Chapter VIII (2)

No better result is to be looked for from such a course. Of the one thousand five hundred and ninety-two persons in the State's prison of New York, four hundred have been there more than once. In five years, from 1841 to 1847, there were punished in the House of Correction in this city, five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight persons; of these three thousand one hundred and forty-six received such a sentence oftener than once. Yes, in five years, three hundred and thirteen were sent thither, each ten times or more! How many found a place in other jails I know not.

What if fathers treated dull or vicious boys in this manner at home--making them infamous for the first offence, or the first dulness, and then refusing to receive them back again? What if the father sent out his son with bad boys, and when he erred and fell, said: "You did mischief with bad boys once; I know they enticed you. I knew you were feeble and could not resist their seductions. But I shall punish you. Do as well as you please, I will not forgive you. If you err again, I will punish you afresh. If you do never so well, you shall be infamous for ever!" What if a public teacher never took back to college a boy who once had broke the academic law--but made him infamous for ever? What if the physicians had kept a patient the requisite time in the hospital, and discharged him as wholly cured, but bid men beware of him and shun him for ever? That is just what we are doing with this class of criminals; not intentionally, not consciously--but doing none the less!

Let us look a moment more carefully, though I have already touched on this subject, at the proximate causes of crime in this class of men. The first cause is obvious--poverty. Most of the criminals are from the lowest ranks of society. If you distribute men into three classes, the abounding, the thriving, the perishing, you will find the inmates of your prisons come almost wholly from the latter class. The perishing fill the sink of society, and the dangerous the sink of the perishing--for in that "lowest deep there is a lower depth." Of three thousand one hundred and eighty-eight persons confined in the House of Correction in this city, one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven were foreigners; of the five hundred and fifty sent from this city in five years to the State's Prison, one hundred and eighty-five were foreigners. Of five hundred and forty-seven females in the Prison on Blackwell's Island at one time--five hundred and nineteen were committed for "vagrancy;" women with no capital but their person, with no friend, no shelter. Examine minutely, you shall find that more than nine tenths of all criminals come from the perishing class of men. There all cultivation, intellectual, moral, religious, is at the lowest ebb. They are a class of barbarians; yes, of savages, living in the midst of civilization, but not of it. The fact, that most criminals come from this class, shows that the causes of the crime lie out of them more than in them; that they are victims of society, not foes. The effect of property in elevating and moralizing a class of men is seldom appreciated. Historically the animal man comes before the spiritual. Animal wants are imperious; they must be supplied. The lower you go in the social scale, the more is man subordinated to his animal appetites and demonized by them. Nature aims to preserve the individual and repeat the species--so all passions relative to these two designs are preeminently powerful. If a man is born into the intense life of an American city, and grows up, having no contact with the loftier culture which naturally belongs to that intense life, why the man becomes mainly an animal, all the more violent for the atmosphere he breathes in. What shall restrain him? He has not the normal check of reason, conscience, religion, these sleep in the man; nor the artificial and conventional check of honor, of manners. The public opinion which he bows to favors obscenity, drunkenness, and violence. He is doubly a savage. His wants cannot be legally satisfied. He breaks the law, the law which covers property, then goes on to higher crimes.

The next cause is the result of the first--education is neglected, intellectual, moral, and religious. Now and then a boy in whom the soul of genius is covered with the beggar's rags, struggles through the terrible environment of modern poverty to die, the hero of misery, in the attempt at education! His expiring light only makes visible the darkness out of which it shone. Boys born into this condition find at home nothing to aid them, nothing to encourage a love of excellence, or a taste for even the rudiments of learning. What is unavoidably the lot of such? The land has been the schoolmaster of the human race--but the perishing class scarce sees its face. Poverty brings privations, misery, and that a deranged state of the system; then unnatural appetites goad and burn the man. The destruction of the poor is their poverty. They see wealth about them, but have none; so none of what it brings; neither the cleanliness, nor health, nor self-respect, nor cultivation of mind, and heart, and soul. I am told that no Quaker has ever been confined in any jail in New England for any real crime. Are the Quakers better born than other men? Nay, but they are looked after in childhood. Who ever saw a Quaker in an almshouse? Not a fiftieth part of the people of New York are negroes, yet more than a sixth part of all the criminals in her four State's Prisons are men of color. These facts show plainly the causes of crime.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the temptations of the perishing class in our great cities. In Boston at this moment there are more than four hundred boys employed about the various bowling-alleys of the city, exposed to the intemperance, the coarseness, the general corruption of the men who mainly frequent those places. What will be their fate? Shall I speak of their sisters; of the education they are receiving; the end that awaits them? Poverty brings misery with its family of vices.

A third cause of crime comes with the rest--intemperance, the destroying angel that lays waste the household of the poor. In our country, misery in a healthy man is almost proof of vice; but the vice may belong to one alone, and the misery it brings be shared by the whole family. A large proportion of the perishing class are intemperate, and a great majority of all our criminals.

Now, our present method is wholly inadequate to reform men exposed to such circumstances. You may punish the man, but it does no good. You can seldom frighten men out of a fever. Can you frighten them from crime, when they know little of the internal distinction between right and wrong; when all the circumstances about them impel to crime? Can you frighten a starving girl into chastity? You cannot keep men from lewdness, theft and violence, when they have no self-respect, no culture, no development of mind, heart, and soul. The jail will not take the place of the church, of the school-house, of home. It will not remove the causes which are making new criminals. It does not reform the old ones. Shall we shut men in a jail, and when there treat them with all manner of violence, crush out the little self-respect yet left, give them a degrading dress, and send them into the world cursed with an infamous name, and all that because they were born in the low places of society and caught the stain thereof? The jail does not alter the circumstances which occasioned the crime, and till these causes are removed a fresh crop will spring out of the festering soil. Some men teach dogs and horses things unnatural to these animals; they use violence and blows as their instrument of instruction. But to teach man what is conformable to his nature, something more is required.

To return to the other class, who are born criminals. Bare confinement in the prison alters no man's constitutional tendencies; it can no more correct moral or mental weakness or obliquity than it can correct a deficiency of the organs of sensation. You all know the former treatment of men born with defective or deranged intellectual faculties--of madmen and fools. We still pursue the same course towards men born with defective or deranged moral faculties, idiots and madmen of a more melancholy class, and with a like result.

I know how easy it is to find fault, and how difficult to propose a better way; how easy to misunderstand all that I have said, how easy to misrepresent it all. But it seems to me that hitherto we have set out wrong in this undertaking; have gone on wrong, and, by the present means, can never remove the causes of crime nor much improve the criminals as a class. Let me modestly set down my thoughts on this subject, in hopes that other men, wiser and more practical, will find out a way yet better still. A jail, as a mere house of punishment for offenders, ought to have no place in an enlightened people. It ought to be a moral hospital where the offender is kept till he is cured. That his crime is great or little, is comparatively of but small concern. It is wrong to detain a man against his will after he is cured; wrong to send him out before he is cured, for he will rob and corrupt society, and at last miserably perish. We shall find curable cases and incurable.

I would treat the small class of born criminals, the foes of society, as maniacs. I would not kill them more than madmen; I would not inflict needless pain on them. I would not try to shame, to whip, or to starve into virtue men morally insane. I would not torture a man because born with a defective organization. Since he could not live amongst men, I would shut him out from society; would make him work for his own good and the good of society. The thought of punishment for its own sake, or as a compensation for the evil which a man has done, I would not harbor for a moment. If a man has done me a wrong, calumniated, insulted, abused me with all his power, it renders the matter no better that I turn round and make him smart for it. If he has burned my house over my head, and I kill him in return, it does not rebuild my house. I cannot leave him at large to burn other men's houses. He must be restrained. But if I cure the man perhaps he will rebuild it, at any rate, will be of some service to the world, and others gain much while I lose nothing.

When the victims of society violated its laws, I would not torture a man for his misfortune, because his father was poor, his mother a brute; because his education was neglected. I would shut him out from society for a time. I would make him work for his own good and the good of others. The evil he had caught from the world I would overcome by the good that I would present to him. I would not clothe him with an infamous dress, crowd him with other men whom society had made infamous, leaving them to ferment and rot together. I would not set him up as a show to the public, for his enemy, or his rival, or some miserable fop to come and stare at with merciless and tormenting eye. I would not load him with chains, nor tear his flesh with a whip. I would not set soldiers with loaded gun to keep watch over him, insulting their brother by mocking and threats. I would treat the man with firmness, but with justice, with pity, with love. I would teach the man; what his family could not do for him, what society and the church had failed of, the jail should do, for the jail should be a manual labor school, not a dungeon of torture. I would take the most gifted, the most cultivated, the wisest and most benevolent, yes, the most Christian man in the State, and set him to train up these poor savages of civilization. The best man is the natural physician of the wicked. A violent man, angry, cruel, remorseless, should never enter the jail except as a criminal. You have already taken one of the greatest, wisest, and best men of this Commonwealth, and set him to watch over the public education of the people.[33] True, you give him little money, and no honor; he brings the honor to you, not asking but giving that. You begin to see the result of setting such a man to such a work, though unhonored and ill paid. Soon you will see it more plainly in the increase of temperance, industry, thrift, of good morals and sound religion! I would set such a man, if I could find such another, to look after the dangerous classes of society. I would pay him for it; honor him for it. I would have a Board of Public Morals to look after this matter of crime, a Secretary of Public Morals, a Christian Censor, whose business it should be to attend to this class, to look after the jails and make them houses of refuge, of instruction, which should do for the perishing class what the school-house and the church do for others. I would send missionaries amongst the most exposed portions of mankind as well as amongst the savages of New Holland. I would send wise men, good men. There are already some such engaged in this work. I would strengthen their hands. I would make crime infamous. If there are men whose crime is to be traced not to a defective organization of body, not to the influence of circumstances, but only to voluntary and self-conscious wickedness,--I would make these men infamous. It should be impossible for such a man, a voluntary foe of mankind, to live in society. I would have the jail such a place that the friends of a criminal of either class should take him as now they take a lunatic or a sick man, and bring him to the Court that he might be healed if curable, or if not might be kept from harm and hid away out of sight. Crime and sin should be infamous; not its correction, least of all its cure. I would not loathe and abhor a man who had been corrected and reformed by the jail more than a boy who had been reformed by his teacher, or a man cured of lunacy. I would have society a father who goes out to meet the prodigal while yet a great way off; yes, goes and brings him away from his riotous living, washes him, clothes him, and restores him to a right mind. There is a prosecuting attorney for the State; I would have also a defending attorney for the accused, that justice might be done all round. Is the State only a step-mother? Then is she not a Christian Commonwealth but a barbarous despotism, fitly represented by that uplifted sword on her public seal, and that motto of barbarous and bloody Latin. I would have the State aid men and direct them after they have been discharged from the jail, not leave them to perish; not force them to perish. Society is the natural guardian of the weak.

I cannot think the method here suggested would be so costly as the present. It seems to me that institutions of this character might be made not only to support themselves, but be so managed as to leave a balance of income considerably beyond the expense. This might be made use of for the advantage of the criminal when he returned to society; or with it he might help make restitution of what he had once stolen. Besides being less costly, it would cure the offender and send back valuable men into society.

It seems to me that our whole criminal legislation is based on a false principle--force and not love; that it is eminently well adapted to revenge, not at all to correct, to teach, to cure. The whole apparatus for the punishment of offenders, from the gallows down to the House of Correction, seems to me wrong; wholly wrong, unchristian, and even inhuman. We teach crime while we punish it. Is it consistent for the State to take vengeance when I may not? Is it better for the State to kill a man in cold blood, than for me to kill my brother when in a rage? I cannot help thinking that the gallows and even the jail, as now administered, are practical teachers of violence and wrong! I cannot think it will always be so. Hitherto we have looked on criminals as voluntary enemies of mankind. We have treated them as wild beasts, not as dull or loitering boys. We have sought to destroy by death, to disable by mutilation or imprisonment, to terrify and subdue, not to convince, to reform, encourage, and bless.

The history of the past is full of prophecy for the future. Not many years ago we shut up our lunatics in jails, in dungeons, in cages; we chained the maniac with iron; we gave him a bottle of water and a sack of straw; we left him in filth, in cold and nakedness. We set strong and brutal men to watch him. When he cried, when he gnashed his teeth and tore his hair, we beat him all the more! They do so yet in some places, for they think a madman is not a brother but a devil. What was the result? Madness was found incurable. Now lunacy is a disease, to be prescribed for as fever or rheumatism; when we find an incurable case we do not kill the man, nor chain him, nor count him a devil. Yet lunacy is not curable by force, by jails, dungeons, and cages; only by the medicine of wise men and good men. What if Christ had met one demoniac with a whip and another with chains!

You know how we once treated criminals! with what scourgings and mutilations, what brandings, what tortures with fire and red-hot iron! Death was not punishment enough, it must be protracted amid the most cruel torments that quivering flesh could bear. The multitude looked on and learned a lesson of deadly wickedness. A judicial murder was a holiday! It is but little more than two hundred years since a man was put to death in the most enlightened country of Europe for eating meat on Friday; not two hundred since men and women were hanged in Massachusetts for a crime now reckoned impossible! It is not a hundred years since two negro slaves were judicially burned alive in this very city! These facts make us shudder, but hope also. In a hundred years from this day will not men look on our gallows, jails, and penal law as we look on the racks, the torture-chambers of the middle ages, and the bloody code of remorseless inquisitors?

We need only to turn our attention to this subject to find a better way. We shall soon see that punishment as such is an evil to the criminal, and so swells the sum of suffering with which society runs over; that it is an evil also to the community at large by abstracting valuable force from profitable work, and so a loss.[34] We shall one day remember that the offender is a man, and so his good also is to be consulted. He may be a bad man, voluntarily bad if you will. Still we are to be economical even of his suffering, for the least possible punishment is the best. Already a good many men think that error is better refuted by truth than by fagots and axes. How long will it be before we apply good sense and Christianity to the prevention of crime? One day we must see that a jail, as it is now conducted, is no more likely to cure a crime than a lunacy or a fever! Hitherto we have not seen the application of the great doctrines of Christianity; not felt that all men are brothers. So our remedies for social evils have been bad almost as the disease; remedies which remedied nothing, but hid the patient out of sight. All great criminals have been thought incurable, and then killed. What if the doctors found a patient sick of a disease which he had foolishly or wickedly brought upon himself, and then, by the advice of twelve other doctors, professionally killed him for justice or example's sake? They would do what all the States in Christendom have done these thousand years. I cannot see why the Legislature has not as good right to authorize the medical college thus to kill men, as to authorize the present forms of destroying life!

We do not look the facts of crime fairly in the face. We do not see what heathens we are. Why, there is not a Christian nation in the world that has not a Secretary of War, armies, soldiers, and the terrible apparatus of destruction. But there is not one that has a Secretary of Peace, not one that takes half the pains to improve its own criminals which it takes to build forts and fleets! Yet it seems to me that a Christian State should be a great peace society, a society for mutual advancement in the qualities of a man!

Do we not see that by our present course we are teaching men violence, fraud, deceit, and murder? What is the educational effect of our present political conduct, of our invasions, our battles, our victories; of the speeches of "our great men?" You all know that this teaches the poor, the low, and the weak that murder and robbery are good things when done on a large scale; that they give wealth, fame, power, and honors. The ignorant man, ill-born and ill-bred, asks: "Why not when done on a small scale; why not good for me?" If it is right in the President of the United States to rob and murder, why not for the President of the United States Bank? Do famous men say, "Our country however bounded," and vote to plunder a sister State? then why shall not the poor man, hungry and cold, say, "My purse however bounded," and seize on all he can get? Give one a seat in Congress if you will, and the other a noose of hemp, there is a God before whom seats in Congress and hempen halters are of equal value, but who does justice to great and little!

* * * * *

To reform the dangerous classes of society, to advance those who loiter behind our civilization, we need a special work designed directly for the good of the criminals and such as stand on that perilous ground which slopes towards crime. Some good men undertook this work long ago. They found much to do; a good deal to encourage them. Some of them are well known to you, are laboring here in the midst of us. They need counsel, encouragement, and aid. We must not look coldly on their enterprise nor on them. They can tell far better than I what specific plans are best for their specific work. Already have they accomplished much in this noble enterprise. The society for aiding discharged convicts is a prophecy of yet better things. Soon I trust it will extend its kind offices to all the prisons, and its work be made the affair of the State. The plan now before your Legislature for a "State Manual Labor School," designed to reform vicious children, is also full of promise. The wise and anonymous charity which so beautifully and in silence has dropped its gold into the chest for these poor outcasts, is itself its hundred-fold reward. Institutions like that which we contemplate have been found successful in England, Germany, and France. They actually reform the juvenile delinquent and bring up useful men, not hardened criminals.[35] We are beginning to attend to this special work of removing the causes of crime, and restoring at least the young offenders.

However, the greater portion of this work is not special and for the criminal, but general and for society. To change the treatment of criminals, we must change every thing else. The dangerous class is the unavoidable result of our present civilization; of our present ideas of man and social life. To reform and elevate the class of criminals, we must reform and elevate all other classes. To do that, we must educate and refine men. We must learn to treat all men as brothers. This is a great work and one of slow achievement. It cannot be brought about by legislation, nor any mechanical contrivance and reorganization alone. There is no remedy for this evil and its kindred but keeping the laws of God; in one word, none but Christianity, goodness, and piety felt in the heart, applied in all the works of life, individually, socially, and politically. While educated and abounding men acknowledge no rule of conduct but self-interest, what can you expect of the ignorant and the perishing? While great men say without rebuke that we do not look at "the natural justice of a war," do you expect men in the lowest places of society, ignorant and brutish, pinched by want, to look at the natural justice of theft, of murder? It were a vain expectation. We must improve all classes to improve one; perhaps the highest first. Different men acting in the most various directions, without concert, often jealous one of another, and all partial in their aims, are helping forward this universal result. While we are contending against slavery, war, intemperance, or party rage, while we are building up hospitals, colleges, schools, while we are contending for freedom of conscience, or teaching abstractly the love of man and love of God, we are all working for the welfare of this neglected class. The gallows of the barbarian and the Gospel of Christianity cannot exist together. The times are full of promise. Mankind slowly fulfils what a man of genius prophesies; God grants what a good man asks, and when it comes, it is better than what he prayed for.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] The allusion is to the following passages of Scripture, which were read as the lesson for the day: Numb. xiv.; 2 Kings, ii. 23-25; and Luke, xv.

[32] See other statistics in "Sermon of the Perishing Classes," pp. 205, 206.

[33] Mr. Horace Mann.

[34] The period of confinement in our States' Prisons differs a good deal in the various States, as will appear from the following Table.

Whole No.
in prison. Average sentence.
In Conn. 189, March 31, 1841, 7 yrs. 3 mos.
Va. 181, Sept 30, 1839, 6 " 10 "
Mass. 322, Sept. 30, 1840, 5 " 9 "
La. 68, Sept 30, 1839, 5 " 1 "
N. J. 152, Sept. 30, 1840, 4 " 7 "
Ky. 162, Sept. 30, 1839, 4 "
D. C. 79, Nov. 30, 1840, 3 " 8 "
Md. 104, 3 "
Phila. 129, Sept. 30, 1840, 2 " 5 "

The difference between the average term of punishment in Connecticut and Philadelphia is 300 per cent! If the same result is effected by each, there has then been a great amount of gratuitous suffering in one case.

[35] I refer to the prisons at Stretton-upon-Dunmore in Warwickshire, that at Horn near Hamburg, and the one at Mettray near Tours in France. The French penal code allows the guardian or relatives of an offender under age to take him from prison on giving bonds for his good behavior. While these pages were first passing through the press, I learned the happy effect which followed the execution of the license laws in this city. In 1846, from the 10th of March to the 24th of April, there were sent to the House of Correction for intemperance one hundred eighty-nine persons. During the same period of the year 1847, only eighty-four have been thus punished! But alas, in 1851 the evil has returned, and the demon of drunkenness mows down the wretched in Boston with unrestricted scythe.