Crime -- Great Britain; Criminal anthropology; Punishment -- Great Britain
the proceedings to assist him, good and well; but in that case they may
find they have started on a new and criminal career. The loose cohesion
between the mischievous and the criminal elements in the crowd becomes
organised; and by this time there is a general demand on the part of the
citizens that somebody should be punished. Then the examples begin.
But the very fact that the outrages have been advertised, while it causes
their imitation at first, makes parents and employers enquire into the
conduct of their sons and their workers. The lads are kept in at night, or
they are otherwise separated from each other. When the association begins
to break up the process is not long before it is complete. Everyone who
leaves it is suspected of being a possible informer, and the dread of they
know not what--the most powerful kind of fear--invades their minds. The
conduct that seemed so laudable is now given up and the epidemic dies out.
To send one of the offenders to prison is simply to make him a martyr in
the eyes of his associates, who know that he is no worse than they were
and who sympathise with rather than abhor him. The real deterrent is the
action of the parents and employers who know the lads. They neither want
to get into trouble at home nor to lose their jobs. Those who are sent to
prison have often little to do with the matter, and their exemplary
punishment has less. Real hooliganism--the existence of young professional
thieves who are in the habit of committing brutal assaults and inflicting
injuries recklessly on their victims--is rare in Glasgow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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