This is the ideal and the typical form of segregation for
criminals, against whom it would not be sufficient to exact strict
reparation of damage, on the principles already set forth.
<p 266>
Wherever there is a crowding of humanity, there is human
fermentation and putrefaction. Only labour in the open air will
secure physical and moral health. And if agricultural work would
be less fitted for criminals from the towns, there is no reason
why an agricultural colony should not make itself as far as
possible self-sufficing by means of workshops where prisoners
could ply the trade to which they were accustomed when at liberty.
For town convicts without a trade, such as vagabonds, beggars, and
the like, on the ground of their muscular incapacity for hard and
regular work, an agricultural colony is still the most fit, for it
provides light and varied occupations, as the agricultural
colonies of Holland, Belgium, and Austria bear witness.
The same evolution will take place in regard to the segregation of
criminals as in regard to the seclusion of the insane; first,
hospitals and prisons, with a terrible communion of corruption in
both cases; then barrack life, in asylums or penitentiaries, vast
and isolated; lastly, for the insane, a system of so-called
village asylums, and even a free colony for harmless idiots who
can be put to agricultural work and minor trades, as at Gheel in
Belgium. Similarly for criminals, the sanitary ``elbow room'' of
agricultural colonies will be substituted for the infectious
barrack-life of the great prisons.
As for habitual criminals, their anthropological characteristics
remind us that we must distinguish between the two crises of their
criminal activity, and, as a consequence, between the methods of
defence <p 267>against them. That is to say, we must distinguish
between the initial moment at which they commit their first crime
and the subsequent period in which they become habitual offenders,
recidivists, and even incorrigible.
Thus it is clear that at the initial moment of their criminal
career they ought to be subjected to the measures which I am about
to indicate for occasional criminals; whereas, when from
occasional they have become, partly by their imprisonment,
habitual offenders, they must be subjected to the measures already
indicated for born criminals. The latter are incorrigible through
congenital tendency to degenerate, and the former are incorrigible
through acquired tendency; but they end in the same degree of
anti-sociality and brutalisation. There is, however, this
difference, that habitual offenders nearly always commit less
serious crimes, such as theft, swindling, forgery, indecent
assault, whilst the born criminals, though they may be petty
thieves, or not very formidable swindlers, are more frequently
murderers, footpads, guilty of arson, or the like. Thus the
discipline of their segregation must vary accordingly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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