Crime -- United States; Criminal justice, Administration of -- United States; Criminals -- United States
Just as there are three general classes of wrongs, so there are three
general and varyingly effective forms of restraint against their
perpetration. First there is the moral control exerted by what is
ordinarily called conscience, secondly there is the restraint which
arises out of the apprehension that the commission of a tort will be
followed by a judgment for damages in a civil court, and lastly there
is the restraint imposed by the criminal law. All these play their part,
separately or in conjunction. For some men conscience is a sufficient
barrier to crime or to those acts which, while equally reprehensible,
are not technically criminal; for others the possibility of pecuniary
loss is enough to keep them in the straight and narrow way; but for a
large proportion of the community the fear of criminal prosecution,
with implied disgrace and ignominy, forfeiture of citizenship, and
confinement in a common jail is about the only conclusive reason for
doing unto others as they would the others should do unto them. Were
the criminal law done away with in our present state of civilization,
religion, ethics and civil procedure would be absolutely inefficacious
to prevent anarchy. It is as imperative to the ordinary citizen to know
that if he steals he will be locked up as it is for the child to know
that if he puts his hand into the fire it will be burned. The acquittal
of every thief breeds another, and the unpunished murder is an incentive
for a dozen similar homicides.
Crimes are either deliberate or the result of accident or impulse. The
last class may rise to a high degree of enormity, such as manslaughter,
but these crimes are rarely possible of restraint. The perpetrator
does not stop to consider, even if he be sober enough to think at all,
whether his act be moral, whether it will entail any civil liability, or
what will be its consequences, if it be a crime. So far as such acts
are concerned those who commit them are hardly criminals in the ordinary
sense, and no influence in the world is able to prevent them.
The question is how far these different kinds of restraint operate upon
the community as a whole in the prevention of deliberate crime. Clearly
the fear of pecuniary loss through actions brought to judgment in the
civil courts is practically nil. Most persons who set out to commit
crime have no bank account, the absence of one being generally what
leads them into a criminal career.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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