Prisoners -- Biography; Prisoners' writings, English; Prisons -- Great Britain
With regard to the former class, the deterring influence is detection.
Capital sentence, perpetual imprisonment, or even a less severe
sentence would operate equally in preventing the commission of the
crime in their case, because the idea is not generally present in their
mind when they premeditate it, or is completely outweighed by the fear
of detection or discovery. With reference to the second and bolder
class, a lingering imprisonment would appear more horrible in their
estimation, and exercise an equal if not a greater deterring influence
than the scaffold. Some of those men with whom I have met would glory
in dying 'game' as they term it. Those who commit murder in order to
gratify feelings of revenge, usually, I believe, find the gratification
of the passion so sweet that they are for the time quite regardless of
their own lives; and when jealousy is the cause of murder, it often
happens that the murderer takes the law into his own hands and visits
upon himself the penalty. I met cases in point, and in none of them did
the fear of the death sentence operate against the perpetration of
crime. They had made up their minds to lose their lives, and did not
calculate on escape. Such cases are not common, however, and perhaps it
is not possible to prevent them occurring.
Those murders perpetrated for the love of money might to some extent be
prevented by the general elevation of the mass of society, and by
increasing the swiftness and certainty of detection; and I have come,
after long study of the subject, and from frequent contact with those
saved from the gallows, to the conclusion that capital punishment may
now be safely abolished in this country. In all countries where
secondary punishments are severe and capital punishments rigorously
inflicted, murders are numerous, and in countries where the machinery
for the detection of crime is defective it may be the same. Earl
Russell, in a late edition of his work on the constitution, expresses
opinions on this subject with which I coincide, but I disagree with him
when he prescribes imprisonment and hard labour as being the most
suitable method of dealing with criminals not capitally punished; I
refer, of course, to imprisonment and hard labour as generally
understood.
There are three systems of imprisonment: the solitary, the separate and
silent, and the promiscuous association of all prisoners at the public
works.
The solitary system feeds the lunatic asylums, the separate system has
its advantages, if not too long continued, and of the promiscuous
association system I have already at some length given my opinion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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