We come, now, to consider the effect of Capital Punishment in the
prevention of crime.
Does it prevent crime in those who attend executions?
There never is (and there never was) an execution at the Old Bailey in
London, but the spectators include two large classes of thieves—one class
who go there as they would go to a dog-fight, or any other brutal sport,
for the attraction and excitement of the spectacle; the other who make it
a dry matter of business, and mix with the crowd solely to pick pockets.
Add to these, the dissolute, the drunken, the most idle, profligate, and
abandoned of both sexes—some moody ill-conditioned minds, drawn thither
by a fearful interest—and some impelled by curiosity; of whom the greater
part are of an age and temperament rendering the gratification of that
curiosity highly dangerous to themselves and to society—and the great
elements of the concourse are stated.
Nor is this assemblage peculiar to London. It is the same in country
towns, allowing for the different statistics of the population. It is
the same in America. I was present at an execution in Rome, for a most
treacherous and wicked murder, and not only saw the same kind of
assemblage there, but, wearing what is called a shooting-coat, with a
great many pockets in it, felt innumerable hands busy in every one of
them, close to the scaffold.
I have already mentioned that out of one hundred and sixty-seven convicts
under sentence of death, questioned at different times in the performance
of his duty by an English clergyman, there were only three who had not
been spectators of executions. Mr. Wakefield, in his _Facts relating to
the Punishment of Death_, goes into the working, as it were, of this sum.
His testimony is extremely valuable, because it is the evidence of an
educated and observing man, who, before having personal knowledge of the
subject and of Newgate, was quite satisfied that the Punishment of Death
should continue, but who, when he gained that experience, exerted himself
to the utmost for its abolition, even at the pain of constant public
reference in his own person to his own imprisonment. “It cannot be
egotism”, he reasonably observes, “that prompts a man to speak of himself
in connection with Newgate.”
“Whoever will undergo the pain,” says Mr. Wakefield, “of witnessing the
public destruction of a fellow-creature’s life, in London, must be
perfectly satisfied that in the great mass of spectators, the effect of
the punishment is to excite sympathy for the criminal and hatred of the
law. . . . I am inclined to believe that the criminals of London, spoken
of as a class and allowing for exceptions, take the same sort of delight
in witnessing executions, as the sportsman and soldier find in the
dangers of hunting and war. . . I am confident that few Old Bailey
Sessions pass without the trial of a boy, whose first thought of crime
occurred whilst he was witnessing an execution. . . . And one grown man,
of great mental powers and superior education, who was acquitted of a
charge of forgery, assured me that the first idea of committing a forgery
occurred to him at the moment when he was accidentally witnessing the
execution of Fauntleroy. To which it may be added, that Fauntleroy is
said to have made precisely the same declaration in reference to the
origin of his own criminality.”
But one convict “who was within an ace of being hanged”, among the many
with whom Mr. Wakefield conversed, seems to me to have unconsciously put
a question which the advocates of Capital Punishment would find it very
difficult indeed to answer. “Have you often seen an execution?” asked
Mr. Wakefield. “Yes, often.” “Did it not frighten you?” “No. _Why
should it_?”
It is very easy and very natural to turn from this ruffian, shocked by
the hardened retort; but answer his question, why should it? Should he
be frightened by the sight of a dead man? We are born to die, he says,
with a careless triumph. We are not born to the treadmill, or to
servitude and slavery, or to banishment; but the executioner has done no
more for that criminal than nature may do tomorrow for the judge, and
will certainly do, in her own good time, for judge and jury, counsel and
witnesses, turnkeys, hangman, and all. Should he be frightened by the
manner of the death? It is horrible, truly, so horrible, that the law,
afraid or ashamed of its own deed, hides the face of the struggling
wretch it slays; but does this fact naturally awaken in such a man,
terror—or defiance? Let the same man speak. “What did you think then?”
asked Mr. Wakefield. “Think? Why, I thought it was a—shame.”
Disgust and indignation, or recklessness and indifference, or a morbid
tendency to brood over the sight until temptation is engendered by it,
are the inevitable consequences of the spectacle, according to the
difference of habit and disposition in those who behold it. Why should
it frighten or deter? We know it does not. We know it from the police
reports, and from the testimony of those who have experience of prisons
and prisoners, and we may know it, on the occasion of an execution, by
the evidence of our own senses; if we will be at the misery of using them
for such a purpose. But why should it? Who would send his child or his
apprentice, or what tutor would send his scholars, or what master would
send his servants, to be deterred from vice by the spectacle of an
execution? If it be an example to criminals, and to criminals only, why
are not the prisoners in Newgate brought out to see the show before the
debtors’ door? Why, while they are made parties to the condemned sermon,
are they rigidly excluded from the improving postscript of the gallows?
Because an execution is well known to be an utterly useless, barbarous,
and brutalising sight, and because the sympathy of all beholders, who
have any sympathy at all, is certain to be always with the criminal, and
never with the law.
I learn from the newspaper accounts of every execution, how Mr.
So-and-so, and Mr. Somebody else, and Mr. So-forth shook hands with the
culprit, but I never find them shaking hands with the hangman. All kinds
of attention and consideration are lavished on the one; but the other is
universally avoided, like a pestilence. I want to know why so much
sympathy is expended on the man who kills another in the vehemence of his
own bad passions, and why the man who kills him in the name of the law is
shunned and fled from? Is it because the murderer is going to die? Then
by no means put him to death. Is it because the hangman executes a law,
which, when they once come near it face to face, all men instinctively
revolt from? Then by all means change it. There is, there can be, no
prevention in such a law.
It may be urged that Public Executions are not intended for the benefit
of those dregs of society who habitually attend them. This is an
absurdity, to which the obvious answer is, So much the worse. If they be
not considered with reference to that class of persons, comprehending a
great host of criminals in various stages of development, they ought to
be, and must be. To lose sight of that consideration is to be
irrational, unjust, and cruel. All other punishments are especially
devised, with a reference to the rooted habits, propensities, and
antipathies of criminals. And shall it be said, out of Bedlam, that this
last punishment of all is alone to be made an exception from the rule,
even where it is shown to be a means of propagating vice and crime?
But there may be people who do not attend executions, to whom the general
fame and rumour of such scenes is an example, and a means of deterring
from crime.
Who are they? We have seen that around Capital Punishment there lingers
a fascination, urging weak and bad people towards it, and imparting an
interest to details connected with it, and with malefactors awaiting it
or suffering it, which even good and well-disposed people cannot
withstand. We know that last-dying speeches and Newgate calendars are
the favourite literature of very low intellects. The gallows is not
appealed to as an example in the instruction of youth (unless they are
training for it); nor are there condensed accounts of celebrated
executions for the use of national schools. There is a story in an old
spelling-book of a certain Don’t Care who was hanged at last, but it is
not understood to have had any remarkable effect on crimes or executions
in the generation to which it belonged, and with which it has passed
away. Hogarth’s idle apprentice is hanged; but the whole scene—with the
unmistakable stout lady, drunk and pious, in the cast; the quarrelling,
blasphemy, lewdness, and uproar; Tiddy Doll vending his gingerbread, and
the boys picking his pocket—is a bitter satire on the great example; as
efficient then, as now.
Is it efficient to prevent crime? The parliamentary returns demonstrate
that it is not. I was engaged in making some extracts from these
documents, when I found them so well abstracted in one of the papers
published by the committee on this subject established at Aylesbury last
year, by the humane exertions of Lord Nugent, that I am glad to quote the
general results from its pages:
“In 1843 a return was laid on the table of the House of the
commitments and executions for murder in England and Wales during the
thirty years ending with December 1842, divided into five periods of
six years each. It shows that in the last six years, from 1836 to
1842, during which there were only 50 executions, the commitments for
murder were fewer by 61 than in the six years preceding with 74
executions; fewer by 63 than in the six years ending 1830 with 75
executions; fewer by 56 than in the six years ending 1824 with 94
executions; and fewer by 93 than in the six years ending 1818 when
there was no less a number of executions than 122. But it may be
said, perhaps, that in the inference we draw from this return, we are
substituting cause for effect, and that in each successive cycle, the
number of murders decreased in consequence of the example of public
executions in the cycle immediately preceding, and that it was for
that reason there were fewer commitments. This might be said with
some colour of truth, if the example had been taken from two
successive cycles _only_. But when the comparative examples adduced
are of no less than _five_ successive cycles, and the result
gradually and constantly progressive in the same direction, the
relation of facts to each other is determined beyond all ground for
dispute, namely, that the number of these crimes has diminished in
consequence of the diminution of the number of executions. More
especially when it is also remembered that it was _immediately after_
the first of these cycles of five years, when there had been the
greatest number of executions and the greatest number of murders,
that the greatest number of persons were suddenly cast loose upon the
country, without employ, by the reduction of the Army and Navy; that
then came periods of great distress and great disturbance in the
agricultural and manufacturing districts; and _above all_, that it
was during the subsequent cycles that the most important mitigations
were effected in the law, and that the Punishment of Death was taken
away not only for crimes of stealth, such as cattle and horse
stealing and forgery, of which crimes corresponding statistics show
likewise a corresponding decrease, but for the crimes of violence
too, _tending to murder_, such as are many of the incendiary
offences, and such as are highway robbery and burglary. But another
return, laid before the House at the same time, bears upon our
argument, if possible, still more conclusively. In table 11 we have
_only_ the years which have occurred since 1810, in which _all_
persons convicted of murder suffered death; and, compared with these
an _equal_ number of years in which the _smallest_ proportion of
persons convicted were executed. In the first case there were 66
persons convicted, all of whom underwent the penalty of death; in the
second 83 were convicted, of whom 31 only were executed. Now see how
these two very different methods of dealing with the crime of murder
affected the commission of it _in the years immediately following_.
The number of commitments for murder, in the four years immediately
following those in which all persons convicted were executed, was
270.
“In the four years immediately following those in which little more
than one-third of the persons convicted were executed, there were but
222, being 48 less. If we compare the commitments in the following
years with those in the first years, we shall find that, immediately
after the examples of unsparing execution, the crime _increased
nearly 13 per cent._, and that after commutation was the practice and
capital punishment the exception, it _decreased 17 per cent._
“In the same parliamentary return is an account of the commitments
and executions in London and Middlesex, _spread over a space of_ 32
_years_, ending in 1842, divided into two cycles of 16 years each.
In the first of these, 34 persons were _convicted_ of murder, _all of
whom were executed_. In the second, 27 were _convicted_, and only 17
executed. The _commitments_ for murder during the latter long
period, with 17 executions, were _more than one half_ fewer than they
had been in the former _long_ period with _exactly double the number
of executions_. This appears to us to be as conclusive upon our
argument as any statistical illustration can be upon any argument
professing to place successive events in the relation of cause and
effect to each other. How justly then is it said in that able and
useful periodical work, now in the course of publication at Glasgow,
under the name of the _Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and
Secondary Punishment_, ‘the greater the number of executions, the
greater the number of murders; the smaller the number of executions,
the smaller the number of murders. The lives of her Majesty’s
subjects are less safe with a hundred executions a year than with
fifty; less safe with fifty than with twenty-five.’”
Similar results have followed from rendering public executions more and
more infrequent, in Tuscany, in Prussia, in France, in Belgium. Wherever
capital punishments are diminished in their number, there, crimes
diminish in their number too.
But the very same advocates of the punishment of Death who contend, in
the teeth of all facts and figures, that it does prevent crime, contend
in the same breath against its abolition because it does not! “There are
so many bad murders,” say they, “and they follow in such quick
succession, that the Punishment must not be repealed.” Why, is not this
a reason, among others, _for_ repealing it? Does it not go to show that
it is ineffective as an example; that it fails to prevent crime; and that
it is wholly inefficient to stay that imitation, or contagion, call it
what you please, which brings one murder on the heels of another?
One forgery came crowding on another’s heels in the same way, when the
same punishment attached to that crime. Since it has been removed,
forgeries have diminished in a most remarkable degree. Yet within five
and thirty years, Lord Eldon, with tearful solemnity, imagined in the
House of Lords as a possibility for their Lordships to shudder at, that
the time might come when some visionary and morbid person might even
propose the abolition of the punishment of Death for forgery. And when
it was proposed, Lords Lyndhurst, Wynford, Tenterden, and Eldon—all Law
Lords—opposed it.
The same Lord Tenterden manfully said, on another occasion and another
question, that he was glad the subject of the amendment of the laws had
been taken up by Mr. Peel, “who had not been bred to the law; for those
who were, were rendered dull, by habit, to many of its defects!” I would
respectfully submit, in extension of this text, that a criminal judge is
an excellent witness against the Punishment of Death, but a bad witness
in its favour; and I will reserve this point for a few remarks in the
next, concluding, Letter.