Even the most optimistic student of penology would be compelled to admit that our present methods of dealing with criminals are unsatisfactory to the last degree. Our systems of punishment do not punish in any such sense as to be a terror to evil-doers; our systems of reformation do not reform. The whole thing goes on in a vicious round of self-perpetuating infamy. The central idea of our modern penal system—and it is certainly a very venerable one—is that in some way the world will be greatly benefited by shutting up its law-breakers for a longer or shorter period, feeding them liberally, giving them a period of enforced steady habits and steady work, and after a while taking off this straight jacket of compulsory morality, and turning them loose again with improved criminal skill and sharpened appetites to prey upon society in the old way.
The actual result of this crowding of more or less confirmed vice into one concentrated aggregation, is simply to intensify the evil it was intended to remedy. The convict who enters a prison cell for the first time—perhaps as the result of some sudden and overpowering temptation—a man who at heart is no better and no worse than his neighbors, and who, if by any chance he had escaped conviction, would have finished his life as an average citizen, as a friend and advocate of the law—finds himself here in an entirely new environment. Self-respect is gone. The old motive for honesty is gone. He enters the new and stifling atmosphere of concentrated crime, and with it comes the feeling that the world is all against him. It is his first offence, but it is by no means likely to be his last. Every man he sees, save the grim rifle-carrying guard who growls and swears at him, is a convicted criminal. Every object that his eyes fall upon intensifies the lesson that he is henceforth to be counted among the enemies of his race. Every breath that he breathes reeks with the malaria of crime. He is now an enlisted soldier in a warfare against right and law and social order. He is in the devil’s own training school. The seven other “spirits more wicked than himself” are all around him. Whatever prison rules may say, there are certain to be clandestine meetings, secret conferences, in which the novice is initiated into the higher degrees of the freemasonry of crime. Schemes of profitable law-breaking swarm in the teeming brains of these wearers of the stripes, to be turned into actual deeds in “the good time coming,” when these apt pupils of the high school of depravity shall be free again to make war upon the peace and welfare of the world. Is it any wonder that this first offender comes out of prison a confirmed criminal, and that “the last state of that man is worse than the first”?
If the same business sense were used in this matter which is ordinarily given to the management of great human concerns, we should soon find some way of improving upon this discouraging condition of affairs. No merchant in his senses would discharge a dishonest clerk for a term of ninety days with the distinct understanding that he was to spend his enforced vacation in the society of thieves and cutthroats, and at the end of the time be taken back again into his old place as though nothing had happened. The railroad president who should discharge a drunken engineer, and then after six months give him hold of his old throttle again, although it was in evidence that he had spent his retirement in a whiskey saloon, studying under competent tuition the latest methods of holding up trains, would be very apt to be bundled off at the next meeting of the board of directors to manage railroads from the inside of a lunatic asylum. Courts and judges and lawyers are about the only people on the outside that do business in that way.
Is there no help for this state of things? Must the machinery of justice go on forever grinding over the same vile grist, retrying and reimprisoning old offenders, cultivating rather than repressing the law-breaking instinct, passing on to still lower depths of depravity the soul once caught in the meshes of crime, and at last dragging the great masses of offenders down to one common level of hopeless and helpless hostility to social order and law?
It is, of course, much easier to point out faults than to suggest effective remedies. I am persuaded that some happy inspiration of genius will yet give us methods, probably so simple that we shall wonder that they have not always been used, by which many of the gravest evils which disgrace our present system will be effectually removed. I think the key to the whole problem will ultimately be found in one word—segregation. Worcester defines “to segregate” “to gather in a flock, to set apart, to separate from others.”
In pursuance of this idea let us suppose, save in the case of certain crimes that disclose confirmed and hopelessly vicious tendencies, that all first offenders were counted in a class by themselves. For these reformatories should be built, in which a complete segregation of the various classes of law-breakers should be made, and that, too, with the same idea uppermost which prevails in modern hospital practice, that infectious cases should in all instances be especially isolated. Criminal infection is as real and morally quite as disastrous as is physically that of cholera or smallpox. So with this predominating idea of segregation; and with a wise discrimination which might be difficult in the beginning, but which experience would more or less perfectly supply, the various classes of first offenders should be separated into distinct and non-communicating families. Hard labor should here mean hard labor. Rigid discipline coupled with coarse but wholesome food should emphasize the fact that this was a place, not of comfortable leisure, but of reformatory punishment. At the same time such educational and moral influences as enlightened experience could supply should be brought continuously to bear, to give new aims, inspire new motives, and impart health, strength, and soundness to morally weak but not necessarily hopelessly criminal natures.
Under enlightened management, commitment to such reformatories might be made for an indefinite period, with the same limited discretion that the law now gives to courts of justice, to be dependent largely upon the behavior of the criminal, and to be determined not before, but after his term of imprisonment began. The superintendent and board of managers should, in that case, be clothed with large discretionary powers to dismiss, to detain, to place in higher or lower classes, as their best judgments should dictate, and as the actual and tried needs and progress of reform in each individual case might demand. The vast, costly, and architecturally imposing structures which are now denominated “reformatories,” and which in many cases might be much more appropriately labelled “failures,” if not discarded altogether, could be supplemented by simple and inexpensive structures, giving abundant room and light and air. With such conditions and surroundings, and under such a system intelligently administered, it is reasonable to believe that no small proportion of first offenders, who, under our present method, drift into the hopelessly, and it might in many cases be added, helplessly, criminal classes, would be restored to moral soundness and self-respecting citizenship.
But with the most efficient system of reformation which human wisdom could devise, there would still be a large contingent of incorrigible offenders, who, from hereditary taint, bad environment, or other causes, have cut themselves off from all retreat, burned the bridges behind them, and enlisted in a life warfare against human society and law. Most second offenders and those whose brutal past points to an irredeemable future should properly be classed as life criminals, and with these, society, while not forgetting “the quality of mercy,” should deal with firm hand and inexorable justice.
As our government is not so situated that penal colonies are practicable, walled villages might be built with all the safeguards which modern science and inventive skill can supply for the absolute and permanent isolation of these “life criminals.” In these penal villages, various grades and classes should be placed each by itself. Behind these never-opening gates, and under conditions that should relieve the world at once and forever of their presence, these avowed and unrepentant enemies of social and civil order should be compelled to “work out their own salvation.”
No great and costly prisons would be needed. Simple and inexpensive cottages, each with its separate plot of ground, with furniture and housekeeping arrangements on the most frugal scale, with absolute necessaries in food and clothing, at least for a time, would be required. The greatest possible liberty should be given to each individual convict. The industrious should be assured of the full benefit of their toil. Those who would not work, should find here the same penalties for idleness as obtain in the world they had left. Here might be gathered the whole round of industry—artisans, shops, manufacturers of all kinds, aided by every appliance of modern machinery. Schools, libraries, and even churches would by no means be excluded from this life-convict home. There is no reason why such a community of criminals might not ultimately become largely self-supporting and self-governing. They could have their own courts, their own lawyers, their own judges, their own system of penal law, and their own machinery for its enforcement.