It will be perceived that, like all reformers, I am going too far. I
begin with demanding secrecy in police trials, and I end by suggesting
that they be abolished altogether. But in fact nothing struck me more
forcibly in the proceedings of the police court than their apparent
futility. It was all a mere suppression of symptoms in the vicious
classes, not a cure. This one or that one would not steal, or assault
and batter, for the given term of his imprisonment, but this was
ludicrously far from touching even the tendency to theft and violence.
These bad boys and girls came up and had their thrashing or their rap
over the knuckles, and were practically bidden by the conditions of our
civilization to go and sin some more. Perhaps there is no cure for vice
and crime. Perhaps there is nothing but prevention, in the application
of which there is always difficulty, obscurity, and uncertainty.
The other day, as I passed the court-house, that sad vehicle which is
called the Black Maria was driving away from the high portal into which
it backs to receive its dead. (The word came inevitably; it is not so
far wrong, and it may stand.) The Black Maria may still be Maria (the
reason why it should ever have been I do not know), but it is black no
longer. On the contrary, it is painted a not uncheerful salmon color,
with its false sash picked out in drab; and at first glance, among the
rattling express wagons, it looked not unlike an omnibus of the living,
and could have passed through the street without making the casual
observer realize what a dreary hearse it was. I dare say it was on
its way to the House of Industry, or the House of Correction, or Deer
Island, or some of those places where people are put to go from bad to
worse; and it was fulfilling its function with a merciful privacy, for
its load of convicts might have been dragged through the streets on
open hurdles, for the further edification of the populace. Yet I could
not help thinking--or perhaps the thought only occurs to me now--that
for all reasonable hope as to the future of its inmates the Black Maria
might as well have been fitted with one of those ingenious pieces of
mechanism sometimes employed by the Enemies of Society, and driven
out to some wide, open space where the explosion could do no harm to
the vicinity, and so when the horses and driver had removed to a safe
distance--
But this is perhaps pessimism.
It is very hard to say what pessimism really is, and almost any honest
expression concerning the monotonous endeavor and failure of society
to repress the monotonous evolution of the criminal in conditions
that render his evolution inevitable, must seem pessimistic. I do not
suppose that we ought to kill him merely because we cannot hope to cure
him, though society goes to this extreme in certain extreme cases.
Is it right to kill the criminal at one stage of his career, and not
at another? After the first conviction the rest is inevitable, and
each succeeding conviction follows as a matter of course. A bleaker
pessimist than myself might say that all criminal courts seem to be
part of the process in the evolution of the criminal. Still, criminal
courts must be.