“It is useless, or worse than useless, to occupy ourselves with methods for improving the treatment of criminals, so long as the conditions of life render the prison a welcome and desired shelter. So long as we foster the growth of reckless classes we foster the growth of criminality. So long as there are a large body of women in the East of London, and in other large centers, who are prepared to say, ‘It’s Jack the Ripper or the bridge with me. What’s the odds?’ there will be a still larger number of persons who will willingly accept the risks of prison. ‘What’s the odds?’ Liberty is dear to every man who is fed and clothed and housed, and he will not usually enter a career of crime unless he has carefully calculated the risks of losing his liberty, and found them small; but food and shelter are even more precious than liberty, and these may be secured in prison. As things are, the asylum and the workhouse, against which there is a deep prejudice, ingrained and irrational, would have a greater deterring effect than the prison. There are every morning in Paris 50,000 persons who do not know how they will eat or where they will sleep. It is the same in every great city; for such the prison can be nothing but a home. It is well known that the life of the convict, miserable as it is, with its dull routine and perpetual surveillance, is yet easier, less laborious, and far more healthy than that to which thousands of honest working-men are condemned throughout Great Britain.”[23]
VI.
Carroll D. Wright.
The author of the brochure, “The Relation of Economic Conditions to the Causes of Crime”, begins by declaring that there are two kinds [[194]]of criminals; persons who have become such from their psycho-physical constitution, and others who have become such from circumstances.
“I believe the criminal is an undeveloped man in all his elements, whether you think of him as a worker or as a moral and intellectual being. His faculties are all undeveloped, not only those which enable him to labor honestly and faithfully for the care and support of himself and his family, but also all his moral and intellectual faculties. He is not a fallen being: he is an undeveloped individual.”[24]
The author then continues by saying that since there is a relation more or less close between all the important social questions and the labor question, it is necessary to take that up also in studying the criminal question.
We know that there are three great systems of labor: the system resting upon slavery, the feudal system, and the system now in force, i.e. that of free labor. In the first two, which intrinsically do not differ much, crime had a totally different character from what it has under the last. Under the feudal system the peasants lived in the most deplorable condition, without hope of betterment. In many countries conditions were so bad that great bands of thieves and brigands overran them. During the reign of Henry VIII, which lasted 38 years, 72,000 criminals were executed. “Pauperism, therefore, did not attract legislation, and crime, the offspring of pauperism and idleness, was brutally treated; and these conditions, betokening an unsound social condition, existed until progress made pauperism, and crime as well, the disgrace of the nation, and it was then that pauperism began to be recognized as a condition that might be relieved through legislation.”[25]
In the end the feudal system was overthrown and that of free labor, the present system, became general. Since then the differences between poverty and wealth have appeared more distinctly.
“Carry industry to a country not given to mechanical production or to any systematic form of labor, employ three-fourths of its inhabitants, give them a taste of education, of civilization, make them feel the power of moral forces even in a slight degree, and the misery of the other fourth can be gauged by the progress of the three-fourths, and a class of paupers and resultant criminals will be observed. We have in our own day a most emphatic illustration of this in the emancipation of slaves in this country (America). Under the old system the negro slave was physically comfortable, as a rule. He was [[195]]cared for, he was nursed in sickness, fed and clothed, and in old age his physical comforts were continued. He had no responsibility, and, indeed, exercised no skill beyond what was taught him. To eat, to work and to sleep were all that was expected of him, and, unless he had a cruel master, he lived the life that belongs to the animal. Since his emancipation and his endowment with citizenship he has been obliged to support himself and his family, and to contend with all obstacles belonging to a person in a state of freedom. Under the system of villeinage in the old country it could not be said that there were any general poor, for the master and the lord of the manor took care of the laborers their whole lives; and in our Southern towns, during slavery, this was true, so that in the South there were few, if any, poorhouses, and few, if any, inmates of penal institutions. The South today knows what pauperism is, as England learned when the system of villeinage departed. Southern prisons have become active, and all that belongs to the defective, the dependent, and the delinquent classes has come to be familiar to the South.…” “But so far as the modern industrial order superinduces idleness or unemployment, in so far it must be considered as having a direct relation to the causes of crime.”[26]