Only then shall we secure a strict reparation of damage, for the
State will put in motion its inexorable fiscal machinery, as it
now does for the recovery of taxes; and on the other hand the
principle of social community of interests will be really admitted
and applied, not only against the individual but also for him.
For we believe that if the individual ought to be always
responsible for the crimes which he commits, he ought also to be
always indemnified for the crimes of which he is the victim.
In any case, as the indefinite segregation of the criminal is the
fundamental principle of the positive system of social defence
against crime, apart from the technical systems of imprisonment
and detention, so indemnification as a social function is a second
essential principle, apart from the special rules of procedure for
carrying it into effect.
<p 225>
These two fundamental principles of the positive system would
still be incomplete if they did not come into practical operation
according to a general rule, which leads up to the practical
organisation of social defence--that is to say, the adaptation of
defensive measures to the various criminal types.
The tendency of the classical theories on crime and prison
discipline is in sharp contrast, for their ideal is the
``uniformity of punishment'' which lies at the base of all the
more recent penal codes.
If for the classical school the criminal is but an average and
abstract type, the whole difference of treatment is, of course,
reduced to a graduation of the ``amount of crime'' and the
``amount of punishment.'' And then it is natural that this
punitive dosing should be more difficult when the punishments are
different in kind, and not very similar in their degrees of
coincident afflictive and correctional power. Thus the ideal
becomes a single punishment, apportioned first by the legislature
and then by the judge, in an indefinite number of doses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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