thousand five hundred and ninety-two persons in the State's prison of
New York, four hundred have been there more than once. In five years,
from 1841 to 1847, there were punished in the House of Correction in
this city, five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight persons; of these
three thousand one hundred and forty-six received such a sentence
oftener than once. Yes, in five years, three hundred and thirteen were
sent thither, each ten times or more! How many found a place in other
jails I know not.
What if fathers treated dull or vicious boys in this manner at
home--making them infamous for the first offence, or the first dulness,
and then refusing to receive them back again? What if the father sent
out his son with bad boys, and when he erred and fell, said: "You did
mischief with bad boys once; I know they enticed you. I knew you were
feeble and could not resist their seductions. But I shall punish you. Do
as well as you please, I will not forgive you. If you err again, I will
punish you afresh. If you do never so well, you shall be infamous for
ever!" What if a public teacher never took back to college a boy who
once had broke the academic law--but made him infamous for ever? What if
the physicians had kept a patient the requisite time in the hospital,
and discharged him as wholly cured, but bid men beware of him and shun
him for ever? That is just what we are doing with this class of
criminals; not intentionally, not consciously--but doing none the less!
Let us look a moment more carefully, though I have already touched on
this subject, at the proximate causes of crime in this class of men. The
first cause is obvious--poverty. Most of the criminals are from the
lowest ranks of society. If you distribute men into three classes, the
abounding, the thriving, the perishing, you will find the inmates of
your prisons come almost wholly from the latter class. The perishing
fill the sink of society, and the dangerous the sink of the
perishing--for in that "lowest deep there is a lower depth." Of three
thousand one hundred and eighty-eight persons confined in the House of
Correction in this city, one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven were
foreigners; of the five hundred and fifty sent from this city in five
years to the State's Prison, one hundred and eighty-five were
foreigners. Of five hundred and forty-seven females in the Prison on
Blackwell's Island at one time--five hundred and nineteen were committed
for "vagrancy;" women with no capital but their person, with no friend,
no shelter. Examine minutely, you shall find that more than nine tenths
of all criminals come from the perishing class of men. There all
cultivation, intellectual, moral, religious, is at the lowest ebb. They
are a class of barbarians; yes, of savages, living in the midst of
civilization, but not of it. The fact, that most criminals come from
this class, shows that the causes of the crime lie out of them more than
in them; that they are victims of society, not foes. The effect of
property in elevating and moralizing a class of men is seldom
appreciated. Historically the animal man comes before the spiritual.
Animal wants are imperious; they must be supplied. The lower you go in
the social scale, the more is man subordinated to his animal appetites
and demonized by them. Nature aims to preserve the individual and repeat
the species--so all passions relative to these two designs are
preeminently powerful. If a man is born into the intense life of an
American city, and grows up, having no contact with the loftier culture
which naturally belongs to that intense life, why the man becomes mainly
an animal, all the more violent for the atmosphere he breathes in. What
shall restrain him? He has not the normal check of reason, conscience,
religion, these sleep in the man; nor the artificial and conventional
check of honor, of manners. The public opinion which he bows to favors
obscenity, drunkenness, and violence. He is doubly a savage. His wants
cannot be legally satisfied. He breaks the law, the law which covers
property, then goes on to higher crimes.
The next cause is the result of the first--education is neglected,
intellectual, moral, and religious. Now and then a boy in whom the soul
of genius is covered with the beggar's rags, struggles through the
terrible environment of modern poverty to die, the hero of misery, in
the attempt at education! His expiring light only makes visible the
darkness out of which it shone. Boys born into this condition find at
home nothing to aid them, nothing to encourage a love of excellence, or
a taste for even the rudiments of learning. What is unavoidably the lot
of such? The land has been the schoolmaster of the human race--but the
perishing class scarce sees its face. Poverty brings privations, misery,
and that a deranged state of the system; then unnatural appetites goad
and burn the man. The destruction of the poor is their poverty. They see
wealth about them, but have none; so none of what it brings; neither the
cleanliness, nor health, nor self-respect, nor cultivation of mind, and
heart, and soul. I am told that no Quaker has ever been confined in any
jail in New England for any real crime. Are the Quakers better born than
other men? Nay, but they are looked after in childhood. Who ever saw a
Quaker in an almshouse? Not a fiftieth part of the people of New York
are negroes, yet more than a sixth part of all the criminals in her four
State's Prisons are men of color. These facts show plainly the causes of
crime.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the temptations of the perishing
class in our great cities. In Boston at this moment there are more than
four hundred boys employed about the various bowling-alleys of the
city, exposed to the intemperance, the coarseness, the general
corruption of the men who mainly frequent those places. What will be
their fate? Shall I speak of their sisters; of the education they are
receiving; the end that awaits them? Poverty brings misery with its
family of vices.
A third cause of crime comes with the rest--intemperance, the destroying
angel that lays waste the household of the poor. In our country, misery
in a healthy man is almost proof of vice; but the vice may belong to one
alone, and the misery it brings be shared by the whole family. A large
proportion of the perishing class are intemperate, and a great majority
of all our criminals.
Now, our present method is wholly inadequate to reform men exposed to
such circumstances. You may punish the man, but it does no good. You can
seldom frighten men out of a fever. Can you frighten them from crime,
when they know little of the internal distinction between right and
wrong; when all the circumstances about them impel to crime? Can you
frighten a starving girl into chastity? You cannot keep men from
lewdness, theft and violence, when they have no self-respect, no
culture, no development of mind, heart, and soul. The jail will not take
the place of the church, of the school-house, of home. It will not
remove the causes which are making new criminals. It does not reform
the old ones. Shall we shut men in a jail, and when there treat them
with all manner of violence, crush out the little self-respect yet left,
give them a degrading dress, and send them into the world cursed with an
infamous name, and all that because they were born in the low places of
society and caught the stain thereof? The jail does not alter the
circumstances which occasioned the crime, and till these causes are
removed a fresh crop will spring out of the festering soil. Some men
teach dogs and horses things unnatural to these animals; they use
violence and blows as their instrument of instruction. But to teach man
what is conformable to his nature, something more is required.
To return to the other class, who are born criminals. Bare confinement
in the prison alters no man's constitutional tendencies; it can no more
correct moral or mental weakness or obliquity than it can correct a
deficiency of the organs of sensation. You all know the former treatment
of men born with defective or deranged intellectual faculties--of madmen
and fools. We still pursue the same course towards men born with
defective or deranged moral faculties, idiots and madmen of a more
melancholy class, and with a like result.
I know how easy it is to find fault, and how difficult to propose a
better way; how easy to misunderstand all that I have said, how easy to
misrepresent it all. But it seems to me that hitherto we have set out
wrong in this undertaking; have gone on wrong, and, by the present
means, can never remove the causes of crime nor much improve the
criminals as a class. Let me modestly set down my thoughts on this
subject, in hopes that other men, wiser and more practical, will find
out a way yet better still. A jail, as a mere house of punishment for
offenders, ought to have no place in an enlightened people. It ought to
be a moral hospital where the offender is kept till he is cured. That
his crime is great or little, is comparatively of but small concern. It
is wrong to detain a man against his will after he is cured; wrong to
send him out before he is cured, for he will rob and corrupt society,
and at last miserably perish. We shall find curable cases and incurable.
I would treat the small class of born criminals, the foes of society, as
maniacs. I would not kill them more than madmen; I would not inflict
needless pain on them. I would not try to shame, to whip, or to starve
into virtue men morally insane. I would not torture a man because born
with a defective organization. Since he could not live amongst men, I
would shut him out from society; would make him work for his own good
and the good of society. The thought of punishment for its own sake, or
as a compensation for the evil which a man has done, I would not harbor
for a moment. If a man has done me a wrong, calumniated, insulted,
abused me with all his power, it renders the matter no better that I
turn round and make him smart for it. If he has burned my house over my
head, and I kill him in return, it does not rebuild my house. I cannot
leave him at large to burn other men's houses. He must be restrained.
But if I cure the man perhaps he will rebuild it, at any rate, will be
of some service to the world, and others gain much while I lose nothing.
When the victims of society violated its laws, I would not torture a man
for his misfortune, because his father was poor, his mother a brute;
because his education was neglected. I would shut him out from society
for a time. I would make him work for his own good and the good of
others. The evil he had caught from the world I would overcome by the
good that I would present to him. I would not clothe him with an
infamous dress, crowd him with other men whom society had made infamous,
leaving them to ferment and rot together. I would not set him up as a
show to the public, for his enemy, or his rival, or some miserable fop
to come and stare at with merciless and tormenting eye. I would not load
him with chains, nor tear his flesh with a whip. I would not set
soldiers with loaded gun to keep watch over him, insulting their brother
by mocking and threats. I would treat the man with firmness, but with
justice, with pity, with love. I would teach the man; what his family
could not do for him, what society and the church had failed of, the
jail should do, for the jail should be a manual labor school, not a
dungeon of torture. I would take the most gifted, the most cultivated,
the wisest and most benevolent, yes, the most Christian man in the
State, and set him to train up these poor savages of civilization. The
best man is the natural physician of the wicked. A violent man, angry,
cruel, remorseless, should never enter the jail except as a criminal.
You have already taken one of the greatest, wisest, and best men of this
Commonwealth, and set him to watch over the public education of the
people.[33] True, you give him little money, and no honor; he brings the
honor to you, not asking but giving that. You begin to see the result of
setting such a man to such a work, though unhonored and ill paid. Soon
you will see it more plainly in the increase of temperance, industry,
thrift, of good morals and sound religion! I would set such a man, if I
could find such another, to look after the dangerous classes of society.
I would pay him for it; honor him for it. I would have a Board of Public
Morals to look after this matter of crime, a Secretary of Public Morals,
a Christian Censor, whose business it should be to attend to this class,
to look after the jails and make them houses of refuge, of instruction,
which should do for the perishing class what the school-house and the
church do for others. I would send missionaries amongst the most exposed
portions of mankind as well as amongst the savages of New Holland. I
would send wise men, good men. There are already some such engaged in
this work. I would strengthen their hands. I would make crime infamous.
If there are men whose crime is to be traced not to a defective
organization of body, not to the influence of circumstances, but only to
voluntary and self-conscious wickedness,--I would make these men
infamous. It should be impossible for such a man, a voluntary foe of
mankind, to live in society. I would have the jail such a place that the
friends of a criminal of either class should take him as now they take a
lunatic or a sick man, and bring him to the Court that he might be
healed if curable, or if not might be kept from harm and hid away out of
sight. Crime and sin should be infamous; not its correction, least of
all its cure. I would not loathe and abhor a man who had been corrected
and reformed by the jail more than a boy who had been reformed by his
teacher, or a man cured of lunacy. I would have society a father who
goes out to meet the prodigal while yet a great way off; yes, goes and
brings him away from his riotous living, washes him, clothes him, and
restores him to a right mind. There is a prosecuting attorney for the
State; I would have also a defending attorney for the accused, that
justice might be done all round. Is the State only a step-mother? Then
is she not a Christian Commonwealth but a barbarous despotism, fitly
represented by that uplifted sword on her public seal, and that motto of
barbarous and bloody Latin. I would have the State aid men and direct
them after they have been discharged from the jail, not leave them to
perish; not force them to perish. Society is the natural guardian of the
weak.
I cannot think the method here suggested would be so costly as the
present. It seems to me that institutions of this character might be
made not only to support themselves, but be so managed as to leave a
balance of income considerably beyond the expense. This might be made
use of for the advantage of the criminal when he returned to society; or
with it he might help make restitution of what he had once stolen.
Besides being less costly, it would cure the offender and send back
valuable men into society.
It seems to me that our whole criminal legislation is based on a false
principle--force and not love; that it is eminently well adapted to
revenge, not at all to correct, to teach, to cure. The whole apparatus
for the punishment of offenders, from the gallows down to the House of
Correction, seems to me wrong; wholly wrong, unchristian, and even
inhuman. We teach crime while we punish it. Is it consistent for the
State to take vengeance when I may not? Is it better for the State to
kill a man in cold blood, than for me to kill my brother when in a rage?
I cannot help thinking that the gallows and even the jail, as now
administered, are practical teachers of violence and wrong! I cannot
think it will always be so. Hitherto we have looked on criminals as
voluntary enemies of mankind. We have treated them as wild beasts, not
as dull or loitering boys. We have sought to destroy by death, to
disable by mutilation or imprisonment, to terrify and subdue, not to
convince, to reform, encourage, and bless.
The history of the past is full of prophecy for the future. Not many
years ago we shut up our lunatics in jails, in dungeons, in cages; we
chained the maniac with iron; we gave him a bottle of water and a sack
of straw; we left him in filth, in cold and nakedness. We set strong and
brutal men to watch him. When he cried, when he gnashed his teeth and
tore his hair, we beat him all the more! They do so yet in some places,
for they think a madman is not a brother but a devil. What was the
result? Madness was found incurable. Now lunacy is a disease, to be
prescribed for as fever or rheumatism; when we find an incurable case we
do not kill the man, nor chain him, nor count him a devil. Yet lunacy is
not curable by force, by jails, dungeons, and cages; only by the
medicine of wise men and good men. What if Christ had met one demoniac
with a whip and another with chains!
You know how we once treated criminals! with what scourgings and
mutilations, what brandings, what tortures with fire and red-hot iron!
Death was not punishment enough, it must be protracted amid the most
cruel torments that quivering flesh could bear. The multitude looked on
and learned a lesson of deadly wickedness. A judicial murder was a
holiday! It is but little more than two hundred years since a man was
put to death in the most enlightened country of Europe for eating meat
on Friday; not two hundred since men and women were hanged in
Massachusetts for a crime now reckoned impossible! It is not a hundred
years since two negro slaves were judicially burned alive in this very
city! These facts make us shudder, but hope also. In a hundred years
from this day will not men look on our gallows, jails, and penal law as
we look on the racks, the torture-chambers of the middle ages, and the
bloody code of remorseless inquisitors?
We need only to turn our attention to this subject to find a better way.
We shall soon see that punishment as such is an evil to the criminal,
and so swells the sum of suffering with which society runs over; that it
is an evil also to the community at large by abstracting valuable force
from profitable work, and so a loss.[34] We shall one day remember that
the offender is a man, and so his good also is to be consulted. He may
be a bad man, voluntarily bad if you will. Still we are to be economical
even of his suffering, for the least possible punishment is the best.
Already a good many men think that error is better refuted by truth than
by fagots and axes. How long will it be before we apply good sense and
Christianity to the prevention of crime? One day we must see that a
jail, as it is now conducted, is no more likely to cure a crime than a
lunacy or a fever! Hitherto we have not seen the application of the
great doctrines of Christianity; not felt that all men are brothers. So
our remedies for social evils have been bad almost as the disease;
remedies which remedied nothing, but hid the patient out of sight. All
great criminals have been thought incurable, and then killed. What if
the doctors found a patient sick of a disease which he had foolishly or
wickedly brought upon himself, and then, by the advice of twelve other
doctors, professionally killed him for justice or example's sake? They
would do what all the States in Christendom have done these thousand
years. I cannot see why the Legislature has not as good right to
authorize the medical college thus to kill men, as to authorize the
present forms of destroying life!
We do not look the facts of crime fairly in the face. We do not see what
heathens we are. Why, there is not a Christian nation in the world that
has not a Secretary of War, armies, soldiers, and the terrible apparatus
of destruction. But there is not one that has a Secretary of Peace, not
one that takes half the pains to improve its own criminals which it
takes to build forts and fleets! Yet it seems to me that a Christian
State should be a great peace society, a society for mutual advancement
in the qualities of a man!
Do we not see that by our present course we are teaching men violence,
fraud, deceit, and murder? What is the educational effect of our present
political conduct, of our invasions, our battles, our victories; of the
speeches of "our great men?" You all know that this teaches the poor,
the low, and the weak that murder and robbery are good things when done
on a large scale; that they give wealth, fame, power, and honors. The
ignorant man, ill-born and ill-bred, asks: "Why not when done on a small
scale; why not good for me?" If it is right in the President of the
United States to rob and murder, why not for the President of the United
States Bank? Do famous men say, "Our country however bounded," and vote
to plunder a sister State? then why shall not the poor man, hungry and
cold, say, "My purse however bounded," and seize on all he can get? Give
one a seat in Congress if you will, and the other a noose of hemp, there
is a God before whom seats in Congress and hempen halters are of equal
value, but who does justice to great and little!
* * * * *
To reform the dangerous classes of society, to advance those who loiter
behind our civilization, we need a special work designed directly for
the good of the criminals and such as stand on that perilous ground
which slopes towards crime. Some good men undertook this work long ago.
They found much to do; a good deal to encourage them. Some of them are
well known to you, are laboring here in the midst of us. They need
counsel, encouragement, and aid. We must not look coldly on their
enterprise nor on them. They can tell far better than I what specific
plans are best for their specific work. Already have they accomplished
much in this noble enterprise. The society for aiding discharged
convicts is a prophecy of yet better things. Soon I trust it will extend
its kind offices to all the prisons, and its work be made the affair of
the State. The plan now before your Legislature for a "State Manual
Labor School," designed to reform vicious children, is also full of
promise. The wise and anonymous charity which so beautifully and in
silence has dropped its gold into the chest for these poor outcasts, is
itself its hundred-fold reward. Institutions like that which we
contemplate have been found successful in England, Germany, and France.
They actually reform the juvenile delinquent and bring up useful men,
not hardened criminals.[35] We are beginning to attend to this special
work of removing the causes of crime, and restoring at least the young
offenders.
However, the greater portion of this work is not special and for the
criminal, but general and for society. To change the treatment of
criminals, we must change every thing else. The dangerous class is the
unavoidable result of our present civilization; of our present ideas of
man and social life. To reform and elevate the class of criminals, we
must reform and elevate all other classes. To do that, we must educate
and refine men. We must learn to treat all men as brothers. This is a
great work and one of slow achievement. It cannot be brought about by
legislation, nor any mechanical contrivance and reorganization alone.
There is no remedy for this evil and its kindred but keeping the laws of
God; in one word, none but Christianity, goodness, and piety felt in the
heart, applied in all the works of life, individually, socially, and
politically. While educated and abounding men acknowledge no rule of
conduct but self-interest, what can you expect of the ignorant and the
perishing? While great men say without rebuke that we do not look at
"the natural justice of a war," do you expect men in the lowest places
of society, ignorant and brutish, pinched by want, to look at the
natural justice of theft, of murder? It were a vain expectation. We must
improve all classes to improve one; perhaps the highest first.
Different men acting in the most various directions, without concert,
often jealous one of another, and all partial in their aims, are helping
forward this universal result. While we are contending against slavery,
war, intemperance, or party rage, while we are building up hospitals,
colleges, schools, while we are contending for freedom of conscience, or
teaching abstractly the love of man and love of God, we are all working
for the welfare of this neglected class. The gallows of the barbarian
and the Gospel of Christianity cannot exist together. The times are full
of promise. Mankind slowly fulfils what a man of genius prophesies; God
grants what a good man asks, and when it comes, it is better than what
he prayed for.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] The allusion is to the following passages of Scripture, which were
read as the lesson for the day: Numb. xiv.; 2 Kings, ii. 23-25; and
Luke, xv.