The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular governmentFollett, Mary Parker
Science
The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular government
Follett, Mary Parker
Democracy; Political participation; Social psychology; State, The
First, the growing idea of community responsibility for crime. We read
in an account of the new penology that “Crime in the last analysis is
not to be overcome after arrest but before,” that crime will be
abolished by a change of environment and that “environment is
transformed by child labor laws and the protection of children, by
housing laws and improved sanitation, by the prevention of tuberculosis
and other diseases, by health-giving recreational facilities, by
security of employment, by insurance against the fatalities of industry
and the financial burdens of death and disease, by suitable vocational
training, by all that adds to the content of human life and gives us
higher and keener motives to self-control, strenuous exertion and
thrift.” We of course do not exonerate the individual from
responsibility, but it must be shared by the whole society in which he
lives.
Secondly, the old idea of justice was punishment, a relic of personal
revenge; this punishment took the form of confinement, of keeping the
man outside society. The new idea is exactly the opposite: it is to join
him to society by finding out just what part he is best fitted to play
in society and training him for it. A former Commissioner of Corrections
in New York told me that a number of people, including several judges,
were looking forward to the time very soon being ripe for making the
“punishment” of a crime the doing some piece of social service in order
to fit the criminal into the social order. One man who had shown in his
crime marked organizing ability had been sent to oversee the reclaiming
of some large tracts of abandoned farm land, and this had worked so well
that a number of judges wished to try similar experiments.
Thus criminals are coming to be shown that their crime has not been
against individuals but against society, that it has divorced them from
their community and that the object of their imprisonment is that they
may learn how to unite themselves to their community. The colony system
means that they must learn to live in a community _by_ living in a
community. This is the object of Mr. William George’s “Social
Sanitarium,” where the men are to live in a graded series of farm
villages, govern themselves, support themselves and also their families
as far as possible, and pass from “village” to “village” on their way
towards the society from which their crime has separated them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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