Perhaps it would; but the
point is, that it multiplies and abounds even in the teeth of
prosecutions; every year the number of convictions is greater, and the
jails are already cracking their seams to contain the convicts. One
might almost conclude that prisons, as now administered, stimulate crime
instead of preventing it, and that we are in the predicament of Hercules
in the fable, who, as fast as he cut off a head of the hydra, saw two
others sprout in its place. At which rate, we might be led on to the
surmise that it would be financially cheaper to let crime run on; the
cost of our futile efforts to stop it would be saved, and might be set
over against the loss from the increased annual depredations.
But finance is not the whole story; what about morality? and who can
forecast the ruin of anarchy? The problem cannot be so crudely solved.
Crime must be prevented; doubtless nine-tenths even of the men in jail
would agree to that proposition. The question is, can the jail system
prevent it? and the answer is that, judged by long experience--the
experience of thousands of years--it cannot. There are several reasons
why it cannot, into some of which we may enquire later; but the
objection to the jail system which I wish to emphasize just now is, that
it not only makes slaves of convicts, but, unlike the more reasonable
southern negro slavery, it makes them unproductive slaves.
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