Our present mode of treating criminals does no good to this class of men, these victims of circumstances. I do not know that their improvement is even contemplated. We do not ask what causes made this man a criminal, and then set ourselves to remove those causes. We look only at the crime; so we punish practically a man because he had a wicked father; because his education was neglected, and he exposed to the baneful influence of unholy men. In the main we treat all criminals alike if guilty of the same offence, though the same act denotes very different degrees of culpability in the different men, and the same punishment is attended with quite opposite results. Two men commit similar crimes, we sentence them both to the State Prison for ten years. At the expiration of one year let us suppose one man has thoroughly reformed, and has made strict and solemn resolutions to pursue an honest and useful life. I do not say such a result is to be expected from such treatment; still it is possible, and I think has happened, perhaps many times. We do not discharge the man; we care nothing for his penitence; nothing for his improvement; we keep him nine years more. That is an injustice to him; we have robbed him of nine years of time which he might have converted into life. It is unjust also to society, which needs the presence and the labor of all that can serve. The man has been a burden to himself and to us. Suppose at the expiration of his ten years the other man is not reformed at all; this result, I fear, happens in the great majority of cases. He is no better for what he has suffered; we know that he will return to his career of crime, with new energy and with even malice. Still he is discharged. This is unjust to him, for he cannot bear the fresh exposure to circumstances which corrupted him at first, and he will fall lower still. It is unjust to society, for the property and the persons of all are exposed to his passions just as much as before. He feels indignant as if he had suffered a wrong. He says, "Society has taken vengeance on me, when I was to be pitied more than blamed. Now I will have my turn. They will not allow me to live by honest toil. I will learn their lesson. I will plunder their wealth, their roof shall blaze!" He will live at the expense of society, and in the way least profitable and most costly to mankind. This idle savage will levy destructive contributions on the rich, the thrifty, and the industrious. Yes, he will help teach others the wickedness which himself once, and perhaps unavoidably learned. So in the very bosom of society there is a horde of marauders waging perpetual war against mankind.
Do not say my sympathies are with the wicked, not the industrious and good. It is not so. My sympathies are not confined to one class, honorable or despised. But it seems to me this whole method of keeping a criminal a definite time and then discharging him, whether made better or worse is a mistake. Certainly it is so if we aim at his reformation. What if a shepherd made it a rule to look one hour for each lost sheep, and then return with or without the wanderer? What if a smith decreed that one hour and no more should be spent in shoeing a horse, and so worked that time on each, though half that time were enough—or sent home the beast with but three shoes, or two, or one, because the hour passed by? What if the physicians decreed, that all men sick of some contagious disease, should spend six weeks in the hospital, then, if the patient were found well the next day after admission, still kept him the other forty; or, if not mended at the last day, sent him out sick to the world? Such a course would be less unjust, less inhuman, only the wrong is more obvious.
To aggravate the matter still more, we have made the punishment more infamous than the crime. A man may commit great crimes which indicate deep depravity; may escape the legal punishment thereof by gold, by flight, by further crimes, and yet hold up his head unblushing and unrepentant amongst mankind. Let him commit a small crime, which shall involve no moral guilt, and be legally punished—who respects him again? What years of noble life are deemed enough to wipe the stain out of his reputation? Nay, his children after him, to the third generation, must bear the curse!
The evil does not stop with the infamy. A guilty man has served out his time. He is thoroughly resolved on industry and a moral life. Perhaps he has not learned that crime is wrong, but found it unprofitable. He will live away from the circumstances which before led him to crime. He comes out of prison, and the jail-mark is on him. He now suffers the severest part of his punishment. Friends and relations shun him. He is doomed and solitary in the midst of the crowd. Honest men will seldom employ him. The thriving class look on him with shuddering pity; the abounding loathe the convict's touch. He is driven among the dangerous and the perishing; they open their arms and offer him their destructive sympathy. They minister to his wants; they exaggerate his wrongs; they nourish his indignation. His direction is no longer in his own hands. His good resolutions—he knows they were good, but only impossible. He looks back, and sees nothing but crime and the vengeance society takes for the crime. He looks around, and the world seems thrusting at him from all quarters. He looks forward, and what prospect is there? "Hope never comes that comes to all." He must plunge afresh into that miry pit, which at last is sure to swallow him up. He plunges anew, and the jail awaits him; again; deeper yet; the gallows alone can swing him clear from that pestilent ditch. But he is a man and a brother, our companion in weakness. With his education, exposure, temptation, outward and from within, how much better would the best of you become?
No better result is to be looked for from such a course. Of the one thousand five hundred and ninety-two persons in the State's prison of New York, four hundred have been there more than once. In five years, from 1841 to 1847, there were punished in the House of Correction in this city, five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight persons; of these three thousand one hundred and forty-six received such a sentence oftener than once. Yes, in five years, three hundred and thirteen were sent thither, each ten times or more! How many found a place in other jails I know not.
What if fathers treated dull or vicious boys in this manner at home—making them infamous for the first offence, or the first dulness, and then refusing to receive them back again? What if the father sent out his son with bad boys, and when he erred and fell, said: "You did mischief with bad boys once; I know they enticed you. I knew you were feeble and could not resist their seductions. But I shall punish you. Do as well as you please, I will not forgive you. If you err again, I will punish you afresh. If you do never so well, you shall be infamous for ever!" What if a public teacher never took back to college a boy who once had broke the academic law—but made him infamous for ever? What if the physicians had kept a patient the requisite time in the hospital, and discharged him as wholly cured, but bid men beware of him and shun him for ever? That is just what we are doing with this class of criminals; not intentionally, not consciously—but doing none the less!
Let us look a moment more carefully, though I have already touched on this subject, at the proximate causes of crime in this class of men. The first cause is obvious—poverty. Most of the criminals are from the lowest ranks of society. If you distribute men into three classes, the abounding, the thriving, the perishing, you will find the inmates of your prisons come almost wholly from the latter class. The perishing fill the sink of society, and the dangerous the sink of the perishing—for in that "lowest deep there is a lower depth." Of three thousand one hundred and eighty-eight persons confined in the House of Correction in this city, one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven were foreigners; of the five hundred and fifty sent from this city in five years to the State's Prison, one hundred and eighty-five were foreigners. Of five hundred and forty-seven females in the Prison on Blackwell's Island at one time—five hundred and nineteen were committed for "vagrancy;" women with no capital but their person, with no friend, no shelter. Examine minutely, you shall find that more than nine tenths of all criminals come from the perishing class of men. There all cultivation, intellectual, moral, religious, is at the lowest ebb. They are a class of barbarians; yes, of savages, living in the midst of civilization, but not of it. The fact, that most criminals come from this class, shows that the causes of the crime lie out of them more than in them; that they are victims of society, not foes. The effect of property in elevating and moralizing a class of men is seldom appreciated. Historically the animal man comes before the spiritual. Animal wants are imperious; they must be supplied. The lower you go in the social scale, the more is man subordinated to his animal appetites and demonized by them. Nature aims to preserve the individual and repeat the species—so all passions relative to these two designs are preëminently powerful. If a man is born into the intense life of an American city, and grows up, having no contact with the loftier culture which naturally belongs to that intense life, why the man becomes mainly an animal, all the more violent for the atmosphere he breathes in. What shall restrain him? He has not the normal check of reason, conscience, religion, these sleep in the man; nor the artificial and conventional check of honor, of manners. The public opinion which he bows to favors obscenity, drunkenness, and violence. He is doubly a savage. His wants cannot be legally satisfied. He breaks the law, the law which covers property, then goes on to higher crimes.
The next cause is the result of the first—education is neglected, intellectual, moral, and religious. Now and then a boy in whom the soul of genius is covered with the beggar's rags, struggles through the terrible environment of modern poverty to die, the hero of misery, in the attempt at education! His expiring light only makes visible the darkness out of which it shone. Boys born into this condition find at home nothing to aid them, nothing to encourage a love of excellence, or a taste for even the rudiments of learning. What is unavoidably the lot of such? The land has been the schoolmaster of the human race—but the perishing class scarce sees its face. Poverty brings privations, misery, and that a deranged state of the system; then unnatural appetites goad and burn the man. The destruction of the poor is their poverty. They see wealth about them, but have none; so none of what it brings; neither the cleanliness, nor health, nor self-respect, nor cultivation of mind, and heart, and soul. I am told that no Quaker has ever been confined in any jail in New England for any real crime. Are the Quakers better born than other men? Nay, but they are looked after in childhood. Who ever saw a Quaker in an almshouse? Not a fiftieth part of the people of New York are negroes, yet more than a sixth part of all the criminals in her four State's Prisons are men of color. These facts show plainly the causes of crime.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the temptations of the perishing class in our great cities. In Boston at this moment there are more than four hundred boys employed about the various bowling-alleys of the city, exposed to the intemperance, the coarseness, the general corruption of the men who mainly frequent those places. What will be their fate? Shall I speak of their sisters; of the education they are receiving; the end that awaits them? Poverty brings misery with its family of vices.
A third cause of crime comes with the rest—intemperance, the destroying angel that lays waste the household of the poor. In our country, misery in a healthy man is almost proof of vice; but the vice may belong to one alone, and the misery it brings be shared by the whole family. A large proportion of the perishing class are intemperate, and a great majority of all our criminals.