But what crimes? Some had done
murder, others committed rape, some had held up a train, another had
blown a safe, another was a pickpocket, another a white-slaver, this one
had stolen food to avert starvation, that was a confidence man or bank
embezzler, here was one snared in some technicality of new finance laws,
yonder an ignorant moonshiner from the hills, who had grown corn in his
back yard and thought he had a right to make whiskey out of it--he had
no other means of livelihood. Breakers of God's laws; of man's; victims
of tricks and legal technicalities, of torturing want and of headlong
passion, and of sheer court errors or of perjured testimony--here they
were, all on the same footing, no discriminations made! To what end? So
that they might be punished and repent and go forth better men and
useful workers, and so that society might be protected and its integrity
vindicated. That is the ostensible reason; no other is alleged.
It sounds like a jest; but the men are here, the thing is done. In some
moods I would say to myself, "It's too preposterous--it can't be--it's
an hallucination--a bad dream!" But there it was, visible and palpable.
Was it protection for society to shut up a man from ability to support
those dependent on him, who were thus themselves driven to want and
perhaps crime, multiplying the original criminality by three or four or
half a dozen? Could any injury which the culprit could do to the
community equal the injury thus done by the community to him and his,
and indirectly to itself, by such treatment? Or could the technical and
perhaps unconscious violator of an obscure and whimsical law be reformed
by putting him on an equality with a cold-blooded murderer, or with a
man who had grown rich by selling the shame of women? Was the punishment
equable which handled with equal severity a brutish negro from the
cotton fields, and a man brought up in refinement and gentleness?
But I would go further, and challenge the right of the community to
inflict penal imprisonment as we know it at all.
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