are aggravated by the necessity of close association regardless of the real feelings that may exist. Certain claims are made by husbands and by wives, which are probably inherent in the relationship; sometimes they flow from habit and custom, but, from whatever cause, such claims are so exacting that either the husband or wife finds them hard to meet.
Because of the fact that the feelings of men and women for each other are deeper and more fundamental than those of any other relation, they are more subject to misfortune and tragedy. The hatreds born from the deepest affection are most beyond control. Then the desire of possession is overwhelming. It would be strange if more killings did not result from the relations of men and women than from any other cause. It is easy to understand why this is true. It is likewise easy to understand how laws, reason and judgment are powerless to prevent. Juries seem to understand this when women kill husbands and lovers, but a long-established code of chivalry and a cultivated attitude toward women, which is partly right and partly wrong, make it impossible to see that men are just as helpless under strong feelings as women. No doubt a public opinion that would favor divorces on a greater number of grounds and make them easily obtainable would prevent large numbers of such killings, but the cause can not be altogether removed.
The law has long singled out killing as the greatest crime, doubtless because man prizes life first of all. Of course every effort should be made to protect life. Still, in measuring the character of the offender, in determining his possibilities as a useful citizen, homicide is probably one of the lesser crimes. Many times it implies no moral turpitude, even with those who believe in moral turpitude. It may imply very little lack of physical stability. Homicide practically never becomes an occupation. Most killings are accidental in the sense that they are casual and dependent on circumstances, and there is as a rule much less danger of repetition than there is of the original commission of a homicide by one of a defective nervous system who has never before committed an unlawful act. A large number of men convicted of murder are used as “trusties” in our penal institutions, even when their imprisonment is for a long term, or for life. This shows from the experience of prison officials that this class of offenders is, as a rule, of a better fibre than almost any other class.
Doubtless no sort of treatment will ever entirely get rid of homicide. Brains and nervous systems are so made, that inhibitions are unable to protect in all cases. Nations and men readily engage in killing, either from sport or because of a real or fancied wrong. Mob psychology shows how whole communities are turned into ravenous beasts, hunting for their prey. The world war, and all wars, show cases of mob psychology that have led large masses of men to take an active part in killing. The pursuit of those charged with crime shows that all people like the chase when the emotions are thoroughly aroused. Under certain impulses, communities gloat over hangings and commend judges and juries because they have the courage to hang, when, in fact, they were too cowardly not to hang and when their reason did not approve the verdict and judgment. Men who do not kill often wish others might die and are pleased and happy when they do die. We approve of death when it is the right one who dies. Whether all persons are murderers or not may depend upon a definition of murder. But, beyond doubt, all persons are potential murderers, needing only time and circumstances, and a sufficiently overwhelming emotion that will triumph over the weak restraints that education and habit have built up, to control the powerful surging instincts and feelings that Nature has laid at the foundation of life.
XI
SEX CRIMES
Most of the inmates of prisons convicted of sex crimes are the poor and wretched and the plainly defective. Nature, in her determination to preserve the species, has planted sex hunger very deep in the constitution of man. The fact that it is necessary for the preservation of life, and that Nature is always eliminating those whose sex hunger is not strong enough to preserve the race, has overweighted man and perhaps all animal life with this hunger. At least it has endowed many men with instincts too powerful for the conventions and the laws that hedge him about.
Rape is almost always the crime of the poor, the hardworking, the uneducated and the abnormal. In the man of this type sex hunger is strong; he has little money, generally no family; he is poorly fed and clothed and possesses few if any attractions. He may be a sailor away from women and their society for months, or in some other remote occupation making his means of gratifying this hunger just as impossible. There is no opportunity for him except the one he adopts. It is a question of gratifying this deep and primal instinct as against the weakness of his mentality and the few barriers that a meagre education and picked-up habits can furnish; and when the instinct overbalances he is lost.
Incest, which is peculiarly the crime of the weak, the wretched and the poor, has a somewhat different origin. Westermarck in his “_History of Human Marriage_” shows that in the early tribe there was no inhibition against the marriage of blood relations; that the restriction then was against the members of the tribe that used one tent; these might or might not be blood relations. The traditions and folk-ways against the marriage of close relations grew from the familiarity that came from the living together of brother and sister, for instance, in one home. This feeling gradually worked itself into custom and habit and from that into folk-ways and laws. Sometimes we read accounts of the marriage of a man and woman who found, after years had gone by, that they were brother and sister who had been separated in infancy and grew up without knowledge of their relation to each other. Whether Nature forbids the marriage of relatives by preventing offspring or by producing imperfect offspring is a doubtful question. Certain communities in Europe have lived together so long that all are related and still they seem to thrive. Considering the general custom and feeling on the subject, however, the man and woman who know that they are closely related and who marry are different and weaker than the others; and this may show in their offspring. Although the subnormal may have no such feeling, they are judged by the traditions and customs of the normal and on that judgment are sent to prison.
Many sex crimes are charged to children in the adolescent age; children who have no knowledge of sex and its development and are helpless in the strength of their newly-discovered feelings. This class of offenders is almost always the inferior and the poor who are moved by strong instincts which they have not the natural feeling, the strength, the education, nor the desire to withstand.
While most crimes against persons are not directly due to economic causes, still the indirect effect of property is generally present in these crimes as well as others. The fact that the poor and defective are generally the subjects of prosecution and conviction in these offences shows how closely economic conditions are related to all crimes.
Other criminal statutes are of more modern date, and as a rule involve not much more than adultery, except in regard to the age of the girl offender, which is generally placed below eighteen. Still the sex age of neither boys nor girls can be fixed by a calendar. It depends really upon development, which is not the same with all people or in all environments. Many girls of sixteen are more mature and have more experience of life than others of twenty. Most laws provide that below sixteen one cannot give consent and that a sexual act is then rape. It is doubtful if there should be any intermediate age between sixteen and eighteen, where an act is not rape but still a minor offence.
XII
ROBBERY AND BURGLARY
Robbery and burglary are generally counted as crimes of violence, but they should be properly classed under property crimes. Every motive that leads to getting property in illegal ways applies to these crimes. There is added to the regular causes of property crimes the element of danger and adventure which makes a strong appeal to boys and men. I am inclined to think that few mature men have committed one of these crimes, unless they began criminal careers as boys. Such crimes especially appeal to the activity and love of adventure which inhere in every boy. They are committed for the most part by youths who have had almost no chance to get the needed sport and physical experience incident to boyhood. The foot-ball, base-ball, polo or golf player very seldom becomes a robber or a burglar. Almost no rich man or rich man’s son becomes a robber or a burglar. Those who fall under this lure are mainly the denizens of the streets, the railroad yards, the vacant lots, the casual workers who are stimulated by a variety of conditions to get property unlawfully. Added to this are almost invariably a defective heredity, vicious environment, little education, and a total want of direction in the building up of habits and inhibitions.
The robber or burglar who kills in the commission of crime is more dangerous and harder to cure than the one who kills from passion or malice. There is always the element of an occupation, for getting property, and generally a love of adventure that is difficult to overcome, except by a substantial change of social relations which makes acquiring property easier for the class from which all these criminals develop. The murder that comes from passion and feeling implies situations and circumstances that are rarely strong enough to overcome the restrictions against killing.
XIII
MAN AS A PREDATORY ANIMAL
Not less than eighty per cent of all crimes are property crimes, and it seems probable that, of the rest, most arise from the same motives. If we look at civilization as the result of that seesaw trend of the race from “Naturalism to Artificialism,” we may get a flexible view of life that will be in accordance with the facts, and will help us to get rid of the arbitrary division of man’s history into the three periods termed Savagery, Barbarism and Civilization. However desirable this division may be for historic purposes in general, it is only confusing in an effort to study the nature of man.
In the life and origin of the race, the fact is always evidenced that the Ego through its growth and persistence is always drawing to itself from the current of environment all things which it feels desirable to its life and growth. This must be a necessary condition of survival. In the long journey from amoeba to man, any circumstance causing a complete halt for even a brief period meant extinction, while even a persistent interference produced a weakened organism, if not an arrest of development.
This then is the origin of the “Master Instinct,” hunger. When we consider the various emotions growing from the force of this vital urge, as developed by adaptation to an ever-changing environment, we are able to realize fully why it bulks so large in moulding and shaping the destiny of the race.
All psychologists are agreed in classing under the nutritive instinct such activities as acquisition, storing and hoarding. During a period variously estimated as a quarter of a million to two million years, man and his animal antecedents responded to the hunger instinct, in the manner and by the same methods as did the various jungle animals. He secured his prey by capture, or killed it wherever found, the one condition being his power to get and to hold. Later tribal organization arose, and food and shelter were held in common. But since the folk-ways commended raiding and looting between alien tribes, here was presented an alluring chance to secure both booty and glory to men trained in the “get and hold” process of acquiring. For thousands of years life itself depended upon this unerring exercise.
It was during the period outlined that man developed his big brain (cerebrum) involving the central nervous system. Furthermore, it was developed by, and trained to, these particular reactions. The far-reaching control of the mind must be remembered, as upon this through his racial heritage must be based his conflicting impulses. These must be reckoned with in our conclusions with regard to present-day behavior, economic or otherwise.
During the last thirty years, psychological laboratories, aided by physiology, through oft-repeated experiments conducted with newly-invented weighing and measuring instruments of marvelous accuracy, have put us in possession of an array of facts unknown to students of earlier periods, who sought the “why and the how” of man’s erratic actions as a social animal. It is constantly being demonstrated that under given conditions, moved by appropriate stimuli, the human animal inevitably and surely reacts the same as does inorganic matter. If we understand “intelligence” to be the “capacity to respond to new conditions,” we can measurably see and at least partly understand the constant inter-play of heredity and environment. Between these there is no antagonism. The sum of life experiences consists solely in the adjustments required to enable the sentient organism–man or beast–to live.
How readily a “throw-back” to earlier and cruder life may be brought about under favorable conditions, is shown by the methods and virulence of combat during the vicious massacre in the war just ended. Can the conclusion be evaded that individually and collectively we constantly teeter on the brink of a precipice? If we fall it spells crime or misfortune, or both.
Wherever civilization exists on the private property basis as its main bulwark, we find crime as an inseparable result. Man, by virtue of his organic nature, is a predatory animal. This does not mean that he is a vicious animal. It simply means that man, in common with the eagle and the wolf, acts in accordance with the all-impelling urge and fundamental instincts of his organic structure. In any conflict between newer and nobler sentiments and the emotions which function through the primeval instincts, he is shackled to the bed-rock master instincts in such manner that they usually win. This is conclusively shown by the history of the race.
If this is true, we should expect to find the master hunger specially active through the many chances presented for exploitation after the fall of feudalism–beginning, let us assume, with the invention of power machinery–the “Age of Steam”. It is apparent that from that time to our own day, man’s acquisitive tendency has so expanded, that if we were capable of an unbiased opinion it might be said to be a form of megalomania gripping the entire white race, where highly-developed commerce and industry are found in their most vigorous forms.
If our theory is correct, we should expect to find the most energetic and enterprising nations showing a greater ratio of property crimes than the invalid and feeble nations. This would more certainly be true where political constitutions by letter and spirit encourage and promote individual development, mental and industrial. When this condition exists with abundant natural resources, such as often may be found in what we term a new country, it furnishes the chance for the most vigorous functioning of whatsoever may be the dominant qualities inherent in the tendencies and aspirations of a people. The United States of America, among the nations, meets these conditions, and we find here the highest ratio of property crimes per capita. This holds as to all such crimes, both minor and major, which are far in excess of those of any other nation, as shown by statistics.
It seems clear that this explanation shows the main reason for the seemingly abnormal number of property crimes in the United States.
Man’s infinitely long past developed the hunger instinct, which made him take directly and simply where he could and as he could. This is always urging him to supply his wants in the simplest way, regardless of the later restrictions that modern civilization has placed around the getting of property. With the weaker intellectually and physically, these instincts are all-controlling. The superficial and absurd theories that his excesses are due to the lack of the certainty of punishment take no account of the life experience, and the inherent structure of man.
Especially in our large cities with their great opportunities for the creation and accumulation of wealth, the “lust of power” is shown by the nerve-racking efforts to obtain wealth by the most reckless methods. The emotion drives us to spend extravagantly and conspicuously, that we may inspire the envy of our neighbors by our money and power.
This is an old emotion securing a new outlet, and tenfold magnified in force, through modern conditions in commercial and industrial life. Is it not plain that in America it has assumed the form of an obsession, biting us high and low, until we reek of it? It is likewise clear that it is a menace to any abiding peace and welfare; that it is still growing and leaving a bitter harvest of neurasthenics in its wake.
The criminologist must face the fact that, in spite of contrary pretenses by most of our social doctors, we are still in our work-a-day life guided almost exclusively by the mores–the folk-ways of old–founded on expediency as revealed by experiences, and acquired by the only known process, that of trial and error. If this be true, it clearly follows that in order to conserve any vestige of a civilization, we must realize the fact that property crimes are the normal results of the complex activities making up the treadmill called civilization. We must likewise realize that to modify these crimes we must modify the trend of the race.
When the seamy side of man’s behavior is scrutinized by science, it cannot be other than grim and distressing to the reader. It is this to the writer. But all the really significant facts of life are grim and often repulsive in the material presented. To the “irony of facts” must be ascribed the shadows as well as the high lights. No distortions or speculations can influence the findings of science. They are accessible and can be checked up by any one sufficiently interested. The student knows that man is what he is, because of his origin and long and painful past.
XIV
CRIMES AGAINST PROPERTY
By far the largest class of crimes may be called crimes against property. Strictly speaking, these are crimes in relation to the ownership of property; criminal ways of depriving the lawful owner of its possession.
Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot safely be ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause. No one familiar with courts and prisons can fail to observe the close relation between poverty and crime. All lawyers know that the practice of criminal law is a poor business. Most lawyers of ability refuse such practice because it offers no financial rewards. Nearly all the inmates of penal institutions are without money. This is true of almost all men who are placed on trial. Broad generalizations have been made from statistics gathered for at least seventy-five years. It has been noted in every civilized country that the number of property crimes materially increases in the cold months and diminishes in the spring, summer and early autumn. The obvious cause is that employment is less regular in the winter time, expenses of living are higher, idle workers are more numerous, wages are lower, and, in short, it is harder for the poor to live. Most men and women spend their whole lives close to the line of want; they have little or nothing laid by. Sickness, hard luck, or lack of work makes them penniless and desperate. This drives many over the uncertain line between lawful and unlawful conduct and they land in jail. There are more crimes committed in hard times than in good times. When wages are comparatively high and work is steady fewer men enter the extra-hazardous occupation of crime. Strikes, lockouts, panics and the like always leave their list of unfortunates in the prisons. Every lawyer engaged in criminal practice has noticed the large numbers of prosecutions and convictions for all sorts of offences that follow in the wake of strikes and lockouts.
The cost of living has also had a direct effect on crime. Long ago, Buckle, in his “_History of Civilization_,” collected statistics showing that crime rose and fell in direct ratio to the price of food. The life, health and conduct of animals are directly dependent upon the food supply. When the pasture is poor cattle jump the fences. When food is scarce in the mountains and woods the deer come down to the farms and villages. And the same general laws that affect all other animal life affect men. When men are in want, or even when their standard of living is falling, they will take means to get food or its equivalent that they would not think of adopting except from need. This is doubly true when a family is dependent for its daily bread upon its own efforts.
Always bearing in mind that most criminals are men whose equipment and surroundings have made it difficult for them to make the adjustments to environment necessary for success in life, we may easily see how any increase of difficulties will lead to crime. Most men are not well prepared for life. Even in the daily matter of the way to spend their money, they lack the judgment necessary to get the most from what they have. As families increase, debts increase, until many a man finds himself in a net of difficulties with no way out but crime. Men whose necessities have led them to embezzlement and larceny turn up so regularly that they hardly attract attention. Neither does punishment seem to deter others from following the same path although the danger of detection, disgrace and prison is perfectly clear.
Sometimes, of course, men of education and apparent lack of physical defect commit property crimes. Bankers often take money on deposit after the bank is insolvent. Not infrequently they forge notes to cover losses and in various ways manipulate funds to prevent the discovery of insolvency. As a rule the condition of the bank is brought about by the use of funds for speculation, with the intention of repaying from what seems to be a safe venture. Sometimes it comes through bad loans and unforeseen conditions. Business men and bankers frequently shock their friends and the community by suicide, on disclosures showing they have embezzled money to use on some financial venture that came to a disastrous end.
These cases are not difficult to understand. The love of money is the controlling emotion of the age. Just as religion, war, learning, invention and discovery have been the moving passions of former ages, so now the accumulation of large fortunes is the main object that moves man. It does not follow that this phase will not pass away and give place to something more worth while, but while it lasts it will claim its victims, just as other strong emotions in turn have done. The fear of poverty, especially by those who have known something of the value of money, the desire for the power that money brings, the envy of others, the opportunities that seem easy, all these feelings are too strong for many fairly good “machines,” and bring disaster when plans go wrong.
Only a small portion of those who have speculated with trust funds are ever prosecuted. Generally the speculation is successful or at least covered up. Many men prefer to take a chance of disgrace or punishment or death rather than remain poor. These are not necessarily dishonest or bad. They may be more venturesome, or more unfortunate; at any rate, it is obvious that the passion for money, the chance to get it, the dread of poverty, the love of wealth and power were too strong for their equipment, otherwise the pressure would have been resisted. The same pressure on some other man would not have brought disaster.
The restrictions placed around the accumulation of property are multiplying faster than any other portions of the criminal code. It takes a long time for new customs or habits or restraints to become a part of the life and consciousness of man so that the mere suggestion of the act causes the reaction that doing it is wrong. No matter how long some statutes are on the books, and how severe the penalties, many men never believe that doing the forbidden act is really a crime. For instance, the violations of many revenue laws, game laws, prohibition laws, and many laws against various means of getting property are often considered as not really criminal. In fact, a large and probably growing class of men disputes the justice of creating many legal rules in reference to private property.
Primitive peoples, as a rule, held property in common. Their inhibitions were few and simple. They took what they needed and wanted in the easiest way. There is a strong call in all life to hark back to primitive feelings, customs and habits. Many new laws are especially painful and difficult to a large class of weak men who form the bulk of our criminal class.
To understand the constant urge to throw off the shackles of civilization, one need but think of the number of men who use liquor or drugs. One need only look at the professional and business man, who at every opportunity leaves civilization and goes to the woods to kill wild animals or to the lakes and streams to fish.
The call to live a simple life, free from the conventions, customs and rules, to kill for the sake of killing, to get to the woods and streams and away from brick buildings and stone walls, is strong in the constitution of almost every man. Probably the underlying cause of the world war was the need of man to relax from the hard and growing strain of the civilization that is continually weaving new fetters to bind him. There must always come a breaking point, for, after all, man is an animal and can live only from and by the primitive things.
Children have no idea of the rights of property. It takes long and patient teaching, even to the most intelligent, to make them feel that there is a point at which the taking of property is wrong. Nowhere in Nature can we see an analogy to our property rights. Plants and animals alike get their sustenance where and how they can. It is not meant here to discuss the question of how many of the restrictions that control the getting of property are wise and how many are foolish; it is only meant to give the facts as they affect life and conduct.
It is certainly true that the child learns very slowly and very imperfectly to distinguish the ways by which he may and may not get property. His nature always protests against it as he goes along. Only a few can ever learn it in anything like completeness. Many men cannot learn it, and if they learned the forbidden things they would have no feeling that to disobey was wrong. Even the most intelligent ones never know or feel the whole code, and in fact, lawyers are forever debating and judges doubting as to whether many ways of getting property are inside or outside the law. No doubt many of the methods that intelligent and respected men adopt for getting property have more inherent criminality than others that are directly forbidden by the law. It must always be remembered that all laws are naturally and inevitably evolved by the strongest force in a community, and in the last analysis made for the protection of the dominant class.
XV
ATTITUDE OF THE CRIMINAL
Probably the chief barrier to the commission of crime is the feeling of right and wrong connected with the doing or not doing of particular acts. All men have a more or less binding conscience. This is the result of long teaching and habit in matters of conduct. Most people are taught at home and in school that certain things are right and that others are wrong. This constant instruction builds up habits and rules of conduct, and it is mainly upon these that society depends for the behavior of its citizens. To most men conscience is the monitor, rather than law. It acts more automatically, and a shock to the conscience is far more effective than the knowledge that a law is broken. For the most part the promptings of conscience follow pretty closely the inhibitions of the criminal code, although they may or may not follow the spirit of the law. Each person has his own idea of the relative values attached to human actions. That is, no two machines respond exactly alike as to the relative importance of different things. No two ethical commands have the same importance to all people or to any two people. Often men do not hesitate to circumvent or violate one statute, when they could never be even tempted to violate another.
Ordinarily unless the response of conscience is quick and plain, men are not bothered by the infraction of the law except, perchance, by the fear of discovery. This is quite apart from the teaching that it is the duty of all men to obey all laws, a proposition so general that it has no effect. Even those who make the statement do not follow the precept, and the long list of penal laws that die from lack of enforcement instead of by repeal is too well known to warrant the belief that anyone pays serious attention to such a purely academic statement. No one believes in the enforcement of all laws or the duty to obey all laws, and no one, in fact, does obey them all. Those who proclaim the loudest the duty of obedience to all laws never obey, for example, the revenue laws. These are clear and explicit, and yet men take every means possible to have their property exempted from taxation–in other words, to defraud the State. This is done on the excuse that everyone else does it, and the man who makes a strict return according to law would pay the taxes of the shirkers. While this is true, it simply shows that all men violate the law when the justification seems sufficient to them. The laws against blasphemy, against Sunday work and Sunday play, against buying and transporting intoxicating liquors and smuggling goods are freely violated. Many laws are so recent that they have not grown to be folk-ways or fixed new habits, and their violation brings no moral shock. In spite of the professions often made, most men have a poor opinion of congressmen and legislators, and feel that their own conscience is a much higher guide for them than the law.
Religions have always taught obedience to God or to what takes His place. Religious commands and feelings, are higher and more binding on man than human law. The captains of industry are forever belittling and criticising all those laws made by legislatures and courts which interfere with the unrestricted use of property. None of this sort of legislation has their approval and the courts are regarded as meddlesome when they enforce it. The anti-trust laws, the anti-pooling laws, factory legislation of all kinds, anything in short that interferes with the unrestricted use of property by its owner are roundly condemned and violated by evasion. On the other hand, so much has been written and said in reference to the creation of the fundamental rights to own property, and these rights depend so absolutely upon social arrangements and work out such manifest injustice and inequality, that there is always a deep-seated feeling of protest against many of our so-called property laws. From those who advocate a new distribution of wealth and condemn the injustice of present property rights, the step is quite short to those who feel the injustice and put their ideas in force by taking property when and where they are able to get it.
For instance, a miner may believe that the corporation for which he works really has no right to the gold down in the mine. As he is digging he strikes a particularly rich pocket of high-grade ore. He feels that he does no wrong if he appropriates the ore. Elaborate means are taken to prevent this, even compelling the absolute stripping of the workman, and a complete change of clothes on going in and coming out of the mine.
Many laws are put on the books which are of a purely sumptuary nature; these attempt to control what one shall do in his own personal affairs. Such laws are brought about by organizations with a “purpose”. The members are anxious to make everyone else conform to their ideas and habits. Such laws as Sunday laws, liquor laws and the like are examples. Then, too, every state or nation carries a large list of laws that men have so long violated and ignored, that they virtually are dead. To violate these brings no feeling of wrong, but only serves to make men doubt the evil of violating any law.
It is never easy to get a Legislature to repeal a law. Generally some organization or committee of people is interested in keeping it alive, and the members of the Legislature fear losing their votes. Social ideas are always changing. No laws or customs are eternal. The ordinary man, and especially the man under the normal, cannot keep up with all the shifting of a changing world. There is always a fraction of a community agitating for something new and gradually forcing the Legislature to put it into law, even against the will of the majority and against the sentiment of a large class of the community. The organization that wants something done is always aggressive. The man who wants to prevent it from being done is seldom unduly active or even alarmed. Many organizations are eager to get statutes on the books. One seldom hears of a society or club that is active in getting laws repealed. The constant change of law, the constant fixing of new values in place of old ones, is necessary to social life. This means putting new wine into old bottles, and wine that is much too strong for the bottles. Everybody can see why some particular law might be violated without a sense of guilt, but they cannot see how a law they believe in can be violated without serious obliquity.
Apart from this, there have always been crimes that were not of the class that implied moral wrong. The acts of the revolutionist who saw, or thought he saw, visions of something better; the man who is inspired by the love of his fellow-man and who has no personal ends to gain; the man who in his devotion to an idea or a person risks his life or liberty or property or reputation, has never been classed with those who violate the law for selfish ends. The line of revolutionists, from the beginning of organized government down to the birth of the United States and even to the present time, furnishes ample proof of this. And still the unsuccessful revolutionist meets with the severest penalties. To him failure generally means death. Men who are fired with zeal for all new causes are forever running foul of the law. Social organization, like biological organization, is conservative. All things that live are imbued with the will to live and they take all means in their power to go on living. The philosopher can neither quarrel with the idealist who makes the sacrifice nor the organization that preserves itself while it can; he only recognizes what is true.
Men have always been obliged to fight to preserve liberty. Constitutions and laws do not safeguard liberty. It can be preserved only by a tolerant people, and this means eternal conflict. Emerson said that the good citizen must not be over-obedient to law. Freedom is always trampled on in times of stress. The United States suffered serious encroachments on liberty during the Civil War. During the last war, these encroachments were greater than any American could have possibly dreamed; and so far there seems little immediate chance for change. Still the philosopher does not complain. He sees human passion for what it is, a great emotion that holds men in its grasp, a feeling that nothing can stand against. Opposition is destroyed by force, and often blind, cruel, unreasoning force. Sometimes even worse, this force is created for selfish ends. There are always those who will use the strongest and highest emotions of men to serve their private, sordid ends. Changing social systems, new political ideas, the labor cause, all movements for religious, social or political change have their zealots; they are met by the force of convention and conservatism ready to defend itself, and the clash is inevitable. It is easy to distinguish this sort of action from the things done by those who are known as criminals. Their acts are done to serve personal ends. Society may always punish both, but all men of right ideas will understand that the motive is different, the equipment and capacity of the men are different, and they are only in the same class because they each violate the law and are each responsive to emotions and to feelings that are of sufficient strength to compel action.
XVI
THE LAW AND THE CRIMINAL
If one were ill with a specific disease and he were sent to a hospital, every person who touched him, from the time his disease was known until he was discharged, would use all possible effort to bring him back to health. Physiology and psychology alike would be used to effect a cure. Not only would he be given surroundings for regaining health and ample physical treatment, but he would be helped by appeals in the way of praise and encouragement, even to the extent of downright falsehood about his condition, to aid in his recovery.
If such is done of “disease,” why not of “crime”? Not only is it clear that crime is a disease whose root is in heredity and environment, but it is clear that with most men, at least when young, by improving environment or adding to knowledge and experience, it is curable. Still with the unfortunate accused of crimes or misdemeanors, from the moment the attention of the officers is drawn to him until his final destruction, everything is done to prevent his recovery and to aggravate and make fatal his disease.
The young boy of the congested districts, who tries to indulge his normal impulses for play, is driven from every vacant lot; he is forbidden normal activity by the police; he has no place of his own; he grows to regard all officers as his enemies instead of his friends; he is taken into court, where the most well-meaning judge lectures him about his duties to his parents and threatens him with the dire evils that the future holds in store for him, unless he reforms. If he is released, nothing is done by society to give him a better environment where he can succeed. He is turned out with his old comrades and into his old life, and is then supposed by strength of will to overcome these surroundings, a thing which can be done by no person, however strong he may be.
For the graver things, the boy or man is taken to the police station. There he is photographed and his name and family record taken down even before he has had a hearing or a trial. He is handled by officers who may do the best they can, but who by training and experience and for lack of time and facilities are not fitted for their important positions. I say this in spite of the fact that my experience has taught me that policemen, as a rule, are kindly and human. From the police station the offender is lodged in jail. Here is huddled together a great mass of human wreckage, a large part of it being the product of imperfect heredities acted upon by impossible environments. However short the time he stays, and however wide his experience, the first offender learns things he never knew before, and takes another degree in the life that an evil destiny has prepared for him. In the jail he is fed much like the animals in the zoo. In many prisons the jailer is making what money he can by the amount he can save on each prisoner he feeds above the rate the law allows of twenty-five or fifty cents a day. In a short time the prisoner’s misery and grief turn to bitterness and hate; hatred of jailer, of officers, of society, of existing things, of the fate that overshadows his life. There is only one thing that offers him opportunity and that is a life of crime. He is indicted and prosecuted. The prosecuting attorney is equipped with money and provided with ample detectives and assistants to make it impossible for the prisoner to escape. Everyone believes him guilty from the time of his arrest. The black marks of his life have been recorded at schools, in police stations and examining courts. The good marks are not there and would not be competent evidence if they were. Theoretically the State’s Attorney is as much bound to protect him as to prosecute him, but the State’s Attorney has the psychology that leads to a belief of guilt, and when he forms that belief his duty follows, which is to land the victim in prison. It is not only his duty to land him in jail, but the office of the State’s Attorney is usually a stepping-stone to something else, and he must make a record and be talked about. The public is interested only in sending bad folks to jail.
No doubt there are very few State’s Attorneys who would knowingly prosecute unless they believed a man guilty of the offense, but it is easy for a State’s Attorney to believe in guilt. Every man’s daily life is largely made up of acts from which a presumption of either guilt or innocence can be inferred, depending upon the attitude of the one who draws the inference.
To a State’s Attorney or his assistants the case is one that he should win. All cases should be won. Even though he means to be fair, his psychology is to win. No lawyer interested in a result can be fair. The lawyer is an advocate trying to show that his side is right and trying to win the case. The fact that he represents the State makes no difference in his psychology. In fact, he always tells the jury that he represents the State and is as much interested in protecting the defendant as in protecting society. He does this so that the jury will give his statements more weight than the statements of the lawyer for the defense, and this very remark gives him an advantage that is neither fair nor right.
The man on trial is almost always poor. It is only rarely that a poor man can get a competent lawyer to take his case. He is often handed over to the court for the appointment of a lawyer. The lawyer has no time or money to prepare a defense. As a rule he is a beginner not fitted for his job. If he wishes to take the case, he wants it only for the experience and advertising that it will bring. He is handed a case to experiment on, just as a medical student is handed a cadaver to dissect. If the defendant is in jail, he has little chance to prepare his case. If the defendant had any money he would not know what to do with it. He is often a mentally defective person. His friends are of the same class and can do little to help him. The jury are told that they must presume him innocent, but the accusation alone carries with it the presumption of guilt, which extends to everyone connected with the case, even to the lawyer appointed to defend him. It is almost a miracle if the defendant is not convicted.
Perhaps he is taken out to be hanged–the last act that society can do for him, or the convicted man is sent to prison for a long or shorter term. His head is shaved and he is placed in prison garb; he is carefully measured and photographed in his prison clothes, so that if he should ever get back to the world he will forever be under suspicion. Even a change of name cannot help him. While in prison he works and lives under lock and key, like a wild animal, eager to escape. On certain days he is allowed to sit at a long table with other unfortunates like himself, and visit for an hour with mother or father or wife or son or daughter or friend on the other side. Other prisoners, so far as he can associate with them, are as helpless and hopeless and rebellious as he. How they will get out, and when, are their chief concerns. Many of their guards are very humane. Probably no one seeks to torture him, but the system and the psychology are fatal. He sees almost no one who approaches him with friendship and trust and a desire to help, except his family, his closest friends and his companions in misery. He knows that the length of his term is entirely dependent upon officials whom he cannot see or make understand his case. He snatches at the slightest ray of hope. He is in despair from the beginning to the end. No prison has the trained men who, with intelligence and sympathy, should know and watch and help him in his plight. No state would spend the money necessary to employ enough attendants and aids with the learning and skill necessary to build him up. Money is freely spent on the prosecution from the beginning to the end, but no effort is made to help or save. The motto of the state is: “Millions for offense, but not one cent for reclamation.”
As all things end, prison sentences are generally finished. The prisoner is given a new suit of clothes that betrays its origin and will be useless after the first rain, ten dollars in cash, and he goes out. His heredity and his hard environment have put him in. Now the state is done with him; he is free. But there is only one place to go. Like any other released animal, he takes the same heredity back to the old environment. What else can he do? His old companions are the only ones who will give him social intercourse, which he needs first of all, and the only ones who understand him. They are the only ones who will be glad to see him and help him get a job. There is only one profession for which he is better fitted after he comes out than he was before he went in, and that is a life of crime. Of course, he is a marked man and a watched man with the police. When a crime is committed and the offender is not found, the ex-convict is rounded up with others of his class to see, perchance, if he is not the offender that is wanted. He is taken to the lock-up and shown with others to the witnesses for identification. Before this, the witness may have been shown his photograph in convict clothes. Perhaps they identify him, perhaps they do not; if identified, he may be the man or he may not be. Anyhow, he has been in prison and this is against him. Whenever he comes out and wherever he goes, his record follows him as closely as his shadow. Even his friends suspect him. They suspect him even when they help him.
Such is the daily life of these unfortunates. What can be done? I can see nothing that the officers of the law can do. Officers represent the people. They reflect mob psychology. Even though an officer here and there rises above the crowd, as he sometimes does, it is of no avail. His place soon is filled by someone else. If only the public would understand! If only the public were more intelligent, which in this case at least would mean more human! If only the statement I repeat so often could be understood! There are no accidents; everything is the result of law. All phenomena are a succession of causes and effects. The criminal is the result of all that went before him and all that surrounds him. Like every other mortal, he is a subject for pity and not for hatred. If society is not safe while he is at large, he must be confined and kept under guard and observation. He must be kept until he is safe and a favorable environment found for him. If he will never be safe for society, he should never be released. He must not be humiliated, made to suffer unduly, despised or harried. He must be helped if he can be helped. This should be the second, if not the first object of his confinement.
Assuming that the scientific attitude toward crime should be accepted by those who make public opinion, and that this should become crystallized into written law, the problem would be easy.
The officers of the state can, as a rule, be depended upon to deal properly and considerately with the known insane. The insane are more trying and difficult than the criminal. Courts and juries and the public, however, recognize their mental condition and do not visit them with vengeance. It is appreciated and understood that they cannot with safety be left at large; but they are given the care and consideration that their condition demands. If the criminal should be looked upon as are the creatures insane from natural causes, the State’s Attorney could then be trusted to prepare the case and do the best he could for all concerned. The defendant would no longer be a defendant. His case would be under investigation; his past life would be shown, his credits as well as his debits; he would need no lawyer, not even a public defender; no jury would be required, and the uncertainties and doubts that hang around judgments would be removed. There would be little chance for a miscarriage of justice. Even should there be, it would result in the speedy release of one against whom the public bore no ill-will. One who was sick or insane would ordinarily not need a lawyer, as the state would bear him no malice and make no effort to do more than investigate the case and present the facts. The whole matter should be a purely scientific attempt to find out the best thing to be done both for the interest of the public and the interest of the man.
No doubt, in many cases, men are convicted who are perfectly innocent of the crime of which they are accused. This is especially true with the poor who can provide for no adequate defense and who perhaps have been convicted before of some misdemeanor or crime. This is also often true in cases where there is great prejudice against the defendant, either on account of the nature of the case or of the defendant on trial. For instance, during the recent war a wave of hysteria swept over the world, and courts and juries trampled on individual rights and freely violated the spirit of laws and constitutions. The close of the war left the same intense feelings of bitterness which made justice impossible in cases where the charge savored of treason, and involved criticism of the government, or advocacy of a change of political systems.
Questions of race, religion, politics, labor and the like have always awakened violent feelings on all sides, have made bitter partisans and strict lines of cleavage, and have made verdicts of juries and judgments of courts the result of fear and hatred. In spite of this, most of the inmates of prisons have done the acts charged in the indictments. Why they did them, their states of mind, the conditions and circumstances surrounding them, what can be done to make them stronger and better able to meet life are never ascertained, and few courts or juries have ever deemed these things proper subjects for consideration or in any way involved in the case.
In law every crime consists of two things: an act and an intent. Both are necessary to constitute legal guilt, and on the prevalent theory of moral guilt and punishment both are necessary to make up criminal conduct. There can be no legal or moral guilt unless one intends wickedness; unless he deliberately does the act because he wishes to do wrong and knows he does wrong. The question then of moral guilt, which is necessary to the commission of a criminal act, touches all the questions suggested and many more. Even if freedom of action is to some degree assumed, the question still remains as to the degree of guilt in fixing punishment and responsibility. The question involves the make-up of the man, his full heredity, so far as it can be known.
Most of every man’s heredity is hidden in the mist and darkness of the past. He inherits more or less directly through an infinite number of ancestors, reaching back to primitive man and even to the animals from which he came. The remote ancestry is, of course, usually not so important as that immediately behind him. Still, plainly, his form and structure and the details of his whole machine, including the marvelously delicate mechanism of the brain and nervous system, are heritages of the very ancient past. Neither are the processes of inheritance well understood nor subject to much control. Often in the making of the man Nature resorts to some “throw-back” which reproduces the ancient heritage. This can be seen only in general resemblances and behavior, for the genealogical tree of any family is very short and very imperfectly known, and the poor have no past. In three or four generations at the most the backward trail is lost and his family merged with the species of which he forms but a humble part.
Enough, however, is known of ancestry and the infinite marks of inheritance on every structure as well as enough of the reaction of the human machine to the varied environment that surrounds it, to make it clear that if one were all-seeing and all-wise he could account in advance for every action of every man. More than this, he could see in the original, fertilized cell, all its powers, defects and potentialities and could, in the same manner, look down through the short years during which the human organism, grown from the cell, shall have life and movement, and could see its varied environment. If one could see this with infinite wisdom, he could infallibly tell in advance each step that the machine would take and infallibly predict the time and method of its dissolution. To be all-knowing is to be all-understanding, and this is infinitely better than to be all-forgiving.
To get this knowledge of the past of each machine is the duty and work of the tribunal that passes on the fate of a man. It can be done only imperfectly at best. The law furnishes no means of making these judgments. All it furnishes is a tribunal where the contending lawyers can fight, not for justice, but to win. It is little better than the old wager of battle where the parties hired fighters and the issue was settled with swords. Oftentimes the only question settled in court is the relative strength and cunning of the lawyers. The tribunal whose duty it is to fix the future place and status of its fellowmen should be wise, learned, scientific, patient and humane. It should take the time and make its own investigation, and it can be well done in no other way. When public opinion accepts the belief that punishment is only cruelty, that conduct is a result of causes, and that there is no such thing as moral guilt, investigations and sorting and placing of the unfortunate can be done fairly well. The mistakes will be very few and easily corrected when discovered. There will be no cruelty and suffering. The community will be protected and the individual saved.
Neither will this task be so great as it might seem at first glance. Trials would probably be much shorter than the endless, senseless bickering in courts, the long time wasted in selecting juries and the many irrelevant issues on which guilt or innocence are often determined, make necessary now. Most of the criminal cases would likewise be prevented if the state would undertake to improve the general social and economic condition of those who get the least. Only a fraction of the money spent in human destruction, in war and out, would give an education adapted to the individual, even to the most defective. It would make life easy by making the environment easy. Only a few of the defective, physically and mentally, would be left for courts to place in an environment where both they and society could live. Perhaps some time this work will be seriously taken up. Until then, we shall muddle along, fixing and changing and punishing and destroying; we will follow the old course of the ages, which has no purpose, method or end, and leaves only infinite suffering in its path.
XVII
REPEALING LAWS
It is comparatively easy to get a penal statute on the books. It is very hard to get it repealed. Men are lazy and cowardly; politicians look for votes; members of legislatures and Congress are not so much interested in finding out what should be done, as they are in finding out what the public thinks should be done. Often a law lingers on the books long after the people, no longer believing the forbidden thing to be wrong, have repealed it. The statute stays, to be used by mischievous people and by those who believe in the particular law.
Often the unthinking lay hold of a catch-word or a pet phrase and repeat and write it, as if it were the last word in social science and philosophy. General Grant, when president, stumbled on such a silly combination of words, and surface-thinkers have been repeating it ever since, simply because it sounds wise and pat. Grant once said that, “The way to repeal a bad law is to enforce it.” Grant was not a statesman nor a philosopher. He was a soldier. He probably heard some one use this phrase, and it sounded good to him. Out of that has grown the further statement which courts and prosecutors have used to excuse themselves for the cruelty of enforcing a law that does violence to the feelings of the people. This statement is to the effect that so long as the law is on the books, it is the duty of officers to enforce it. The smallest investigation of the philosophy of law shows how silly and reactionary such statements are.
One thing should be remembered. Laws really come from the habits, customs and feelings of the people, as interpreted or understood by legislative bodies. When these habits and customs are old enough they become the folk-ways of the people. Legislatures and courts only write them down. When the folk-ways change the laws change, even though no legislature or judge has recorded their repeal.
Since Professor Sumner of Yale University wrote his important book, “_Folkways_,” there is no excuse for any student not knowing that this statement is true. As a matter of fact, no court ever enforced all the written laws, or ever would, or ever could. Only a part of the discarded criminal law is ever repealed by other laws. The rest dies from neglect and lack of use. It is like the rudimentary parts of the human anatomy. Man’s body is filled with rudimentary muscles and nerves that, in the past, served a purpose. These were never removed by operations, but died from disuse. Every criminal code is filled with obsolete laws, some of them entirely dead, others in the course of dissolution. They cannot be repealed by statute so long as an active minority insists that they remain on the books. When the great mass no longer wants them, it is useless to take the trouble to repeal them. The fugitive slave law was never believed in and never obeyed, and it was openly violated and defied by the great mass of the people of the North. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution, and the statutes passed to enforce them, providing political and civil equality for the black man, and forbidding discrimination on railroads, in hotels, restaurants, theatres and all public places, have never really been the law in any state in the Union. Their provisions have always been openly violated and no court would think of enforcing them, for the simple reason that public sentiment is against it. Laws condemning witchcraft and sorcery both in Europe and America did their deadly work and died, for the most part, without repeal. Sabbath laws of all sorts forbidding work and play and amusements are dead letters on the statute books of most states, in spite of many attempts to galvanize them into life. All kinds of revenue laws are openly violated. Most tax-payers of intelligence who own property violate the revenue law openly and notoriously, and all courts and officers as well as the public know it. Many laws which interfere with the habits, customs and beliefs of a large number of people, like the prohibition laws, never receive the assent of so large a percentage as to make people conscious of any wrong in violating them, and therefore people break them when they can. Often this class of laws is enforced upon offenders who believe the law is an unwarrantable interference with their rights, and thus causes convictions where no moral turpitude is felt.
Every new crusade against crime not only sweeps away a large amount of work that has been slowly and patiently done toward a right understanding of crime, but likewise puts new statutes on the books which would not be placed there if the public were sane. When it does not do this, it increases penalties which work evil in other directions and awe courts, juries, governors and pardon boards, not only preventing them from listening to the voice of humanity and justice, but causing them to deny substantial rights and wreak vengeance and cruelty upon the weak and helpless.
XVIII
IS CRIME INCREASING?
The question is often asked, Is crime increasing? Statistics of all kinds can be gathered on this subject. In the main they seem to show that crime is on the increase in most civilized countries. It is very unsafe to use statistics without at the same time considering all the questions on which conduct rests. An increase of crime, as shown by statistics, may mean that the records are kept more completely than in former times. It may mean temporary causes like bad times are adding to the number of arrests and convictions. It may mean new classifications. It may mean that figures are based on arrests instead of convictions. It may include misdemeanors with graver offenses. It may or may not include repeaters. Statistics in any field are useful, but usually for broad generalizations, and they must always be interpreted by men of experience who are not interested in the results. Still, on the whole, it is probable that statistics show that crime is on the increase. What have reason and human experience to say on the subject?
We should always bear in mind that crime can never mean anything except the violation of law, when the violator is convicted; that it has no necessary reference to the general moral condition of man. Is the number of criminal convictions growing, and if so why? In the first place, the criminal code is lengthening every year. When civilized man began making criminal codes, there were comparatively few things forbidden. The codes were largely made up of those acts which, in some form, have for ages been generally thought to be criminal. Religious beliefs, customs and habits were included in the penal statutes. So were such things as sorcery and witchcraft. Property was then not an important subject in man’s activities. When the instinct to create and accumulate property began to rule life, the criminal code grew very rapidly. Complex business interests, combined with the constantly increasing value placed on property, were always calling for new statutes.
The same tendency, indirectly, demanded still other statutes until at the present time this class of crimes makes up a large part of the criminal code and is growing steadily each year. Then too, the necessity of property has called for the violation of this part of the criminal code more than any other, and it has naturally caused a considerable increase of crime. Man in his social and political activities is ever weaving and bending and twisting back and forth. For a number of years the universal tendency, especially in America, has been toward what is called “Social Control”, the idea being that more and more people should be controlled in an increasing number of ways. Of course, if people are to be controlled they must be controlled by other people. This policy has been extended until we are ever pushing further into the regulation of the habits, customs and lives of all the individual members of the community. The majority, when it has the power, has never hesitated to force its ways of living, its ideas, customs and habits on the minority. The majority, when strong enough, has always assumed that it was right, and provided that others must live its way or not at all. The pendulum is now swinging far this way as is evidenced by prohibition, the persistent campaign for Sunday laws, and the growing belief in social control as a means of changing and directing humanity.
This has added to the criminal code and has increased the number of men in prisons. Two statutes of recent date in most of the states are responsible for a very large increase in the number of convicts. The conspiracy statute which is used today is a deliberate scheme on the part of prosecutors to get men into the penitentiary by charging an agreement or confederation of two or more persons to do something, which, if really committed, would be a misdemeanor, or no crime whatever. Under this charge, whether made specifically or in connection with another crime, the rules of evidence have been opened and relaxed until the wildest and most remote hearsay is freely admitted for the plain purpose of convicting men who have really been guilty of no specific act. It is in effect punishing one for his thoughts; the business of the court or jury being to find out whether in some particular he has an evil mind.
The statute forbidding the use of the “confidence game” in obtaining property sends to prison a constant stream of persons who, until a few years ago, would have been guilty of no crime. This law, as interpreted by the courts, really means the procuring of money by dishonest means. Under this statute the court and jury hear the evidence and say whether the means charged are dishonest or not. This, of course, leaves the law so that the temporarily prevailing power, perhaps only the prosecuting attorney, may send men to prison who take means of getting money that are not practiced or at least advocated by the ones who procure the passage and enforcement of the law.
Numberless ways used by the strong to get money are considered dishonest by a large class of men and women: exaggerated and lying advertisements, forestalling the markets, the acts and wiles of the professional salesman, misrepresenting goods and other methods that could never be catalogued because new ways are constantly coming to light. The logical end of all these indefinite and uncertain laws is to pass one statute providing that whoever does wrong shall be imprisoned, _et cetera, et cetera_. The law never can specify all the ways of doing wrong and many of the meanest and most annoying things have never been, and from the nature of things never can be, prohibited by the statutes. No man is a good citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, or a good man just because he obeys the law. The intrinsic worth is determined mainly by the intrinsic make-up.
Civilization is all the while making it harder for men to keep out of prison. Especially do the weak and ignorant and poor find that environment is constantly creating more inhibitions as time goes on. While rules and customs are prohibiting more and more ways of getting property, the needs growing out of civilization are always increasing. The simple inexpensive life of the past has given place to a more complex way of living, which calls for greater expense and harder work. It has created rivalry and jealousy to get the things that others have, and has placed men in a mad race with each other which often leads to jail or death.
Students of biology are constantly noting the difficulty that hereditary human traits, which have been evolved for simple reactions and plain living, find in making the necessary adjustments to the extravagant demands and complicated environment of the present day. This departure from the old normal and simple environment, due largely to machinery and commerce, is not only destroying individual lives by the thousands, but is seriously threatening the whole social fabric.
The creation of new courts, like “Boys’ Courts,” “Juvenile Courts,” “Courts of Domestic Relations,” “Moral Courts,” with their array of “Social Workers,” “Parole Agents,” “Watchers,” _et cetera,_ shows the growth of crime and likewise the hopelessness of present methods to deal effectively with a great social question. Numbers of people in our big cities are making their living from the abnormal lives of children. Whether they are doing good or not, or whether their service is unselfish, as much of it doubtless is, are both quite aside from the question. The important fact is that the present system brings no results and that the disease is growing.
Instead of any considerable number of people taking hold of the question of crime, as physicians have taken hold of disease, and seeking to find its cause and to remove that cause, we content ourselves with prosecuting and punishing and visiting with misery and shame, not only the boys and girls, the men and women, who are the victims of life, but the large number of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, whose lives are ruined by a catastrophe with which at least they had nothing to do. If a doctor were called in to treat a case of typhoid fever, he would probably find out where the patient got his milk supply and his drinking water and would have the well cleaned out to stop the spread of typhoid fever through infection. A lawyer called to treat the same kind of a case, legally speaking, would give the patient thirty days in jail, thinking that this treatment would effect a cure. If at the end of ten days the patient were cured, he would nevertheless be kept in prison until his time was out. If at the end of thirty days the disease was more infectious than ever, the patient would be discharged and sent upon his way to spread contagion in his path.
The transgression of organized society in the treatment of crime would not be so great if students and scientists had not long since found the cause of crime. It would be hard to name a single man among all the men of Europe and America who have given their time and thought to the solution of this problem, who has not come to the conclusion that crime has a natural origin, and that the criminal for the most part is the victim of heredity and environment. These students have pointed the way for the treatment of the disease, and yet organized government that spends its millions on prosecutions, reformatories, jails, penitentiaries and the like, has scarcely raised its hand or spent a dollar to remove the cause of a disease that brings misery and despair to millions and threatens the destruction of all social organization! To the teaching of the student and the recommendations of the humane the mob answers back: “Give us more victims, bigger jails, stronger prisons, more scaffolds!”
Not only has the constant multiplication of penal laws helped without avail to fill jails, but the failure to repeal laws that are outgrown does its part. As already stated, there are many anti-social and annoying things that can be done without violating the law. This, no doubt, is responsible for some of the general statutes like that aimed at the confidence game that catches a victim when the crime is not clearly defined as in “robbery,” “burglary,” “larceny” and the like. Still it has been the general opinion of those who have studied crime and influenced the passage of penal laws, that criminal statutes should be clear and explicit so that all would know what they must not do. It is obvious that if one is to be punished simply for doing wrong, there could be no judges or juries or jailers condemning and punishing and no crowds shouting for vengeance. All do wrong and do it over and over again, and day by day. It is not only those specific things that the great majority think are wrong, but the graver offenses that are meant to be the subject of criminal codes. Of course, codes do not work out this way in practice. In effect, they forbid the things that the strongest forces of the community wish forbidden, things which may or may not be the gravest and most anti-social acts, but which at least seem to the strong to be most hostile to their interests and ruling emotions.
XIX
MEDICAL EXPERTS
So long as the ordinary ideal of punishment prevails, a crime must consist of an act coupled with an intent to do the thing, which probably means an intent to do evil. This is no doubt the right interpretation of intent, although cases can be found, generally of a minor grade, which hold that evil intent is not necessary to the crime. Under the law as generally laid down, insanity is a defense to crime when the insanity is so far advanced as to blot out and obliterate the sense of right and wrong or render the accused unable to choose the right and avoid the wrong. Of course, legal definitions of scientific terms, processes, or things, do not ordinarily show the highest wisdom. It is safe to say that few judges or lawyers have ever been students of insanity, of the relation of “will” to “conduct,” or of other questions of science or philosophy. Each man confines himself to his field of operation, and the love of living does not induce him to go far from the matter in hand, which to him means the base of supplies.
The insane are exempted from punishment for crime on the ground that they are not able to prepare and attend to their cases when placed on trial and on the further ground that their “free will” is destroyed by disease or “something else,” and therefore they could form no intent. In another place I have tried to point out the fact that the acts of the sane and the insane are moved by like causes, but this is not the theory of the law.
Insanity is often very insidious. Many cases are easily classified, but there is always the border line, the twilight zone, which is sure to exist in moral questions and in all questions of human conduct, and this is hard to settle. It is generally determined by the feelings of a jury, moved or not by the prejudice of the public, depending on whether the community has been lashed or persuaded to take a hand in the conduct of the case.
Lawyers and judges are not psychologists or psychiatrists, neither are juries. Therefore the doctor must be called in. As a rule, the lawyer has little respect for expert opinion. He has so often seen and heard all sorts of experts testify for the side that employs them and give very excellent reasons for their positive and contradictory opinions, that he is bound to regard them with doubt. In fact, while lawyers respect and admire many men who are expert witnesses, and while many such men are men of worth, still they know that the expert is like the lawyer: he takes the case of the side that employs him, and does the best he can. The expert is an every-day frequenter of the courts; he makes his living by testifying for contesting litigants. Of course scientific men do not need to be told that the receipt of or expectation of a fee is not conducive to arriving at scientific results. Every psychologist knows that, as a rule, men believe what they wish to believe and that the hope of reward is an excellent reason for wanting to believe. It is not my intention to belittle scientific knowledge or to criticise experts beyond such general statements as will apply to all men. I have often received the services of medical experts when valuable time was given without any financial reward, purely from a sense of justice. But all men are bound to be interested in arriving at the conclusion they wish to reach. Furthermore, the contending lawyers are willing to assist them in arriving at the conclusions that the lawyer wants.
It is almost inevitable that both sides will employ experts when they have the means. The poor defendant is hopelessly handicapped. He is, as a rule, unable to get a skillful lawyer or skillful experts. A doctor’s opinion on insanity is none too good, especially in a case where he is called only for a casual examination and has not had the chance for long study. The doctor for the prosecution may find that the subject can play cards and talk connectedly on most things, and as he is casually visiting him for a purpose, he can see no difference between him and other men. This may well be the case and still have little to do with insanity. Experts called for the defense cannot always be sure that the patient truthfully answers the questions. A doctor must make up his mind from examining the patient, except so far as hypothetical questions may be used. In all larger cities, certain doctors are regularly employed by the prosecution. While it would be too much to say that they always find the patient sane, it is safe to say that they nearly always do. Especially is this true in times of public clamor, which affects all human conduct. A court trial with an insanity defense often comes down largely to the relative impression of the testimony of the experts who flatly contradict each other, leaving with intelligent men a doubt as to whether either one really meant to tell the truth. The jury knows that they are paid for their opinions and regards them more or less as it regards the lawyers in the case. It listens to them but does not rely upon their opinions. Expert testimony is always unsatisfactory in a contested case. Under present methods, it can never be any different.
There is another danger: juries do not know the difference in the standing, character and attainments of doctors, so the tendency is always to find the man who will make the best appearance and testify the most positively for his side. This is unfair to the expert, unfair to science, and unfair to the case.
The method for overcoming this difficulty that has received most sanction from students is that experts shall be chosen by the state and appear for neither side. This, like most other things, has advantages and disadvantages. State officials, or those chosen by the state, usually come to regard themselves as a part of the machinery of justice and to stand with the prosecuting attorney for conviction. It will most likely be the same with state defenders. No one who really would defend could be elected or could be appointed, and it would work out in really having two prosecutors, one nominally representing the defense. A defendant should be left to get any lawyer or any expert he wishes. No one can be sure that the state expert will be better than the others. All one can say is that state experts may not be partisans, but, in effect, this would mean that they would not be partisans for the defendant. The constant association with the prosecutor, the officers of the jail, the public officials, and those charged with enforcing the law, would almost surely place them on the side of the state. Such men must be elected or appointed by some tribunal. This brings them to the attention of the public and makes them dependent on the public. The expert’s interest will then be the same as the interest of the prosecutor and the judge.
The prosecuting attorney is not a partisan. His office is judicial. He is not interested in convicting or paid for convicting, and yet, no sane person familiar with courts would think that the defendant could be safely left in his hands. Assuming he is honest, it makes little difference. Almost no prosecutor dares do anything the public does not demand. Neither, as a rule, has he training nor interest to study any subject but the law. The profounder and more important matters affecting life and conduct are a sealed book which he could not open if he would. Very soon under our political system the expert business would gravitate into the hands of politicians, the last group that should handle any scientific problem. I am free to confess the difficulties of the present system, but some other way may be even worse. It must always be remembered that this country is governed by public opinion, that public opinion is always crude, uninformed and heartless. In criminal cases there is no time to set it right. The position of the accused is hard enough at best. He is really presumed guilty before he starts. Every lawyer employed to any extent in criminal practice knows that in an important case his greatest danger is public opinion. He would not take the officers and attaches of the court as jurors, although they might be good men, for their interest and psychology would be always for conviction.
If defendants were not regarded as moral delinquents, if the examination implied no moral condemnation, if it was only a scientific investigation as to where to place him if he is anti-social, if public opinion supported this view, then experts should be appointed by the court. On this phase of the case there would be little need of experts. I would be willing to go further and say that then, too, the partisan lawyer, the hired advocate, should disappear. The machinery of justice would be all-sufficient to take care of the liberties of every man, to give him proper treatment in disease, to restore him to freedom when safe, and, when that time does come, the unseemly contest in courts will disappear, and justice, tempered with mercy, will have a chance.
XX
PUNISHMENT
Assuming that man is justified in fixing the moral worth of his fellow; that he is justified in punishment for the purpose of making the offender suffer; and that these punishments according to the degree of severity will in some way pay for or make good the criminal act or protect or help society or prevent crime or even help the offender or someone else, what finally is the correct basis of fixing penalties?
No science, experience, or philosophy and very little humanity has ever been considered in fixing punishments. The ordinary penalties are first: fines, which generally penalize someone else more than the victim; these with the poor mean depriving families and friends of sorely needed money, and the direct and indirect consequences are sometimes small and sometimes very great. These can be readily imagined. If instead of fines a prison sentence is given, a sort of decimal system has been worked out by chance or laziness or symmetry of figures; certainly it has been done wholly regardless of science, for there is no chance to apply science when it comes to degrading men and taking away a portion of their lives. Generally ten days is the shortest. From this the court goes to twenty, then thirty, then sixty, then three months, then six months, then one year.
Why not eleven days? Why not twenty-four days? Why not forty days? Why not seventy days? Why not four months or five, or eight or nine or ten months? Is there no place between six months in jail and a year in jail? The bids at an auction or the flipping of pennies are exact sciences compared with the relation between crime and punishment and the process of arriving at the right penalty. If in the wisdom of the members of the legislature the crime calls for imprisonment in the penitentiary, then the ordinary sentences run one, two, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and life, according to the hazard of the legislature, the whim of the court, the gamble of the jury, or the feeling and means of expression of the unthinking and pitiless crowd who awe courts and juries with their cries for vengeance.
Neither does punishment affect any two alike; the sensitive and proud may suffer more from a day in jail or even from conviction than another would suffer from a year. The various courts and juries of the different states fix different penalties. Even in the same state there is no sort of resemblance to the punishments generally given for similar crimes. Some jurisdictions, some juries and some courts will make these three or four times as severe as others for the same things. Some days the same judge will give a longer sentence than on other days. In this judges are like all of us. We have our days when we feel kindly and sympathetic toward all mankind. We have our days when we mistrust and dislike the world in general and many people in particular. Largely the weather influences those feelings. Therefore, the amount of time a person spends in prison may depend to a great extent on the condition of the weather at the time of conviction or when sentence is passed. The physical condition of judge or jury, and above all, their types of mind, are all-controlling. No two men have the same imagination: some are harsh and cruel; others kind and sympathetic; one can weigh wheat and corn and butter and sugar; one can measure water and molasses and gasoline. When one measures or weighs, one can speak with exactness regarding the thing involved. Justice and mercy and punishment cannot be measured or weighed; in fact there is even no starting point. The impossibility of it all makes many of the humane and wise doubt their right to pass judgment upon their fellow man. Society no doubt is bound by self-protection to resist certain acts and to restrain certain men, but it is in no way bound to pass moral judgments.
Under any system based on a scientific treatment of crime, men would be taken care of as long as it was necessary to restrain them. It would be done in the best possible way for their own welfare. If they ever were adjudged competent to enter society again, they would be released when that time came. Neither under a right understanding, and a humane, scientific and honest administration, would it be necessary that places of confinement should be places of either degradation or misery. In fact the inmate might well be put where he could enjoy life more than he did before he was confined. It might and should be the case also that he could produce enough to amply take care of himself and provide for those who would naturally look to him for support, and perhaps make compensation for the injury he had caused to someone else.
It is obvious that this cannot be done until men have a different point of view toward crime. In the last hundred years much has been done to make prisons better and to make more tolerable the life of the inmates. This has been accomplished by men who looked on criminals as being at least to a certain extent like other men.
Above all, as things are now, the prison inmate has no chance to learn to conform unless hope is constantly kept before him. He should be like the convalescing invalid, able from time to time to note his gradual progress in the ability to make the adjustments that are necessary to social beings. No patient in a hospital could be cured if he were constantly told that he could not get well and should not get well. His imagination should be enlarged by every means that science can bring to the teaching of man.
First of all there must be individual treatment. No one would think of putting hundreds or thousands of the ill or insane into a pen, giving them numbers, leaving them so that no capable person knows their names, their histories, their families, their possibilities, their strength or their weaknesses. Every intelligent person must know that this would inevitably lead to misery and death. The treatment of men in prison is a much more difficult problem than the care of the physically diseased. It requires a knowledge of biology, of psychology, of hygiene, of teaching and of life; it needs infinite patience and sympathy; it needs thorough acquaintance and constant attention. It is a harder task than the one that confronts the physician in the hospital, because the material is poorer, the make is more defective, and the process of cure or development much slower and not so easily seen.
No person is entirely without the sympathetic, idealistic and altruistic impulses, which after all are the mainsprings of social adaptation. Probably these innate feelings can be found in prisoners as generally as in other men. It is the lack of these qualities that often keeps men outside the jail. They “get by” where kindly and impulsive men fail. A large part of the crime, especially of the young, comes from the desire to do something for someone else and from the ease with which persons are led or yield to solicitation.
The criminal has always been met by coldness and hatred that have made him lose his finer feelings, have blunted his sensibilities, and have taught him to regard all others as his enemies and not his friends. The ideal society is one where the individuals move harmoniously in their various orbits without outside control. The governing power of a perfect order in its last analysis must be within the individual. A perfect system probably will never come. Men are too imperfect, too weak, too ignorant and too selfish to accomplish it. Still, if we wish to go toward perfection, there is no other road.
One of the favorite occupations of legislatures is changing punishments in obedience to the clamor of the public. In times of ordinary tranquility a penalty may even be modified or reduced, but let the newspapers awaken public opinion to crime by the judicious use of headlines and a hot campaign, let the members feel that there is a popular clamor and that votes may be won or lost, and the legislature responds. This is generally done without reference to the experience of the world, without regard to the nature of man, with no thought of the victim, and with no clear conception of how the legislation will really affect the public.
The demand is constantly made that such crimes as kidnapping, train robbing, rape and robbery should be punished with death, or at least with imprisonment for life. Irrespective of its effect on the criminal, what is the effect on the victim of the criminal? A man is held up on a lonely highway; the robber does not intend to kill. His face is exposed. If the penalty for robbery is life imprisonment, he kills to avoid detection. If it is death, he kills even before he robs. The same thing operates in rape, in burglary, and in other crimes. In all property crimes not only is no killing intended or wanted, but precautions are taken to guard against killing. All laws to make drastic penalties should really be entitled: “An Act to Promote Murder.”
Making penalties too drastic destroys the effect meant to be produced. Public clamor does not last forever. Men grow tired of keeping their tongues wagging on the same subject all the time. A state of frenzy is abnormal and when it subsides the temperature not only goes back to normal, but as far below as it has been above. When the fury has spent itself jurors regain some of their human feeling and refuse to convict. History has proved this over and over again, and still politicians always seek to ride into power on the crest of the wave; when the wave moves back, they can easily go back with it. Even if the severe punishments should be continued without abatement, these soon lose their power to terrify. Communities grow accustomed to hangings; they get used to life sentences and long imprisonments and the severity no longer serves to awe. The cruelty serves only as a mark of the civilization of the day. Some day, perhaps, a wiser and more humane world will marvel at our cruelty and ignorance, as we now marvel at the barbarity of the past.
XXI
THE EFFECT OF PUNISHMENT ON OTHERS
The ordinary man who hears of a crime hates the criminal and wants him to suffer. He does not picture the malefactor as a man who, for some all-sufficient reason, has committed a dreadful act. Still less does he ask: “Has he a father or mother, a wife or children, brothers or sisters, and how are these affected by his deed?” No one can intelligently deal with the criminal without considering these. Practically no inmate of a prison stands alone. He is a member of a family or small social group, and inevitably the interests of these others are more or less closely bound up with his. If punishment is justified for its influence on society, these must be taken into account with the other members of the social organization.
The criminal, it must be remembered, is almost always poor. He has a mother, brothers and sisters, wife or children, dependent for support to a large extent, upon his casual earnings. He is placed in jail or the penitentiary and the family must make new adjustments to life. The mother or wife may go to work at hard labor for a small return; the children may be taken out of school and sent to stores or factories, be condemned to lives of drudgery that will often lead to crime. The family may be broken up and scattered through institutions and the poorest shelters. A complete transformation for the worse almost always comes over the home. It is safe to say that at least three or four are closely touched by the misfortune of every one. These lives must be readjusted, and the chances are that the new adjustments will not be equal to the old, if for nothing else than because the conviction is a serious handicap in their struggles. Let anyone go to a city jail on a visiting day and see the old mothers, the stunned and weeping wives, the little children, down to babes in arms, who crowd around the corridors to get a look at the man behind the bars. To them at least he is a human being with feelings and affections, with wants and needs. All of these can recount his many good qualities which the world cannot see or know. Their first step is to borrow or to sell what they can to provide means for his defense. Everything else is cast aside. Day after day they visit the jail and the lawyer, contriving means to save liberty or life. When the trial comes, they watch through its maze in a dazed, bewildered way. They know that the man they love is not the one who is painted in the court room, and at least to them he is not. If he is convicted and goes to prison for a term of years, then month by month the faithful family goes to see him for an hour in the prison, visiting across the table in open view of guards and others as unfortunate as they. The family follows all sorts of advice and directions and seeks out many hopeless clews for men of influence and position who can unlock prison doors. The weeks run into months and the months into years, and still many of them keep up their hopeless vigil; some are driven to drudgery, some to crime, some to destruction for the man whom the state has punished that society may be improved. It is safe to say that the state ruins at least one other life for every victim of the prison.
No provision is made for the dependent families of the wretched man. Ruthlessly society sends the man to prison and sees the daughter leave school, a mere child, and go to work. What becomes of her it does not know or care. It seems not to know that she exists. The state sees the convict’s boy working at casual tasks and growing up on the streets, while his father is paying the penalty of his act. He may on this account follow his father to jail; it is not society’s concern.
Assuming that an offender must be confined for the protection of society, as some no doubt must be, still the effect on the family and how to prevent its destruction should be among the first concerns in the disposition of the case.
XXII
EVOLUTION OF PUNISHMENT
Among primitive peoples the penal code was always short. Desire for property had not taken possession of their emotions. Their lives were simple, their adjustments few, and there was no call for an elaborate code of prohibited acts. Their punishments were generally simple, direct and severe: usually death or banishment which often meant death, sometimes maiming and branding, so that the offender might serve as a constant warning to others.
Primitive peoples early asked questions about their origin and destiny. The unknown filled most of the experiences of their lives. The realm of the known was very small. They had no idea of law and system, of cause and effect. They early began evolving religious ideas. The manifestations of nature, the mystery of birth, the fear of death, the phenomena of dreams, the growth and harvesting of crops–all of these were beyond their understanding. They peopled the earth with gods to be propitiated and appeased. Everything was the act of a special providence. From early times religion and witchcraft furnished the chief subjects for the criminal code.
The penalties for the violation of the code were always severe, generally death, and by the most terrorizing ways. No other crime could be so great as to arouse the anger of the gods, and naturally no other conduct should demand so severe a penalty as calling down the wrath of the gods. This would fall not only upon the offending man, but upon the community of which he was a part. Even as man developed in knowledge and civilization, this sort of crime continued to furnish the greater proportion of victims and the most cruel punishments. Torture of the most fiendish sort was evoked to catch offenders and extort confessions. Difference of religious opinions was the worst crime. The inquisition became an established thing. Sometimes a nation was almost wiped out that heretics should be killed and heresies destroyed. The heretic was the one who did not accept the prevailing faith. The list of victims of punishment on account of religion, witchcraft, sorcery and kindred laws has in the past no doubt been larger than for any other charges.
This kind of laws always called out the greatest zeal in their enforcement. To the religious enthusiast nothing else was of equal importance. It involved not only the life of man on earth but his life through all eternity. Our statutes today are replete with such crimes, but the punishments have been lessened and, as a rule, communities will not enforce them. But laws against blasphemy, working on Sunday, and Sunday amusements of all sorts, are still on the books and enforced in some places. A large organization and an influential and aggressive part of the Christian Church are insisting that these laws shall be enforced to the limit and that still others shall be placed among the statutes of the several states.
The methods of inflicting the death penalty have been various, the favorite ways being burning, boiling in oil, boiling in water, breaking on the rack, smothering, beheading, crucifying, stoning, strangling and electrocuting. Until the middle of the last century they were carried out in the presence of the multitude so that all might be warned by the example.
The number of crimes for which death and bodily torture have been the punishment can scarcely be recorded, and if they could it would be of no value. They would run into the hundreds and probably the thousands. A large part of these crimes are now obsolete. Doubtless more men have been executed for crimes they did not commit and could not commit than for any real wrong of which they were guilty.
Prisons came into fashion later than the death penalty, and as a form of punishment have gradually come to take the place of most death penalties. Prisons in the past have been loathsome places and not much better than death. Prisoners have been packed together so closely that life was almost impossible. To incarcerate victims in prisons has brought terrible punishment not only on the prisoners and their families, but indirectly on the state. No doubt through the years prisons have been gradually improved. Many of their terrors have been banished. People have come to believe that even a prisoner should have some consideration from the state. Penalties have likewise grown less severe and terms have been shortened, but this course has not been regular or constant; the public readily relaxes into hatred and vengeance, and it is easy to arouse these feelings in men, since they lie very close to the surface. A constant struggle has always been waged by the humane to make man more kindly, and yet probably his nature does not really change. A few months of frenzy may easily undo the work of years.
So long as men punish for the sake of punishment, there will be a disagreement between the advocates of long punishment and short punishment, hard punishment and light punishment. From the nature of things, there is no basis on which this can be determined. The only thing that throws any light on the question is experience, and men can always differ as to the lessons of experience. Neither do they remember experience when feelings are concerned.
Punishment can deter only on the ground of the fear that flows from it. Fear comes from things that are more or less unusual. Man has little abstract fear of a natural death; it is so unavoidable that it does not even figure in the ordinary affairs of life. Extreme punishments may grow so common that few give them any concern. They probably are so common now that the impression they make is not very great. Lighter and easier punishments would have the same psychological effect. In many cases a lenient punishment would also eliminate much of the hatred and bitterness against the world that are common to all inmates of prisons.
XXIII
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
The question of capital punishment has been the subject of endless discussion and will probably never be settled so long as men believe in punishment. Some states have abolished and then reinstated it; some have enjoyed capital punishment for long periods of time and finally prohibited the use of it. The reasons why it cannot be settled are plain. There is first of all no agreement as to the objects of punishment. Next there is no way to determine the results of punishment. If the object is assumed it is a matter of conjecture as to what will be most likely to bring the result. If it could be shown that any form of punishment would bring the immediate result, it would be impossible to show its indirect result although indirect results are as certain as direct ones. Even if all of this could be clearly proven, the world would be no nearer the solution. Questions of this sort, or perhaps of any sort, are not settled by reason; they are settled by prejudices and sentiments or by emotion. When they are settled they do not stay settled, for the emotions change as new stimuli are applied to the machine.
A state may provide for life imprisonment in place of death. Some especially atrocious murder may occur and be fully exploited in the press. Public feeling will be fanned to a flame. Bitter hatred will be aroused against the murderer. It is perfectly obvious to the multitude that if other men had been hanged for murder, this victim would not have been killed. A legislature meets before the hatred has had time to cool and the law is changed. Again, a community may have capital punishment and nothing notable happens. Now and then hangings occur. Juries acquit because of the severity of the penalty. A feeling of shame or some bungling execution may arouse a community against it. A deep-seated doubt may arise as to the guilt of a man who has been put to death. The sentimental people triumph. The law is changed. Nothing has been found out; no question has been settled; science has made no contribution; the public has changed its mind, or, speaking more correctly, has had another emotion and passed another law.
In the main, the controversy over capital punishment has been one between emotional and unemotional people. Now and then the emotionalist is reinforced by some who have a religious conviction against capital punishment, based perhaps on the rather trite expression that “God gave life and only God should take it away.” Such a statement is plausible but not capable of proof. In the main religious people believe in capital punishment. The advocates of capital punishment dispose of the question by saying that it is the “sentimentalist” or, rather, the “maudlin sentimentalist” who is against it. Sentimentalist really implies “maudlin.”
But emotion too has its biological origin and is a subject of scientific definition. A really “sentimental” person, in the sense used, is one who has sympathy. This, in turn, comes from imagination which is probably the result of a sensitive nervous system, one that quickly and easily responds to stimuli. Those who have weak emotions do not respond so readily to impressions. Their assumption of superior wisdom has its basis only in a nervous system which is sluggish and phlegmatic to stimuli. Such impressions as each system makes are registered on the brain and become the material for recollection and comparison, which go to form opinion. The correctness of the mental processes depends upon the correctness of the senses that receive the impression, the nerves that transmit the correctness of the registration, and the character of the brain. It does not follow that the stoic has a better brain than the despised “sentimentalist.” Either one of them may have a good one, and either one of them a poor one. Still, charity and kindliness probably come from the sensitive system which imagines itself in the place of the object that it pities. All pity is really pain engendered by the feelings that translate one into the place of another. Both hate and love are biologically necessary to life and its processes.
Many people urge that the penalty of imprisonment for life would be all right if the culprit could be kept in prison during life, but in the course of time he is pardoned. This to me is an excellent reason why his life should be saved. It is proof that the feeling of hatred that inspired judge and jury has spent itself and that they can look at the murderer as a man. Which decision is the more righteous, the one where hatred and fear affect the judgment and sentence, or the one where these emotions have spent their force?
Everyone who advocates capital punishment is really ashamed of the practice for which he is responsible. Instead of urging public executions, the most advanced and sensitive who believe in killing by the state are now advocating that even the newspapers should not publish the details and that the killing should be done in darkness and silence. In that event no one would be deterred by the cruelty of the state. That capital punishment is horrible and cruel is the reason for its existence. That men should be taught not to take life is the purpose of judicial killings. But the spectacle of the state taking life must tend to cheapen it. This must be evident to all who believe in suggestion. Constant association and familiarity tend to lessen the shock of any act however revolting. If men regarded the murderer as one who acted from some all-sufficient cause and who was simply an instrument in an endless sequence of cause and effect, would anyone say he should be put to death?
It is not easy to estimate values correctly. It may be that life is not important. Nature seems extravagantly profligate in her giving and pitiless in her taking away. Yet death has something of the same shock today that was felt when men first gazed upon the dead with awe and wonder and terror. Constantly meeting it and seeing it and procuring it will doubtless make it more commonplace. To the seasoned soldier in the army it means less than it did before he became a soldier. Probably the undertaker thinks less of death than almost any other man. He is so accustomed to it that his mind must involuntarily turn from its horror to a contemplation of how much he makes out of the burial. If the civilized savages have their way and make hangings common, we shall probably recover from some of our instinctive fear of death and the extravagant value that we place on life. The social organism is like the individual organism: it can be so often shocked that it grows accustomed and weary and no longer manifests resistance or surprise.
So far as we can reason on questions of life and death and the effect of stimuli upon human organisms, the circle is like this: Frequent executions dull the sensibilities toward the taking of life. This makes it easier for men to kill and increases murders, which in turn increase hangings, which in turn increase murders, and so on, around the vicious circle.
In the absence of any solid starting point on which an argument can be based; in the absence of any reliable figures; in the absence of any way to interpret the figures; in the absence of any way to ascertain the indirect results of judicial killings, even if the direct ones could be shown; in the impossibility through life, experience or philosophy of fixing relative values, the question must remain where it has always been, a conflict between the emotional and unemotional; the “sentimental” and the stolid; the imaginative and the unimaginative; the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. Personally, being inclined to a purely mechanistic view of life and to the belief that all conduct is the result of certain stimuli upon a human machine, I can only say that the stimuli of seeing and reading of capital punishment, applied to my machine, is revolting and horrible. Perhaps as the world improves, the sympathetic and imaginative nature will survive the stolid and selfish. At least one can well believe that this is the line of progress if there shall be progress, a matter still open to question and doubt.
XXIV
STIGMATA OF THE CRIMINAL
Lombroso and others have emphasized the theory that the criminal is a distinct physical type. This doctrine has been so positively asserted and with such a show of statistics and authority, that it has many advocates. More recent investigations seem to show conclusively that there is little or no foundation for the idea that the criminal is a separate type. Men accustomed to criminal courts and prisons cannot avoid being impressed with the marks of inferiority that are apparent in prisoners. Most prisoners are wretched and poorly nourished, wear poor clothes and are uncared-for and unkempt. Their stunted appearance is doubtless due largely to poor food, the irregularity of nourishment, and the sordidness of their lives in general. One also imagines that a prisoner looks the part, and in his clothes and surroundings he generally does. It is hard for a prisoner to look well-groomed; he has neither the opportunity nor the ambition to give much attention to his personal appearance. The looks of the prisoners are of little value. Nothing but actual measurements could give real information, and these do not sustain the theory of their being different from other men.
It is not possible to see how the criminal can be of a distinct physical type. Criminality exists only in reference to an environment. One cannot be born a criminal. One may be, and often is, born with such an imperfect equipment that he cannot make his adjustments to life, and soon falls a victim to crime and disease. All that a physical examination could do would be to show the strength or weakness of the body and its various organs. What may befall him will depend partly on the kind and quality of his mind and nervous system, and partly on the physical structure and the kind of experiences that life holds in store for him.
No doubt thorough psychological examinations would reveal something of the brain, just as physical examinations certainly would determine the strength and capacity of the body. This would be of material aid in determining the kind of environment that should be found for the individual, and if such environment could be easily found it would avert most of the calamities which beset the path of the youth.
Something can be told of a person’s character from his eyes, the expression of the face and the contour of the head, but this information is very misleading as our everyday experience shows. It is not necessary to find stigmata in the prisoner to know that he was born the way he is. One’s character must be fixed before birth whether Nature marks it on one’s head or not. Likewise every particle of matter moves from stimuli and obedience to law, regardless of whether it shows in the face or not. The strong are no more exempt from the law than the weak. All the difference is that they can longer and more easily avoid disaster.
Everyone is in the habit of forming a hasty opinion of another by reading his face and noting his expression. But the indication given by facial expression is mainly the product of the life that has been lived, and tells something of the part that the hidden emotions have played on the body.
It has been generally believed that mind has its seat in the brain and the nervous system. Later investigations, however, seem to show that it is the product of the whole physical organism. There is no chance to measure or weigh or still less assay the qualities of the machine. It is certain that the quality of the mind depends very little upon either the contour or size of the skull.
About all that can be learned of the mind and the character of the man must be gathered from the manifestation of the machine. It is shown by his behavior in action and reaction. This behavior is caused by the capture, storage and release of energy through the ductless glands.
A defective mechanism either inherited or acquired through imperfectly balanced glands will inevitably produce an imperfect mind and defective conduct. This it will be bound to do because the body is the mind.
As a matter of fact, no man is branded physically with the “mark of Cain.” If criminology were so simple it would not be difficult to handle. The manifestations of the human machine are infinite and only patience and careful study can find the points of weakness and of strength. That all brains and bodies have both is beyond dispute. No physical human structure was ever put together where the organs were equally strong to do the work assigned to them. Some part of the body always needs watchfulness and repair and can never be depended upon in emergencies. In times of overstress and strain, the defective organ or organs will manifest their weakness. The intricate nervous system and the brain, the unseen instincts and emotions likewise do not work perfectly; but as a rule the ones that underwork or overwork cannot be seen by a physical examination. It generally requires great subtlety to find them, and careful treatment and environment to make the machine work fairly well in spite of these imperfections. This could be provided; in most cases the machine could be placed in an environment where it would work fairly well; but instead of this all the effort that is made to keep the machine in shape is a threat of the jail if it goes wrong; it is then left to run itself without help or assistance of any kind.
While examinations of the head do not show marked differences between prisoners and others, a great distinction is seen between the general proportion and the degrees of nourishment of prisoners and those not accused of crime. Nothing is more common than the weak and underfed condition of the delinquent and the criminal. This needs no expert examination. It is obvious to all. The poor, scanty clothes and personal belongings corroborate the fact that the accused is poor and has not enough to eat or wear, nor anything but the most scanty shelter. In addition to these facts, he is almost always ill. A report recently published, based on investigations by a special committee of the New York State Commission of Prisons, shows that in the New York Reformatory only eight per cent passed the required physical examination. In the penitentiary, where the average age was higher, only five per cent passed the test. In the work house–the home of the “down and outs”–only one per cent passed. The health tests employed were those for admission to the army. It was likewise found by the same commission that of those in good health or fair physical condition, eighty-five per cent were self-supporting, while only eighteen per cent of those in poor physical condition took care of themselves.
Disease and ill health, when found so generally, are in themselves indications of a defective system, and such machines are constantly exposed to temptation. Their needs are ever present and their poverty great. Sickness and disease weaken or destroy such inhibitions as the unfortunate are able to build up, and they readily yield to crime.
XXV
THE GOOD IN CRIMINALS
The criminal is confronted in court with an indictment charging him with a violation of the law. He is a human being, like all others, neither perfect nor entirely worthless. He has some tendencies and inclinations which the world calls good for lack of a better term, and some that it calls bad for the same reason. In this he is like the jury and the judge. The strength of the different tendencies is not the same in any two machines. The judge and jury are interested in determining whether he is good or bad; that is, better or worse than they themselves. In theory he is tried on the charges contained in the indictment.
In most cases by a constant stretching of the rules of evidence his whole life may be involved. That is, proof may be offered of any act of delinquency that constituted a violation of the law, if in any way similar, or in any way connected with the one charged in the indictment.