No doubt for first offenders, and for all offenders under
five-and-twenty, the Modern Utopia will attempt cautionary and
remedial treatment. There will be disciplinary schools and colleges
for the young, fair and happy places, but with less confidence and
more restraint than the schools and colleges of the ordinary world.
In remote and solitary regions these enclosures will lie, they will
be fenced in and forbidden to the common run of men, and there,
remote from all temptation, the defective citizen will be schooled.
There will be no masking of the lesson; "which do you value most,
the wide world of humanity, or this evil trend in you?" From that
discipline at last the prisoners will return.
But the others; what would a saner world do with them?
Our world is still vindictive, but the all-reaching State of Utopia
will have the strength that begets mercy. Quietly the outcast will
go from among his fellow men. There will be no drumming of him out
of the ranks, no tearing off of epaulettes, no smiting in the face.
The thing must be just public enough to obviate secret tyrannies,
and that is all.
There would be no killing, no lethal chambers. No doubt Utopia will
kill all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births, but for
the rest, the State will hold itself accountable for their being.
There is no justice in Nature perhaps, but the idea of justice
must be sacred in any good society. Lives that statesmanship has
permitted, errors it has not foreseen and educated against, must
not be punished by death. If the State does not keep faith, no one
will keep faith. Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's
failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community. Even
for murder Utopia will not, I think, kill.
I doubt even if there will be jails. No men are quite wise enough,
good enough and cheap enough to staff jails as a jail ought to be
staffed. Perhaps islands will be chosen, islands lying apart from
the highways of the sea, and to these the State will send its
exiles, most of them thanking Heaven, no doubt, to be quit of a
world of prigs. The State will, of course, secure itself against
any children from these people, that is the primary object in their
seclusion, and perhaps it may even be necessary to make these
island prisons a system of island monasteries and island nunneries.
Upon that I am not competent to speak, but if I may believe the
literature of the subject--unhappily a not very well criticised
literature--it is not necessary to enforce this separation.
[Footnote: See for example Dr. W. A. Chapple's The Fertility of
the Unfit.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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