THE SEGREGATION AND PERMANENT ISOLATION OF CRIMINALS.
BY NORMAN ROBINSON.
What shall be done with confirmed and incorrigible offenders? For a good many thousand years the world has been wrestling with this problem, and in this year of grace it is seemingly very little nearer a rational solution than when the first fraternal brawl sent one brother into his grave, and another into exile with the perpetual brand of a murderer blazing upon his terror-stricken brow.
The savage settles the matter with a tomahawk or a war club. The remedy is at least effectual, and society in the kraal or the tepee does not bother its dusky brain about the possible reform of the offender. Any type of criminality that is inconvenient or unpopular is, therefore, summarily buried in the nearest grave.
Up to the time of the Christian era, the savage and the civilized man alike held substantially the same theories. The one idea that dominated all criminal law was punishment. The statutes of Draco and Lycurgus never harbored the thought of moral improvement, much less made provision for the reform of the criminal. Roman law and Greek law were little better. The one right which all offenders possessed was the right to be punished. Reformation was entirely a personal matter, which theoretically in rare instances was possible, to which the law, save in capital cases, interposed no special obstacles, and to which it gave no special encouragement.
With the advent of a new and more merciful dispensation, we find gradually creeping in a belief that the criminal classes have some rights which society is bound to respect, and that not the least important of these is the right to reform. For two thousand years these not necessarily conflicting ideas of reform and punishment have travelled down the centuries in a medley of incongruous and often contradictory systems of criminal law. As the better classes have generally made and administered the law, it is not strange that the elder and more savage idea has on the whole been dominant, and that, taking the world together, the reform of criminals is still rather a side issue than an object of far-reaching and systematic legislative enactment.