For felony, which was anything from highway robbery to theft of a piece
of bread, men, women, and children were hanged. There were over 250
offences for which the penalty was death.
For "speaking sedition against a magistrate" the offender had both his
ears cut off.
If a prisoner refused to plead he was pressed to death under heavy
weights.
Harrison says that "there is not one year" in which three or four
hundred "rogues" are not "eaten up by the gallows." And then he goes
on to remark that so many are the idle rogues, that "except some better
order be taken, or the laws already made be better executed, such as
dwell in uplandish towns and little villages shall live but in small
safety or rest."
A hundred years ago there were over two hundred offences for which
the punishment was death. Boys and girls were hanged for theft. Mr.
Collinson, in _Facts about Floggings_, says that in 1816 there were at
one time over fifty prisoners in England waiting to be hanged, and that
one of them was a child of tender years. Mr. Collinson says:
The inefficiency and brutality of all this torture and bloodshed became
obvious to the people, through the propaganda of a few daring and
enlightened reformers, and it was swept away.
But let us come nearer home. About a dozen years ago the late Mr.
Hopwood, K.C., Recorder of Liverpool, was good enough to give me his
opinions on the subject of harsh and lenient punishment. Mr. Hopwood
said:
I was first convinced of the uselessness of harsh sentences by
attendance at two courts of sessions about thirty-five years ago. The
two courts were those of Manchester and Salford--towns very similar
as to population and conditions of life. In Salford the sentences were
uniformly lenient. In Manchester they were uniformly severe. People said
Manchester would be purged of crime; that all the criminals would flock
to Salford. It was not so. The state of things continued for some years,
and caused no increase of crime in the one, nor decrease of crime in
the other town. Hence it becomes evident that a great deal of useless
punishment was inflicted in Manchester. I was a young barrister at the
time, and I took the lesson to heart.
Mr. Hopwood only claimed a negative result. He said: "I do not say I
have reduced crime, but only that I have reduced punishment without
increasing crime. For instance, I claim that during my six years at this
court I have saved three thousand years of imprisonment."
When I remarked "that saved a great waste of money," he answered that it
was "a great saving of humanity." He claimed that life and property were
at least as secure under a clement judge as under a cruel one, and that
his system saved much suffering and shame, not only to the prisoners,
but also to those dependent upon them. He said that very often his
treatment had a good effect upon the prisoners: "Do you know, often they
are ashamed to come back."
Mr. Hopwood told me that at first he met with strong opposition, but
that his example had such an effect that the local magistrates had come
"to give six or ten months' imprisonment in cases where formerly the
offenders would have got seven years." Asked whether his leniency had
caused criminals to flock to Liverpool, Mr. Hopwood answered, "Not at
all"; and his denial was backed by the statement of the Chief Constable
that "crime was decreasing to an appreciable extent."
Mr. Hopwood told me he would like to release one-third of those men
then in prison, and, he added, "another third ought never to have gone
there." Asked what that meant, he said that one-third of the prisoners
were innocent. My own observation, in the police-courts afterwards,
convinced me that he was quite right. Finally, after showing me that the
boasted cure of garrotting by "the cat" was a fiction, "there never was
a garrotter flogged," Mr. Hopwood asked me to go and see some of our
prisons, remarking, gravely:
The prison system is cruel and vile. The prisoners are starved,
tortured, and degraded. The system should be altered at once. It is
inhumanly severe upon the guilty, and, in my opinion, a good third of
those in our gaols are _not_ guilty.
Dr. James Devon, medical officer at Glasgow Prison, told the Royal
Philosophical Society in that city, in 1904, that "with milder methods
of repression we have not more, but less, crime: and certainly much less
brutality."
Dr. Hamilton D. Wey, of Elmira Reformatory, 'Elmira, N. Y., says:
"The time will come when every punitive institution in the world will
be destroyed, and be replaced by hospitals, schools, workshops, and
reformatories."
Dr. Lydston, professor of criminal anthropology, writes as follows:
"Try to reform your man, try to purify and elevate his soul, and if
he does not come to time, lock him up or hang him." This has been the
war-cry of the average reformer through all the ages. "Make a healthy
man of your criminal, or prospective criminal, give him a sound,
well-developed brain to think with, and rich, clean blood to feed it
upon, and an opportunity to earn an honest living--then preach to him
if you like." This is the fundamental principle of the scientific
criminologist. Which is the more rational?
Havelock Ellis says in his work on "the criminal," "Flogging is
objectionable, because it is ineffectual, and because it brutalises and
degrades those on whom it is inflicted, those who inflict it, and those
who come within the radius of its influence."
The Recorder of Liverpool told me that millions were wasted upon prisons
which ought to be spent upon detection. "Make detection swift and
certain," said he, "and crime will cease. No one will steal if he is
sure he will be caught every time."
This is proved by the Revenue service. Penalties did not stop smuggling;
but it has now become almost impossible to run a cargo: the coast is so
closely guarded.
Dr. Lydston, in _The Diseases of Society_, says:
The prospective criminal once born, what does society do to prevent
his becoming a criminal? Practically nothing.... What is the remedy at
present in vogue? Society punishes the vicious child after a criminal
act has been committed, and sends the diseased one to the hospital to be
supported by the public, after he has become helpless. Even in this, the
twentieth century, the child who has committed his first offence is in
most communities thrown by the authorities into contact with older and
more hardened criminals--to have his criminal education completed. The
same fate is meted out to the adult "first offender." We have millions
for sectarian universities, millions for foreign missions, but few
dollars for the redemption of children of vicious propensities or
corrupting opportunities, who are the product of our own vicious social
system. Every penal institution, every expensive process of criminal
law, is a monument to the stupidity and wastefulness of society--and
expenditure of money and energy to cure a disease that might be largely
prevented, and more logically treated where not prevented.
Lombroso, the great Italian criminologist, said, in 1901:
There are few who understand that there is anything else for us to do,
to protect ourselves from crime, except to inflict punishments that
are often only new crimes, and that are almost always the source of new
crimes.