Considerations respecting the policy of some recent legislation in Pennsylvania / by William Parker Foulke.

  • Foulke, William Parker.
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Considerations respecting the policy of some recent legislation in Pennsylvania / by William Parker Foulke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    other considerations which in all communities have led to the prescription of penalties for offences against social order and safety. He regards the laws of such communities as he regards the laws of nature. They may occasion particular incon- venience or suffering, or even seeming injustice, but they are necessary to the common good and must be inflexibly main- tained. The pain which they inflict upon individuals may be an unwelcome subject of reflection, but not the less is it necessary. Between these extremes of sensibility, each of which diverts unduly the views of an observer from what is proper to the other, there has been a constant struggle during the progress of penal reform. The degree of severity to be maintained, the limits of its duration, the kind and number of positive mitigations to be provided, the allowance to be made for mani- festations of repentance in prison, have been discussed without intermission. One of the most familiar examples of such topics is that of pardons. The contest between feeling and the con- victions of duty to the public has exposed most of our Execu- tives to a lamentable harassment. In vain have the clearest requisitions of public policy been put in array against the urgency of friends, of humane citizens, of partisan adherents. Perhaps in no respect has the Philadelphia Prison Society been more steadfastly conservative than in its opposition to the undue exercise of executive clemency. Its records are full of evidence of its firmness in resisting interference, except in rare and very peculiar cases, with that character of inevitableness which all governments have regarded as of vital importance to the efficacy of punishment. Still, the question recurs, may there not be found some intermediate adjustments by which the certainty and reason- able inflexibility of public justice can be reconciled with larger concessions than have been heretofore made to good resolutions and good conduct on the part of convicts in the cells. Can we not make such concessions so to depend upon the self-control and voluntary effort of prisoners, as to ensure at once a pro- tection against useless despondency, and an encouragement to