CHAPTER XV

THE MACHINERY OF JUSTICE

The state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice. Even if it were possible under any circumstances to judge, and even though men were really criminals, the state has no way of arriving at the facts. If the state pretends to administer justice this should be its highest concern. It should not be interested in convicting men or punishing crime, but administering justice between men. It is obvious to the most casual observer that the state furnishes no machinery to accomplish this result. The penal law simply takes a man into its hopper and grinds out a criminal at the end. A force of able-bodied, well fed, well paid men are kept busy in their search for crime. These find pecuniary reward in the crime of their fellows. An indictment is easily returned against a friendless man—a suspicion is enough in any case where the victim has no friends. If he is poor he is at once lodged in jail. Later he is placed on trial in the courts. When he steps into the dock both judge and jurors look on him as a guilty man—believe he has committed crime. He is carefully guarded by officers, like a guilty, hunted thing. Arrayed against him is an able prosecutor, well paid, and having personal and political ambitions dependent on the number of men he grinds into criminals. The prosecutor has ample means for the conduct of the case. The prisoner, helpless enough at best, is rendered absolutely powerless to prepare his case by being lodged in jail. Without money he has no advocate with either the learning, influence or ability to help his cause. If he is silent he is convicted. If he speaks no one believes his words. Innocent or guilty, it is a miracle if he escapes, and in this miracle the fact of his innocence or guilt plays but the smallest part. Given a few suspicious circumstances, a helpless prisoner, an indictment, and another victim is the sure result. And in the hands of a shrewd lawyer, or under the belief of guilt, any circumstances are suspicious circumstances. Almost all acts are subject to various interpretations, and the guilt or innocence of a circumstance depends not upon the act but upon the mind that passes judgment on the act. We look back with horror at the criminal courts of England, of Spain, of Italy, even upon our own Puritan judges who sentenced witches to death. These judges were doubtless as intelligent as our own. Their brutal, cruel judgments did not grow from a wicked perverted heart, but from the fact that they were passing judgment on their fellow man. These unjust judgments are the fruit of the cruel system of force and barbarism which clothes one man with the authority and power to condemn his fellow. All prosecutions are malicious, and all judgments are meted out in anger and hatred. Our own judges are constantly showing this. In nearly every instance they condemn a prisoner to a term of servitude, and when passion has fled and the sane and holy feelings of mercy, of charity, of humanity once more regain their sway, they call on the pardoning power to rescind their cruel acts. In all these cases of pardons reflection shows the judges that the punishment meted out was at least too severe. The difference is in the frame of mind of the judge when engaged in the business of administering judgment, and when in the mood for listening to those feelings of human charity which are the diviner part of man.

Punishment, to in any way be justified, should diminish the sum of human misery, the result of the bitterness and hatred of men. But here, as everywhere else, punishment falls short. Wherever the judgment of courts enters it is to corrupt and to destroy. The misery and suffering entailed on man by scaffolds, racks, blocks, dungeons and jails has never yet begun to be told. Blood and misery and degradation has marked the administration of punishment

Since man first penned his fellow men, Like brutes, within an iron pen.

Let any reasoning being consider the tens of thousands who have been burned, and hanged, and boiled, and otherwise put to death for witchcraft; the millions for heresy; the thousands of noble victims who have suffered for treason; the victims of fire, of torture, of scaffold, of rack and of dungeon, for all the conceivable crimes since time began. Let him consider the oceans of blood and rivers of tears shed by the force and brutality of the rulers of the world; the cruelty, torture and suffering heaped upon the helpless, the weak, the unfortunate; and then ask himself if he believes that punishment is good. Even could violence ever prevent crime, the brutality, suffering, blood and crime of the rulers has towered mountain high above that of the weak and obscure victims whose wrongs they have pretended to avenge. And this cruelty does not abate. It is simple madness that doubts the justice of past condemnations and believes in the righteous judgments of to-day. No condemnation is just, and no judgment is righteous. All violence and force are cruel, unjust and barbarous, and cannot be sustained by the judgment of men.

But the evil of judgment and punishment does not end with the unfortunate victim. It brutalizes and makes inhuman all who are touched with its power. Under the influence of punishments jailers, policemen, sheriffs, detectives and all who deal with prisons are brutalized and hardened. The iniquities produced upon helpless prisoners leave their effects upon the captor as well as the captives. To witness the constant suffering and indignities of prison life is to destroy the finer sensibilities of the soul. Men who are otherwise kind in the various relations of life do not hesitate at cruelty to these despised prisoners whom the law has placed outside its ban. To underfeed and overwork, to insult, degrade and beat are common incidents of prison life, and this, too, not because jailers are naturally cruel and bad, but because prisons are prisons, and convicts are outcasts. Instead of approaching these unfortunates as brothers in fellowship and love, their only concern is to make them feel that the heavy hand of the state has been laid upon them in malice and violence.

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However thoroughly the futility, cruelty and injustice of punishment may be shown, men will still persist that it must exist. The thought that society could live without prisons and policemen seems to be beyond the conception of the common man. If punishment has no effect to diminish or prevent crime, then no danger would be incurred to dismiss our jailers and jurors and close our prison doors. The results of this policy can, of course, not be proven absolutely in advance, but so sure as the existence of man is consistent with justice, charity and love, so sure is this policy right and would produce good results. It is not necessary to prove the theory of non-resistance to show that this policy is practical to-day. Society, as now organized, rests upon violence and wrong. The non-resistant pleads for a better order, one in which the law of love and mercy will be the foundation of every relationship of man with man. The present unjust system is supported by violence and force. The unjust possessions of the rich are kept in their place by soldiers, guns and policemen’s clubs. If these were withdrawn would the weak at once take the earth and all its fullness from those who for ages have ruled the world?

No violent and forcible readjustment of this sort could come. Force is wrong both to commit and to redress evil. In the rule of force the weak must always fall. For the poor and oppressed to advocate the use of force means that they must still be the victims, for the strongest force must win. All that can help the weak is the rule of brotherhood, of love. Unless this can be proved there is no way to destroy the injustice that is everywhere the rule of life. To make the weak strong, and the strong weak, could neither destroy injustice nor permanently change the wretched order of the world. A bayonet in the hand of one man is no better than in the hand of another. It is the bayonet that is evil and all of its fruits are bad.

The world must learn that violence is wrong. Individuals who understand this truth must take no part in violent acts, whether to enslave or to free. The inherent cohering forces will hold society together and cause man to coöperate for his highest good. A large part of present society is purely voluntary and due to natural law. It is for force and violence and injustice that the aid of the state is called. Society should not punish. The great burden that rests upon production to support armies, courts and prisons with all their endless officers and staggering weight should be taken from the shoulders of the poor. This of itself would so relieve industry and add to the possibilities of life that the very hazardous occupations that we call criminal would almost wholly disappear. The class from which these victims come is known to be the outcast and the poor. A small fraction of the vast sum squandered for violence and force would easily place all these dangerous persons beyond the temptations of criminal activity. Even now, with all the injustice of to-day, the expenditure of public money to relieve suffering, to furnish remunerative employment, to rationally prevent crime by leaving men with something else to do, would produce better results than all the imagined benefits that follow in the wake of scaffolds and of jails.

The effort of the penal codes has never been to reach any human being before violence is done, except to awe him by the brief transitory show of force; but after the act is done the state must spend its strength and substance for revenge. Most men are driven to criminal acts from the necessities of life and the hatred bred by the organized force they meet. Remove dire poverty, as could be easily done with a tithe of what is now spent on force; let organized society meet the individual, not with force, but with helpfulness and love, and the inducement to commit crime could not exist. Let society be the friend not the tyrant, the brother not the jailer, and the feeling will be returned a thousandfold. No man or no society ever induced love with clubs and guns. The emblem of the state is the soldier, the policeman, the court, the jail. It is an emblem that does not appeal to the higher sentiments of man—an emblem that so long as it exists will prevent true brotherhood and be a hindrance to the higher sentiments that will one day rule the world.

Even if now and then passion and feeling should gain control of man, this passion and feeling would be brief and transitory; if it accomplished destruction, no power could make it whole. The concern of society would then be to call back this soul to saner thoughts and a truer, nobler life; not to blacken and destroy, nor to plant bitter hatred and despair in the soul of one who might be brought to a fine and high realization of human conduct and human life. Under this sort of treatment a large proportion of those who commit violent deeds would be brought to a full realization of their acts, and they themselves would seek in every way to repair the ill effects of their evil deeds.