In France we have figures equally striking, for they relate not to
the effect of exceptional conditions, or conditions peculiar to
this or that country, but to the uniform consequence of the
classical theories of criminal law and prison organisation.
The total number condemned to imprisonment by the French
tribunals, and detained by the police, in the ten years 1879-88,
was 1,675,000; the Tribunal sentences under six days being
113,000.
And the total condemned to punishments of various kinds, by Assize
Courts, Tribunals, and police courts, reached in the same ten
years the enormous number of 6,440,000 individuals!
The meaning of this is that penal justice at the present moment is
a vast machine, devouring and casting up again an enormous number
of individuals, who lose amongst its wheels their life, their
honour, their moral sense, and their health, bearing thenceforth
the ineffaceable scars, and falling into the ever-growing ranks of
professional crime and recidivism, too often without a hope of
recovery.[19]
[19] As regards recidivism and the enormous numbers tried, England
is in as bad a position as Italy and France. See my articles in
_Nineteenth Century__, 1892, and _Fortnightly Review__, 1894.--ED.
It is impossible, then, to deny the urgent necessity <p 204>of
substituting for our present penal organisation a better system
corresponding to the governing conditions of crime, more effectual
for social defence, and at the same time less gratuitously
disastrous for the individuals with whom it deals.
The positive school, in addition to the partial reforms proposed
by Lombroso, and by myself in the second edition of this work, has
put forward in the _Criminology_ of Garofalo a ``rational system
of punishment,'' whereof it is desirable to give a summary.
I. MURDERERS (moral insensibility and instinctive
cruelty) who commit--
Murder for greed, or other selfish
gratification Criminal Lunatic Asylums: or
Murder unprovoked by the victim the death penalty.
Murder with attendant cruelty
II. VIOLENT OR IMPULSIVE CHARACTERS (deficiency
of the sense of pity, with prejudices on the
subject of honour, on the duty of revenge, &c.).
Adults who commit--
Violent assault suddenly provoked Removal of the offender from the
by a cruel injury neighbourhood of the victim or
Justifiable homicide in self-defence his family.
Transportation to an island, colony
Homicide to avenge honour (isolated or village--at liberty, under
or endemic) supervision (for an indefinite
period, with from 5 to 10 years
supervision).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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