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

by Theodore Parker

Now, our present method is wholly inadequate to reform men exposed to such circumstances. You may punish the man, but it does no good. You can seldom frighten men out of a fever. Can you frighten them from crime, when they know little of the internal distinction between right and wrong; when all the circumstances about them impel to crime? Can you frighten a starving girl into chastity? You cannot keep men from lewdness, theft and violence, when they have no self-respect, no culture, no development of mind, heart, and soul. The jail will not take the place of the church, of the school-house, of home. It will not remove the causes which are making new criminals. It does not reform the old ones. Shall we shut men in a jail, and when there treat them with all manner of violence, crush out the little self-respect yet left, give them a degrading dress, and send them into the world cursed with an infamous name, and all that because they were born in the low places of society and caught the stain thereof? The jail does not alter the circumstances which occasioned the crime, and till these causes are removed a fresh crop will spring out of the festering soil. Some men teach dogs and horses things unnatural to these animals; they use violence and blows as their instrument of instruction. But to teach man what is conformable to his nature, something more is required.

To return to the other class, who are born criminals. Bare confinement in the prison alters no man's constitutional tendencies; it can no more correct moral or mental weakness or obliquity than it can correct a deficiency of the organs of sensation. You all know the former treatment of men born with defective or deranged intellectual faculties—of madmen and fools. We still pursue the same course towards men born with defective or deranged moral faculties, idiots and madmen of a more melancholy class, and with a like result.

I know how easy it is to find fault, and how difficult to propose a better way; how easy to misunderstand all that I have said, how easy to misrepresent it all. But it seems to me that hitherto we have set out wrong in this undertaking; have gone on wrong, and, by the present means, can never remove the causes of crime nor much improve the criminals as a class. Let me modestly set down my thoughts on this subject, in hopes that other men, wiser and more practical, will find out a way yet better still. A jail, as a mere house of punishment for offenders, ought to have no place in an enlightened people. It ought to be a moral hospital where the offender is kept till he is cured. That his crime is great or little, is comparatively of but small concern. It is wrong to detain a man against his will after he is cured; wrong to send him out before he is cured, for he will rob and corrupt society, and at last miserably perish. We shall find curable cases and incurable.

I would treat the small class of born criminals, the foes of society, as maniacs. I would not kill them more than madmen; I would not inflict needless pain on them. I would not try to shame, to whip, or to starve into virtue men morally insane. I would not torture a man because born with a defective organization. Since he could not live amongst men, I would shut him out from society; would make him work for his own good and the good of society. The thought of punishment for its own sake, or as a compensation for the evil which a man has done, I would not harbor for a moment. If a man has done me a wrong, calumniated, insulted, abused me with all his power, it renders the matter no better that I turn round and make him smart for it. If he has burned my house over my head, and I kill him in return, it does not rebuild my house. I cannot leave him at large to burn other men's houses. He must be restrained. But if I cure the man perhaps he will rebuild it, at any rate, will be of some service to the world, and others gain much while I lose nothing.

When the victims of society violated its laws, I would not torture a man for his misfortune, because his father was poor, his mother a brute; because his education was neglected. I would shut him out from society for a time. I would make him work for his own good and the good of others. The evil he had caught from the world I would overcome by the good that I would present to him. I would not clothe him with an infamous dress, crowd him with other men whom society had made infamous, leaving them to ferment and rot together. I would not set him up as a show to the public, for his enemy, or his rival, or some miserable fop to come and stare at with merciless and tormenting eye. I would not load him with chains, nor tear his flesh with a whip. I would not set soldiers with loaded gun to keep watch over him, insulting their brother by mocking and threats. I would treat the man with firmness, but with justice, with pity, with love. I would teach the man; what his family could not do for him, what society and the church had failed of, the jail should do, for the jail should be a manual labor school, not a dungeon of torture. I would take the most gifted, the most cultivated, the wisest and most benevolent, yes, the most Christian man in the State, and set him to train up these poor savages of civilization. The best man is the natural physician of the wicked. A violent man, angry, cruel, remorseless, should never enter the jail except as a criminal. You have already taken one of the greatest, wisest, and best men of this Commonwealth, and set him to watch over the public education of the people.[33] True, you give him little money, and no honor; he brings the honor to you, not asking but giving that. You begin to see the result of setting such a man to such a work, though unhonored and ill paid. Soon you will see it more plainly in the increase of temperance, industry, thrift, of good morals and sound religion! I would set such a man, if I could find such another, to look after the dangerous classes of society. I would pay him for it; honor him for it. I would have a Board of Public Morals to look after this matter of crime, a Secretary of Public Morals, a Christian Censor, whose business it should be to attend to this class, to look after the jails and make them houses of refuge, of instruction, which should do for the perishing class what the school-house and the church do for others. I would send missionaries amongst the most exposed portions of mankind as well as amongst the savages of New Holland. I would send wise men, good men. There are already some such engaged in this work. I would strengthen their hands. I would make crime infamous. If there are men whose crime is to be traced not to a defective organization of body, not to the influence of circumstances, but only to voluntary and self-conscious wickedness,—I would make these men infamous. It should be impossible for such a man, a voluntary foe of mankind, to live in society. I would have the jail such a place that the friends of a criminal of either class should take him as now they take a lunatic or a sick man, and bring him to the Court that he might be healed if curable, or if not might be kept from harm and hid away out of sight. Crime and sin should be infamous; not its correction, least of all its cure. I would not loathe and abhor a man who had been corrected and reformed by the jail more than a boy who had been reformed by his teacher, or a man cured of lunacy. I would have society a father who goes out to meet the prodigal while yet a great way off; yes, goes and brings him away from his riotous living, washes him, clothes him, and restores him to a right mind. There is a prosecuting attorney for the State; I would have also a defending attorney for the accused, that justice might be done all round. Is the State only a step-mother? Then is she not a Christian Commonwealth but a barbarous despotism, fitly represented by that uplifted sword on her public seal, and that motto of barbarous and bloody Latin. I would have the State aid men and direct them after they have been discharged from the jail, not leave them to perish; not force them to perish. Society is the natural guardian of the weak.

I cannot think the method here suggested would be so costly as the present. It seems to me that institutions of this character might be made not only to support themselves, but be so managed as to leave a balance of income considerably beyond the expense. This might be made use of for the advantage of the criminal when he returned to society; or with it he might help make restitution of what he had once stolen. Besides being less costly, it would cure the offender and send back valuable men into society.

It seems to me that our whole criminal legislation is based on a false principle—force and not love; that it is eminently well adapted to revenge, not at all to correct, to teach, to cure. The whole apparatus for the punishment of offenders, from the gallows down to the House of Correction, seems to me wrong; wholly wrong, unchristian, and even inhuman. We teach crime while we punish it. Is it consistent for the State to take vengeance when I may not? Is it better for the State to kill a man in cold blood, than for me to kill my brother when in a rage? I cannot help thinking that the gallows and even the jail, as now administered, are practical teachers of violence and wrong! I cannot think it will always be so. Hitherto we have looked on criminals as voluntary enemies of mankind. We have treated them as wild beasts, not as dull or loitering boys. We have sought to destroy by death, to disable by mutilation or imprisonment, to terrify and subdue, not to convince, to reform, encourage, and bless.

The history of the past is full of prophecy for the future. Not many years ago we shut up our lunatics in jails, in dungeons, in cages; we chained the maniac with iron; we gave him a bottle of water and a sack of straw; we left him in filth, in cold and nakedness. We set strong and brutal men to watch him. When he cried, when he gnashed his teeth and tore his hair, we beat him all the more! They do so yet in some places, for they think a madman is not a brother but a devil. What was the result? Madness was found incurable. Now lunacy is a disease, to be prescribed for as fever or rheumatism; when we find an incurable case we do not kill the man, nor chain him, nor count him a devil. Yet lunacy is not curable by force, by jails, dungeons, and cages; only by the medicine of wise men and good men. What if Christ had met one demoniac with a whip and another with chains!

You know how we once treated criminals! with what scourgings and mutilations, what brandings, what tortures with fire and red-hot iron! Death was not punishment enough, it must be protracted amid the most cruel torments that quivering flesh could bear. The multitude looked on and learned a lesson of deadly wickedness. A judicial murder was a holiday! It is but little more than two hundred years since a man was put to death in the most enlightened country of Europe for eating meat on Friday; not two hundred since men and women were hanged in Massachusetts for a crime now reckoned impossible! It is not a hundred years since two negro slaves were judicially burned alive in this very city! These facts make us shudder, but hope also. In a hundred years from this day will not men look on our gallows, jails, and penal law as we look on the racks, the torture-chambers of the middle ages, and the bloody code of remorseless inquisitors?

We need only to turn our attention to this subject to find a better way. We shall soon see that punishment as such is an evil to the criminal, and so swells the sum of suffering with which society runs over; that it is an evil also to the community at large by abstracting valuable force from profitable work, and so a loss.[34] We shall one day remember that the offender is a man, and so his good also is to be consulted. He may be a bad man, voluntarily bad if you will. Still we are to be economical even of his suffering, for the least possible punishment is the best. Already a good many men think that error is better refuted by truth than by fagots and axes. How long will it be before we apply good sense and Christianity to the prevention of crime? One day we must see that a jail, as it is now conducted, is no more likely to cure a crime than a lunacy or a fever! Hitherto we have not seen the application of the great doctrines of Christianity; not felt that all men are brothers. So our remedies for social evils have been bad almost as the disease; remedies which remedied nothing, but hid the patient out of sight. All great criminals have been thought incurable, and then killed. What if the doctors found a patient sick of a disease which he had foolishly or wickedly brought upon himself, and then, by the advice of twelve other doctors, professionally killed him for justice or example's sake? They would do what all the States in Christendom have done these thousand years. I cannot see why the Legislature has not as good right to authorize the medical college thus to kill men, as to authorize the present forms of destroying life!