Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such, for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging strangest to their striving.
When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers; then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to place stricture on punishment values.
At a time when, and in a country where, the murderous footpad knows the chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America doesn’t punish.
How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred of it hit so as to hurt?
Here, again, “The shots that (miss) are the shots that count”; and that would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the gambler’s throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?
Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago newspaper, is fully as informing as are our “minister’s” conclusions: “There never was a time when theft was considered proper.”
From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally punished, even unto death.
With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the “correspondent” probably wouldn’t have been guilty of assertion so grossly incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.
Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.
The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order prison régimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers. That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.