions I know not, but as only twenty-three of the seventy-eight are natives of this State, it is plain that many, under other names, may have been confined in jail before. Yet of these seventy-eight, ten are less than twenty years old.[32] Of thirty-five men sent from Boston to the State's prison in one year, fourteen had been there before. More than half the inmates of the House of Correction in this city are punished oftener than once! These facts show that if we aim at the reformation of the offender we fail most signally. Yet every criminal not reformed lives mainly at the charge of society; and lives too in the most costly way, for the articles he steals have seldom the same value to him as to the lawful owner.

It seems to me that our whole method of punishing crimes is a false one; that but little good comes of it, or can come. We beat the stool which we have stumbled over. We punish a man in proportion to the loss or the fear of society; not in proportion to the offender's state of mind; not with a careful desire to improve that state of mind. This is wise if vengeance be the aim; if reformation, it seems sheer folly. I know our present method is the result of six thousand years' experience of mankind; I know how easy it is to find fault—how difficult to devise a better mode. Still the facts are so plain that one with half an eye cannot fail to see the falseness of the present methods. To remove the evil, we must remove its cause,—so let us look a little into this matter, and see from what quarter our criminals proceed.

Here are two classes.

I. There are the foes of society; men that are criminals in soul, born criminals, who have a bad nature. The cause of their crime therefore is to be found in their nature itself, in their organization if you will. All experience shows that some men are born with a depraved organization, an excess of animal passions, or a deficiency of other powers to balance them.

II. There are the victims of society; men that become criminals by circumstances, made criminals, not born; men who become criminals, not so much from strength of evil in their soul, or excess of evil propensities in their organization, as from strength of evil in their circumstances. I do not say that a man's character is wholly determined by the circumstances in which he is placed, but all experience shows that circumstances, such as exposure in youth to good men or bad men, education, intellectual, moral, and religious, or neglect thereof entire or partial, have a vast influence in forming the character of men, especially of men not well endowed by nature.

Now the criminals in soul are the most dangerous of men, the born foes of society. I will not at this moment undertake to go behind their organization and ask, "How comes it that they are so ill-born?" I stop now at that fact. The cause of their crime is in their bodily constitution itself. This is always a small class. There are in New England perhaps five hundred men born blind or deaf. Apart from the idiots, I think there are not half so many who by nature and bodily constitution are incapable of attaining the average morality of the race at this day; not so many born foes of society as are born blind or deaf.

The criminals from circumstances become what they are by the action of causes which may be ascertained, guarded against, mitigated, and at last overcome and removed. These men are born of poor parents, and find it difficult to satisfy the natural wants of food, clothing, and shelter. They get little culture, intellectual or moral. The school-house is open, but the parent does not send the children, he wants their services, to beg for him, perhaps to steal, it may be to do little services which lie within their power. Besides, the child must be ill-clad, and so a mark is set on him. The boy of the perishing classes, with but common endowments, cannot learn at school as one of the thrifty or abounding class. Then he receives no stimulus at home; there every thing discourages his attempts. He cannot share the pleasure and sport of his youthful fellows. His dress, his uncleanly habits, the result of misery, forbid all that. So the children of the perishing herd together, ignorant, ill-fed, and miserably clad. You do not find the sons of this class in your colleges, in your high schools where all is free for the people; few even in the grammar schools; few in the churches. Though born into the nineteenth century after Christ, they grow up almost in the barbarism of the nineteenth century before him. Children that are blind and deaf, though born with a superior organization, if left to themselves become only savages, little more than animals. What are we to expect of children, born indeed with eyes and ears, but yet shut out from the culture of the age they live in? In the corruption of a city, in the midst of its intenser life, what wonder that they associate with crime, that the moral instinct, baffled and cheated of its due, becomes so powerless in the boy or girl; what wonder that reason never gets developed there, nor conscience, nor that blessed religious sense learns ever to assert its power? Think of the temptations that beset the boy; those yet more revolting which address the other sex. Opportunities for crime continually offer. Want impels, desire leagues with opportunity, and the result we know. Add to all this the curse that creates so much disease, poverty, wretchedness, and so perpetually begets crime; I mean intemperance! That is almost the only pleasure of the perishing class. What recognized amusement have they but this, of drinking themselves drunk? Do you wonder at this? with no air, nor light, nor water, with scanty food and a miserable dress, with no culture, living in a cellar or a garret, crowded, stifling, and offensive even to the rudest sense, do you wonder that man or woman seeks a brief vacation of misery in the dram-shop and in its drunkenness? I wonder not. Under such circumstances how many of you would have done better? To suffer continually from lack of what is needful for the natural bodily wants of food, of shelter, of warmth, that suffering is misery. It is not too much to say, there are always in this city thousands of persons who smart under that misery. They are indeed a perishing class.

Almost all our criminals, victims and foes, come from this portion of society. Most of those born with an organization that is predisposed to crime are born there. The laws of nature are unavoidably violated from generation to generation. Unnatural results must follow. The misfortunes of the father are visited on his miserable child. Cows and sheep degenerate when the demands of nature are not met, and men degenerate not less. Only the low, animal instincts, those of self-defence and self-perpetuation get developed; these with preternatural force. The animal man wakes, becomes brutish, while the spiritual element sleeps within him. Unavoidably then the perishing is mother of the dangerous class.

I deny not that a portion of criminals come from other sources, but at least nine tenths thereof proceed from this quarter. Of two hundred and seventy-three thousand, eight hundred and eighteen criminals punished in France from 1825 to 1839, more than half were wholly unable even to read, and had been brought up subject to no family affections. Out of seventy criminals in one prison at Glasgow who were under eighteen, fifty were orphans having lost one or both parents, and nearly all the rest had parents of bad character and reputation. Taking all the criminals in England and Wales in 1841, there were not eight in a hundred that could read and write well. In our country, where everybody gets a mouthful of education, though scarce any one a full meal, the result is a little different. Thus of the seven hundred and ninety prisoners in the Mount Pleasant State's Prison in New York, one hundred it is said could read and understand. Yet of all our criminals only a very small proportion have been in a condition to obtain the average intellectual and moral culture of our times.