CHAPTER VI
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.