THE PROSPECTIVE REVIEW. No. XXXIV. ART. I.-SOCIETY IN DANGER FROM Juvenile Delinquents: their Condition and Treatment. By Mary Carpenter. London: Cash. 1853. THE natural law of punishment is personal retaliation : you strike me and I strike you; you rob me this time and I rob you the next; you murder me, and my brother murders you. The spirit of the transaction is not greatly different when the medium changes, and society becomes the retaliator instead of the individual sufferer. The character of private and personal retribution continues even when the power of inflicting it is transferred from the hands of the injured party to those of the magistrate. The punishment remains almost as prompt, decisive, and severe as if it had been left to the aggrieved man to avenge himself on his adversary. Instead of the injured retaliator saying, "I have slain a man in my wrath," the injured law says, "I will slay a man in my wrath." To this character of quick and savage justice other things contributed in the early efforts of man after social order and civilization. Society was not vulnerable in so many points. Fewer offences were possible and they were simpler, evidence more palpable and accessible, and therefore conviction more prompt. Physical suffering also was not looked upon with so much horror. War, famine, feud, disease, accustomed men to scenes of blood and pain, as frequent CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 60. N if not daily spectacles. Men were not moved by a trifle. Nothing milder than the block or the gibbet could command attention. In the last century, even, by the laws of this country there were no fewer than one hundred and sixty enumerated offences (no doubt many similar to each other, though sufficiently distinguishable to be separately provided for) on which the punishment denounced was death. The gallows was erected with great expedition and in multitudes of places, so that the traveller would be from time to time scared by the sight of one of his fellowcreatures hanging in chains by the road-side; or as he entered the walls of some city, by the head of another, in the still stern aspect of death, upon the gates. The suicide was buried in the highway, and a stake driven through his body, and the traitor was cut up into four parts. And yet we may doubt whether the death of the criminal was in reality so fearful as his life,-for the prison of those times presents us with the picture of debtor and murderer, convicted and unconvicted, guilty and innocent, all flung into one noisome common room, where they ate and slept and raged and cursed together, and whence few escaped without carrying with them disease and fever, the effects of which sometimes remained with them for life. There was a rough and fierce vengeance about all this, which, though indiscriminating in itself, and cruelly unjust to individuals, made crime, or the suspicion of crime, a terrible evil, from the punishment of which men shrunk with horror and dismay. But now christianized society eschews almost all this severity. Instead of the loathsome jail and its putrid companionship, a strong palace is built for the criminal; wholesome food, warm clothing, clean bedding, ventilated apartments, private rooms, baths, wash-houses, employment, instruction, medical attendance, religious counsel, are provided for these violators of the law. Everything is done to turn the penalty of crime into a simple deprivation, for a certain limited time, of the liberty to do the like again. We confess to some sympathy with those who are beginning to think that the punishment of crime is not made sufficiently deterrent and alarming at present-a fact, indeed, sufficiently proved by the frequent recommittals of the same criminals for the same crimes. But the remedy we look for is not so much alterative as supplementary-—not so much to add to the punishment as to complete the discipline. For in truth, at what point of this humanizing and modifying process, objectionable as by itself the result may make it, is it possible to stop? If we abolish the punishment of death for cutting down a tree, at what point in the scale of the values of human possessions shall we pause and inflict it? What human property shall be so precious that its violation shall require the killing of a man, and what shall be the next degree of value below it, in reference to which that punishment shall not be inflicted? The only tenable point at which to pause between its continuance and discontinuance, is that at which the action of the law does at this moment pause-namely, the point between human property and human existence-declaring that human life shall be sacrificed for human life, but not for human property. Then with regard to treatment during confinement, where shall we pause in this process of amelioration? No one will maintain that it is a necessary or legitimate part of the punishment of crime to expose it to loathsome disease; then, where you confine human beings, you must remove all active causes of disease. No one will maintain that it is a necessary or legitimate part of the punishment of crime to confound its various degrees and perpetrators, and throw the murderer and the debtor into compulsory companionship; then you must remove one of the most appalling parts of the old punishment-the common jail. A Christian legislature cannot think moral pollution a legitimate part of the punishment of crime; then it must separate age and sex. Neither can it believe that for the soul to be without knowledge is good; then education and moral influence follow. And the matter does not end here. What are we to do with a set of persons who, when sent out of prison, must live, yet whose labour society does not want, and whose labour, if it did want, it would rather want than have-and who must therefore steal-be committed again-imprisoned again-steal again -be imprisoned again, or-die? The misery of this state of things in the present is that it contains within itself the promise of continuance for the future. Ample preparation is being made day by day before our eyes, for its continuance. An increasing number of candidates for this dilemma are growing up among us; as in other things, so in crime, education is improved. Thieves and murderers are no more standing still than the rest of the world. If the child in our common schools is surprised at the ignorance of his grandfather, the juvenile, should we not say the infant, thief now laughs at the clumsy contrivances for effecting crime used by his predecessors. As in the Free United States of North America they have breeding-grounds and training-schools by which slavery is perpetuated, and the demand for “involuntary servitude" supplied, so in the Christian country of England we have nurseries where we breed, and schools where we train, young criminals, that the succession may be kept up, and that this family of wretchedness and wickedness may not want representatives to the end of time, No education in England is more systematic, no course of promotion more secure, no field for the exercise of enterprise and talent more open, no class of risks run more exciting and alluring, than those afforded by the career of the young thief. That part of it with which the public and the law are concerned is the least mischievous of the whole. The public and the law only know the young thief and his life when he is detected, when he is at the bar or in the prison. They do not know of him in his keen and anxious vigilance, in his hours of contrivances and premeditation, in the triumphant delight of success and escape, in the communications and congratulations with his fellows, in his rewarding orgies, marked by the copious draught, the droll and exciting narrative, and the joy of his coarse young loves. The depravation of the young thier's nature is total. The crime for which he is captured and punished is not only always a mere fractional part of his punishable crimes, but usually also the smallest part of the moral evil of his life. A child in want of bread, clothing, and lodging, stealing to supply the want, is a small and definite mischief, which gives scarcely a hint of the extent of moral debasement and wickedness which precedes, accompanies, and follows the act. Want is a frequent, but by no means the only or the chief inducement to the criminal life. The command of parents, the instructions of accomplices, the excitement attending the successful practice of every art, the love of pleasure and gain, ambition and the love of distinction and applause, the wearisomeness of labour and the dulness of a plodding life, all combine to draw to this occupation. It is impossible to observe the roguish knowing eye of a narrator, giving an account of a successful fraud or theft to a circle of young admirers, who, with eager glance and intelligent countenance, drink in the descriptions of contrivance, skill, risk, escape, reward, detection even, and long to distinguish themselves in the same manner, without perceiving how complicated is the evil which society has to meet, how all-surrounding is the atmosphere it has to disperse, and to what an education, and to what influences, it has to supply counter-education and counterinfluences. In such schools and circumstances have our present professors of the criminal arts been brought up, and in similar ones are they themselves bringing up their successors. And what are the counteracting forces which the law and enlightenment and philanthropy of England bring to bear against this state of things? Imprisonment and flogging! behold the right hand and the left hand of our power! The weary and inconsolable magistrate plays at hocus-pocus with these two; now he chooses the right hand, and it is imprisonment; now the left hand, and it is whipping. Neither are sufficient-neither indeed efficient. But what can he do? If Parkhurst were all it should be, he could not send them all to Parkhurst. In his distress he remembers the stocks; he tries these, but with the effect of hardening the offenders and amusing a crowd of spectators. He discharges-delivering a short discourse to the boy, who skips out of court, thinking of nothing but that he has got off. Whipping, imprisonment, stocks, discharges, alike bring back a large proportion of the very same offenders to be whipped, imprisoned, but not to be discharged again. Thus it is that society in our times has to defend itself against children-children, who are to a large extent the instruments of men while young, and about to be the employers of children in their turn when men. The criminal class is always training and reproducing itself. But the real criminal-the teacher, compeller, and tempterstands apart, uninvolved and unpunished. The children |