REMEDIAL EFFECTS OF PUNISHMENT
The last refuge of the apologist is that punishment is inflicted
to prevent crime. No one can speak from experience as to whether
punishment prevents what is called crime or not, for the experiment of
non-resistance has never yet been fairly or fully tried. To justify
killing or penning a human being upon the theory that this prevents crime
should call for the strictest proof on the part of those who advocate
this course. To take the life or liberty of a fellow man is the most
serious responsibility that can devolve upon an individual or community.
The theory that punishment is a preventive to unlawful acts does not
seriously mean that it is administered to prevent the individual from
committing a second or a third unlawful act. If this were the case
the death penalty should never be inflicted, as life imprisonment
accomplishes the same results. Neither would it be necessary to restrain
men in the way that is done in our penal institutions, to deprive them of
all pleasure and the income of their labor. All that would then be needed
would be to keep men safely locked from the world. But most unlawful acts
are committed hastily in the heat of passion or upon what seems adequate
provocation, or through sore need. Such acts as these would almost never
be repeated. Genuine repentance follows most really vicious acts, but
repentance, however genuine, gives no waiver of punishment.
Then, too, many men who commit no act in violation of the law are
known to be more likely to commit such acts than others who through
some circumstances may have violated a criminal statute. Men of hasty
temper, of strong will, of intemperate habits, often with no means of
support, all of these are more liable to crime than one who has once
overstepped the bounds. But it is obvious that this is not the real
reason for punishment; if it were it would be the duty of judge and jury
to determine, not whether a man had committed a crime, but whether he was
liable to commit one at some future time, an inquiry which is never made
and which it is obvious could not be made.
* * * * *
The safety aimed at through punishment is not meant the safety for the
individual, but it is contended that the fact that one person is punished
for an act deters others from the commission of similar unlawful acts;
it is obvious that there is a large class who are not deterred by these
examples, for the inmates of prisons never grow less, in fact prisons
grow and increase in the same proportion as other institutions grow.
But here, too, the theories and acts of rulers have been as various and
contradictory as in relation to other matters concerning crime and its
punishment. If the purpose of punishment is to terrorize the community
so that none will dare again to commit these acts, then the more terrible
the punishment the surer the result. This was generally admitted not many
years ago, but in its treatment of crime the world ever prefers to be
illogical and ineffectual rather than too brutal.
If terrorism is the object aimed at, death should again be substituted
for the various crimes, great and small, which ever justified taking
human life. Death, too, should be administered in the most cruel way.
Boiling, the rack, wild beasts, and slow fires should be the methods
sought. It should be steadfastly remembered by all squeamish judges
and executioners that one vigorous punishment would prevent a thousand
crimes. But more than all this, death should be in the most public way.
The kettle of boiling oil should be heated with its victim inside, out
upon the commons, where all eyes could see and all ears could hear. The
scaffold should be erected high on a hill, and the occasion be made
a public holiday for miles around. This was once the case even within
the last half century. These public hangings in Europe and America have
drawn great crowds of spectators, sometimes reaching into the tens of
thousands, to witness the value that the state places on human life.
But finally, even stupid legislators began to realize that these scenes
of violence, brutality and crime bred their like upon those who came to
see. Even governments discovered that many acts of violence followed a
public hanging. The hatred of the state which calmly took a human life
engendered endless hatred as its fruit. And in all countries that claim a
semblance of civilization, public hangings are now looked back upon with
horror and amazement. Hangings to-day take place inside the jail in the
presence of a few invited guests, a state doctor who watches carefully
to see that the victim is not cut down before his heart has ceased to
beat, a chaplain who calls on the Creator of life to take back to his
bosom the divine spark which man in his cruelty and wrath is seeking to
snuff out. Even the state is not so cruel but that it will officially
ask the Almighty to look after the soul that it blackens and defiles
and does its best to everlastingly destroy. A few friends of the jailer
are present to witness the rare performance, and the newspapers too are
represented, so that the last detail, including the breakfast bill of
fare, may be graphically set before the hungry mob to take the place of
the real tragedy that they had the right to witness in the good old days.
Many states to-day have provided that executions shall be inside the
penitentiary walls, that the victim shall be wakened, if perchance he is
asleep, in the darkness and dead of night; that he shall be hurried off
alone and unobserved and hastily put to death outside the gaze of any
curious eye; that this barbarism shall be done, this unholy, brutal deed
committed in silence, in darkness, that the heavens and earth alike may
cover up the shocking crime, from which a sensitive public conscience
stands aghast. The ever-present public press in many cases is allowed to
print only the barest details of the bloody scene, so that oblivion may
the more quickly and deeply cover this crowning infamy of the state.
The abolition of public hangings may speak something for the
sensitiveness, or at least, the squeamishness of the state. But it is
evident that all of this is a terrible admission of guilt upon the part
of those who uphold this crime. It is possible that one might believe at
least in the sincerity of those who argue that punishment prevents crime,
if these terrible scenes of violence were carried out in open day before
the multitude, and fully understood and discussed in all their harrowing,
shocking details of cruelty and blood. If the sight of punishment
terrorizes men from the commission of crime then, of course, punishment
should be as open as the day. In so far as the state is successful in
keeping secret the execution of its victim, in this far does it abandon
every claim of prevention and rests its case for punishment on vengeance
and cruelty alone. The rulers of this generation, who are ashamed of
their deeds, may be wiser and more sensitive than those of the last,
but our ancestors, although less refined, were much more logical and
infinitely more honest than are we.
The whole question of punishment is not only proven but fully admitted by
our rulers in their dealings with the death penalty. It is now everywhere
admitted that the brutalizing effects of public executions are beyond
dispute. It was only after the completest evidence that the believers in
the beneficence of punishment and violence abandoned public executions,
for to abandon these was to utterly abandon the principle on which all
punishment is based.
It would, of course, be impossible to prove the exact result of a public
execution. Somewhere in a quiet rural community, growing out of sudden
passion or some unexplained and temporary aberration, a man takes the
life of his fellow man. To the shock incident to this fatal act is added
a long public trial in the courts where every detail is distorted and
magnified and passed from tongue to tongue until even the lisping babe
is thoroughly familiar with every circumstance of the case with all its
harrowing details iterated and reiterated again and again. There grows up
in the public mind a bitter hatred against the unfortunate victim whose
antecedents, life and motives they can in no way understand or judge. It
is really believed that no one has the right to look upon this person
with any feeling save that of hatred, and the least word of pity or sign
of sympathy for the outcast is set down as sickly sentimentalism and the
mark of mental and spiritual disease. Weeks and months, sometimes even
years, elapse in the slow and unending process of the courts. The whole
tragedy has been well nigh forgot, at least it no longer has any vital
effect upon the community. Finally it is announced that on a certain day
a public hanging will take place. Once more every detail of the tragedy
is recalled to the public mind; once more each man conjures up a monster
in the place of the hunted, weak, doomed victim whose act no one either
fathoms or seeks to understand. A sightly spot is chosen perhaps upon
the village green. For several days men are kept busy erecting a strange
and ominous machine; the old men and women, the middle aged, the boys
and girls, the little children, even the toddling babes, filled with
curiosity watch the work and discuss every detail of the weird and fatal
trap. At length the day arrives for the majesty of the law to vindicate
itself. From every point of the compass comes a great throng of both
sexes, all conditions and ages, each to witness the most startling event
of their lives; children are there, babes in arms, and even the unborn.
A rope is tied around a beam, a noose is formed of the other end, a
trembling, helpless, frantic, friendless victim is led up the steps,
placed on a trap, his hands and feet are bound, a black cap is pulled
down to hide his face, the noose is securely fastened around his neck
below his ears. The crowd watches breathless with suspense, the signal
is given, the trap opens, the man falls through space, he is caught in
mid-air by the rope tightening about his neck, and strangling him to
death. His body heaves, his legs and arms move with violent convulsions,
he swings a few minutes in mid-air before the crowd, a ghastly human
pendulum moving back and forth, the mortal body of a man created in the
image of God whom the state has led out and killed to show the glory and
majesty of law!
The advocate of punishment is right in the belief that such a scene
will produce a profound impression upon all who see or hear or know.
The human being does not live who can witness such a tragedy or even
know its details and not receive some impression that the rest of life
cannot efface. The impression must be to harden and brutalize the heart
and conscience, to destroy the finer sensibilities, to cheapen human
life, to breed cruelty and malice that will bear fruit in endless ways
and unknown forms. No parent who loved his child and who had any of the
human sentiments that should distinguish man from the brute creation,
would ever dare to trust that child to witness a scene like this. Every
intelligent loving mother carrying an unborn babe would close her eyes
and stop her ears and retire to the darkest corner she could find lest
the unborn babe marked by the baleful scene should one day stand upon the
same trembling trap with a rope about his neck.
The true morality of a community does not depend alone upon the number of
men who slay their fellows. These at most are very few. The true morality
depends upon every deed of kindness or malice, of love or hatred, of
charity or cruelty, and the sum of these determine the real character
and worth of a community. Any evil consequences that could flow from a
casual killing of a human being by an irresponsible man would be like a
drop of water in the sea compared with a public execution by the state.
It would probably not be possible to find a considerable number of men
to-day who would believe that a public hanging could have any but bad
results. This must be true because the knowledge of its details tends
to harden, embitter and render cruel the hearts of men. Only in a less
degree does the publication of all the details affect the characters and
lives of men, but unless they are at least published to the world, then
the example is of no effect. The state which would take life without any
hope or expectation that the community would in any way be bettered could
not rank even among savage tribes. Such cruelty could only be classed as
total depravity.
But the effect of other punishment is no whit different save in degree
from that of hanging. Cultivated, sensitive people have long since
deplored the tendency of newspapers to give full and vivid accounts
of crimes and their punishment, and the better and humaner class of
citizens shun those journals which most magnify these details. All of
this has a tendency to familiarize man with violence and force, to
weaken human sensibilities, to accustom man to cruelty, to blood, to
scenes of suffering and pain. What right-thinking parent would place
this literature before his child and familiarize his mind with violence
practiced either by the individual or the state? And yet if punishment is
a deterrent, the widest publicity should be given to the story of every
crime and the punishment inflicted by the state.
That men even unconsciously feel that punishment is wrong is shown by
their attitude toward certain classes of society. A hangman would not be
tolerated in a self-respecting body of men or women, and this has been
the case for many years, in fact since men made a trade of butchering
their fellow man. A professional hangman is really as much despised
as any other professional murderer. A detective, jailer, policeman,
constable and sheriff are not generally regarded as being subjects of
envy by their fellows. Still none of these are as much responsible for
their acts as the real rulers who make and execute the law. The time will
come when the public prosecutor and the judge who sentences his brother
to death or imprisonment will be classed with the other officers who lay
violent and cruel hands upon their fellows.
If the imprisonment of men tended to awe others into obedience to law,
then the old ideas of penal servitude are the only ones that can be
logically sustained. A prison should be the most horrible, grewsome,
painful place that can be contrived. Physical torture should be a common
incident of prison life. The victim himself is beyond the pale of
society. His life should be used to aid the community by the frightful
example: Dark dungeons, noxious smells, vermin, rats, the hardest, most
constant toil, long terms of imprisonment, and the red mark to be branded
on his brow, when he at last is turned loose to the light of day. Prisons
should be open to the public, so that the old and young can constantly
witness the terrible effects of crime. Prisons and jails should be in
every community and in the most conspicuous place. The young should not
be left to casually hear of public punishments or to imagine a penal
institution. The living horrible example in all its loathsome, sickening
details should be ever kept before their eyes. Most men now regard these
public exhibitions of the malice of the state exactly as they now look on
public hangings, as tending to degrade and debauch and harden the hearts
of those who become familiar with the sight. But if the open sight and
knowledge of a penal institution tends to degrade and harden the heart,
then the secret, imperfect, covert knowledge produces the same effect
only in less degree.
All communities and states are in reality ashamed of jails and penal
institutions of whatever kind. Instinctively they seem to understand that
these are a reflection on the state. More and more the best judgment and
best conscience of men are turned toward the improvement of prisons, the
introduction of sanitary appliances, the bettering of jail conditions,
the modification of punishment, the treatment of convicts as men. All
of this directly disproves the theory that the terrible example of
punishment tends to prevent crime. All these improvements of prison
conditions show that society is unconsciously ashamed of its treatment
of so-called criminals; that the excuse of prevention of crime is really
known to be humbug and hypocrisy, and that the real motive that causes
the punishment of crime is malice and hatred and nothing else. The
tendency to abrogate capital punishment, to improve prisons, to modify
sentences, to pardon convicts is all in one direction. It can lead to but
one inevitable result, the abolition of all judgment of man by man, the
complete destruction of all prisons and the treatment of all men as if
each human being was the child of the one loving Father and a part and
parcel of the same infinite and mysterious life.