The prevention and repression of crime : being a report of the fifth section of the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy, Chicago, June, 1893 / edited by Frederick H. Wines.

Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention and repression of crime : being a report of the fifth section of the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy, Chicago, June, 1893 / edited by Frederick H. Wines. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    40/112 (page 38)
    one of intention to violate a statute, that intention makes it crime. If there be no such intention it is involuntary crime; but the subject may be a menace to order and to liberty. In either case he should be under restraint. It is claimed there is a Word of God, a Biblical standard of right and wrong. Grant it, but it is not fixed, and is arbitrary and temporary, and has many hundred constructions. Any violation of any one of the constructions is not crime, unless the statute says it shall be. It is crime we are dealing with, not morals. Morals, justice, charity, sentiment, religion, etc., come in when the law has acted, when the offender is seized and convicted. Exist- ing methods resort to what is called punishment. This paper goes on the theory of safety first, reform next, believing punishment to be a barrier to reform. Civil death is punishment while it envelops the criminal. But it should be considered purgatorial probation, during which he is being purged, reformed. If the mental and physical organisms are such that permanent moral perception and conception cannot be created in the criminal by training, he should remain civilly dead. If they can be created, with will power to follow their impulses, he may be civilly resurrected, that is, go back to society, liberty and civil life. The paper deals with crime, punishment, etc., as matters of fact. If we wish to take up the subject of morals we must enter the domain of metaphysics, and that is not the question here considered. Further. In the law a man is not a criminal until convicted by due process of law; then he becomes a criminal. The paper deals with criminals. The treatment proposed relates to these and to their progeny. The law has no control of a person until it takes him into custody, and it can so take him for crime only on due charge, on oath. Even then it presumes him innocent of the charge until he is convicted on proof beyond a reasonable doubt. When this is done, then the theories of the paper become applicable as to him. As to reformation, it must begin with the statutes. The Secretary.—There is present in the room a lady, an ofllicer appointed to assist in the carrying out of the probation law of Massa- chusetts, and I would be very glad if you would invite her to say a few words. The Chairman.—The new law of probation for criminals, which went into effect in its present form, July i, 1891, in the state of Massa- chusetts, has been hailed by thinking men all over the country as a