In the
intention of their originators they may have appeared beneficent; in
practise, they proved sinister and abominable means to cruelty and
despotism. There can be no compromises with hell.
But can I pretend to solve the age-long problem of the right handling of
crime in the community? I am not wiser than my fellows, but I have felt
and known at first hand more of certain grievous wrongs than most of
them have, and even those who have known and felt may not possess the
opportunity or facility to speak that I have. I must say what is in me,
and leave to the collective judgment of the nation, and to the further
teaching of time, what shall be changed, abolished, and done.
One thing seems plain--there must be an act of faith. Worldly wisdom and
enlightened selfishness have been tried out thoroughly and are
thoroughly discredited. Their proposal was first to cure crime, and only
after that was done, to abolish prisons. But it turns out that prisons
generate, teach, perpetuate and inflame crime; never extirpate it,
though they often deter specific persons from continuing a criminal
career by either killing them outright, or destroying in them their
effective spiritual manhood. Therefore the selfishly enlightened and
worldly-wise shake their heads and declare that crime in criminals is
ineradicable. If medicine for crime be futile, save as a temporary
physical preventive, all that is left to us is to continue it as a
preventive, while admitting its impotence as a cure.
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