Chapter VI: The Treatment of the Criminal (2)

The bathing and massage formed a very important part of the treatment. The routine, after several trials, resolved itself into three baths a week--_i.e._, one tub and two vapour baths one week, followed the next week by two tub baths and one vapour. “The tub bath consisted in placing a man in a tub of water heated to about 100° F., and leaving him there to rub and soap himself for fifteen minutes or longer. From the tub he was placed upon a marble slab, where he was drenched with hot and cold water and sponged. After this the body was spatted until the skin was in a glow, the muscles pinched and kneaded, passive motions of the joints employed, followed by a brisk rubbing with a coarse wash-towel or Turkish bathing mitten, all this being done by a professional trainer, who was available at the time. Being obliged to make use of the facilities at hand, the vapour bath was the moist instead of the dry or heated air, and consisted of turning steam into a room, and maintaining an atmosphere of 115° F.” This was followed by massage as before. After the bath the men usually slept until dinner time.

After dinner they were put through two hours or more of active physical exercise. In the beginning this consisted of the drill employed in the case of raw recruits, supplemented by dumb-bell exercises. At first they were an awkward squad, slow to comprehend an order and deliberate in its execution. It was some weeks before they were able to march in line and to keep step.

On November 7th the class was discontinued, and the men were assigned to various shops and employments.

The results of this treatment were in every respect remarkable. As they slowly advanced in their studies an increased mental activity was noted, and the workings of the mind were less forced and laborious than at the beginning. In mental arithmetic they made progress, and were able, with comparative ease and rapidity, to add three or four single numbers. “The drill and discipline they were subjected to wrought an improvement in their physical condition. The baths and stimulation of the cutaneous system brought the skin to the highest degree of functional activity, overcoming the integumentary disorders of five noted in the beginning. The daily drill and dumb-bell exercises hardened and developed muscles that previously were soft and flabby, and the entire muscular system acquired firmness and power. The setting-up drill improved the carriage and conferred a rapidity of action not before indulged in. The aimless shuffling gait gave way to a carriage inspired by elastic muscles and supple joints. The faces parted with the dull and stolid look they had in the beginning, assuming a more intelligent expression, while the eye gained a brightness and clearness that before was conspicuous by its absence. With physical culture and improvement there came a mental awakening, a cerebral activity never before manifested in their prison life. The purely animal man with his ox-like characteristics seemed to recede before the intellectual. Their progress in school-work was not steadily onward, but intermittently progressive.” Whereas in the six months before the class was formed the men had obtained less than 10/11 of a mark (for demeanour, labour, and school) per man each month, during the six months that followed the breaking-up of the class the number of marks earned was 7-7/16 per month per man. There was a simultaneous and rapid improvement, moral, physical, and intellectual--an improvement that was common to all, although more pronounced in some, and which was very encouraging, considering the material of which the class was formed. A year later several had been released on parole, and were demonstrating their ability to maintain themselves honestly, while only two of them, still in prison, were not doing well.[108]

The results of this and similar experiments have been so satisfactory that a fully-equipped gymnasium and Turkish bath are now in course of erection at Elmira. “Here,” Dr. Wey tells me, “we propose to treat those who are in arrears both in body and mind, and prepare them for work and study in the schools of letters and trades. By this plan it is possible to impress later the mind to a greater degree than could be done by taking up its cultivation at the time the man comes to us.”

In 1888, when the Yates bill became law, the productive prison industries of Elmira had to be suspended. “Within less than a month,” writes Dr. Wey, “from the passage of the bill, all the men who previously were employed in productive industries (industries yielding revenue) were being drilled in military evolutions and tactics. In other words, idleness was avoided by turning the prison into a military school. The men received from four to six hours of drill daily, which was sufficient to prevent them from rusting in their cells. By this means the health of the men was maintained, and opportunity was afforded for increasing the scope of school-work, trades, and letters. A drum corps was formed, and instruction given others in instrumental music, with the sequence that to-day [29th October 1889] we have a drum and fife corps of about twenty, and a band composed of twenty or more wind instruments.[109] Two afternoons a week are devoted to military work, the balance being devoted to technical instruction. The effect of the military drill and discipline was so good in the way of a health measure and in improving the carriage of the men that I doubt if it will soon be discontinued. It was another phase of the application of physical training.” The report of the able superintendent of Elmira, Mr. Z. R. Brockway, fully confirms these conclusions.

Just now the industries of New York prisons are partially re-established. The Fassett bill, passed in the spring of 1889, enabled various industries to be apportioned to the various prisons, one prison not to compete with another, and the number of men engaged in any one industry in a prison not to exceed five per cent. of the total number engaged in the same industry throughout the entire state. The question of productive prison industry is still, however, far from settled.

The physical and industrial education is not the whole of the training given at Elmira. A third, and scarcely less important, factor is the moral and æsthetic training. There is no official chaplain at Elmira. “There is,” says Mr. Brockway, “in the minds of men, as observed during imprisonment, an unexplained but actual repugnance to professional, official, and stereotyped religious phrases, while for the noble character of the practical Christian, in common affairs, unheralded and unnamed, there is among prisoners a quick and favourable response.” Although there are no resident chaplains, various ministers and others--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish--attend frequently, and hold services, lectures, classes, etc. The class in Practical Morality, originated a few years ago by Professor Collin, has been judiciously managed, and has proved a valuable feature in the work. The æsthetic culture has been chiefly carried on by means of the systematic study of literature. The results in this department have been unexpectedly encouraging. At first the men met the attempt with sullen stupidity as a new task imposed upon them. Gradually this impression was conquered; the men slowly began to acquire an eager appetite for Chaucer and Shakespeare, for Emerson and Browning. The applications for admission to the English Literature class became very numerous, and at one time there was so great a run on Jowett’s Plato at the Reformatory library that a special regulation had to be made concerning its issue. It is satisfactory to learn that this taste has, in many cases at all events, survived incarceration, as a wholesome recreation for leisure hours. “In my work with the class in English Literature,” writes the instructor in that department, Mr. Douglas, “I proceed on the basis that the earnest obligatory study--let me emphasise the word _study_--of mental and moral beauty developes or creates the mental and moral faculty of appreciation; and, furthermore, that mental and moral habits may be formed just as certainly as physical habits, and without any more conscious co-operation of the individual than is required in physical practice.” It has been mentioned already that a newspaper, the _Summary_, is published within the Reformatory; it contains both local and general news, as well as passages from good authors; the inmates contribute to this paper, and at one time it was ably edited by a prisoner. It has been said, with justice, that the _Summary_ compares favourably with the average American newspaper published outside prison walls.

The prison, as Professor Collin remarks, must be “a moral hospital.” As Sir Thomas More said long ago, the end of punishment is “nothing else but the destruction of vices and the saving of men.” Mr. Brockway, and those who are working with him, have clearly realised this; the training they give is rational and scientific, and hence its success. During the thirteen years from the opening of the Reformatory to the end of 1889, nearly 4000 prisoners were received at Elmira on an indefinite sentence. Over 2300 of these were paroled, and of these 15.2 per cent. only are estimated as having “probably returned to criminal practices and contact.”

Elmira is at present the most promising direction in which we can turn for light on the treatment of the criminal. Its wholesome and improving discipline stands in favourable contrast to the lax indulgence and shameful neglect of the criminal which coexist generally in the United States. The system is not perfect, and it has been unfavourably reported on by some observers. It is undoubtedly a defect that the prisoner must be released, whatever his condition, at the expiring of his legal maximum sentence; this is, however, an inevitable compromise. Notwithstanding all defects, Elmira is full of encouragement, for it shows us a community awakening to an active sense of its duties, so long forgotten, towards those weaker members who, if neglected, become so dangerous to themselves and to others. “It is an interesting sight,” remarks Dr. Wey, “when the school is in session, to see a group of men, felons every one, gathered about an instructor, intently listening as he makes clear some step in the work in hand not fully or clearly understood, going through the various processes, one by one, and explaining until the dullest mind can comprehend. It is not expected that, with the comparatively limited time for instruction, these men will become skilled mechanics. But rather the idea has been to train the hand and eye, and teach the use of tools, to awaken an ambition to pursue a lawful calling, and appreciate the value of a practical knowledge of a trade, so that when the time shall come that they pass beyond the prison doors, and again come into contact with society, they will not be handicapped by the same conditions that formerly operated to their detriment; but with increased resources of mind and body will be enabled to occupy a higher and more self-respecting place.”[110] The example of Elmira is spreading in America; in Ohio, for instance, youthful criminals are being brought up on the broad basis of manual training, and among the branches of industry taught are farming, fruit-growing, carpentry, shoemaking, painting, tailoring, baking, laundring, housework, vocal and band music, telegraphy and printing. On the continent of Europe--especially, perhaps, in Germany--the system is beginning to attract attention; and while it would be too sanguine to conclude that Elmira has solved the question of the treatment of the criminal, there can be no doubt as to the value of its contribution to this difficult problem.[111]

It can scarcely be necessary to say that in any effectual treatment flogging can have no part. It would not have been necessary to say a word on this point if within very recent times an English Parliament had not been found so lamentably ignorant of historic evolution in this matter, of the results of experience, and of rational principles, as to pass a Corporal Punishment Bill. The objections to flogging are by no means of a sentimental character. We have seen that the instinctive criminal, although often cowardly enough, is by no means peculiarly sensitive to pain. Flogging is objectionable because it is ineffectual (as was shown long since), and because it brutalises and degrades those on whom it is inflicted, those who inflict it, and those who come within the radius of its influence. These facts are well known to those who have more than a superficial acquaintance with the insides of prisons, and should have been ascertained by those individuals who presume to legislate, before they voted in the face of reason and experience. To flog a man for whatever offence, however brutal, is to sanction his brutality. Capital punishment, which is brutal like flogging, is comparatively free from the brutalising influence of flogging. The method of flogging is so obviously unfit to humanise and socialise any human being, that the impulse to inflict it can only spring from a relic of savagery of the same kind as that which inspires the criminal, without his excuse of a morbid or defective organisation. It can only be said in excuse of those who advocate it that they have no experience in the matter. Those who have witnessed it have, however, recorded their experiences. Thus, to mention one instance, Sir Robert Rawlinson, after giving a vivid account of flogging as he has himself seen and heard it, adds:--“I will strive in my mind to judge those members of Parliament who now advocate the revival of corporal punishment charitably, by considering that they have never seen it as I have feebly attempted to describe it: the degraded man lashed to the triangles, the white clean skin of an Englishman exposed to the cool morning air, to be scored, cut up, and scarred into a pulpy, blood-smeared lump of living human flesh. Take the vision away: it is too hideous even to remember.” Even if there were less evidence as to the ineffectual character of flogging as a deterrent, and to its bad influence on the _morale_ of a prison, we cannot afford to flog any human being. It is well to meditate on the words of Dostoieffsky, who was familiar with the various forms of flogging, and has recorded his convictions in his _Recollections of the Dead-House_. After giving his opinion that “the rods are the most terrible punishment in use among us,” and speaking of the demoralising influence of flogging on those who inflict it, he concludes:--“Let me add that the possibility of such a licence acts contagiously on the whole of society: such a power is seductive. A society which regards these things with an indifferent eye is already infected to the bone. The right accorded to a man to punish his fellows corporally is one of the sores of our society; it is the surest method of annihilating the spirit of citizenship.” Flogging has not yet reached among us the extension which it then had in Russia and in Siberia, but its character and influence remain the same, and the warning seems to be still needed.

With the indeterminate sentence must always be associated conditional liberation--_i.e._, liberation by ticket-of-leave or on parole, liable to revocation in case of misbehaviour. It is not, however, necessary to insist on this, as the principle has long been practically recognised in England and elsewhere. It exists in Belgium, some of the American states, Hungary, Saxony, Switzerland, the Grand Duchy of Baden, etc.

A very desirable accompaniment to any system of dealing with criminals is a sound system for their registration and recognition. The method originated by M. Alphonse Bertillon is now adopted in France, Russia, Japan, Spain, Italy, the Argentine Republic, and some parts of Germany, and it is being adopted in several of the United States. By this method the height, the length and width of head, the measurements of left foot, of outstretched arms, of trunk when seated, of fourth finger of left hand, of left arm, length of ear, colour of eyes, and any marks are recorded, together with the photograph, profile and full face. The method of classifying the photographs in its simplest form was thus generally described by M. A. Bertillon a few years ago (_Revue Politique et Littéraire_, 28 April 1883). Suppose we have 80,000 photographs. They are first divided according to the sex, the men on one side, the women on the other. These latter do not reach 20,000. The 60,000 men who remain are divided into three classes according to height; the short numbering about 20,000, the middle-sized numbering about 20,000, and the tall 20,000. Each of these divisions is divided into three series according to length of head. These new divisions, to the number of nine, contain rather more than 6000 each. Each of these sub-divisions is then divided into three groups according to length of foot, each group containing about 2000 photographs. Each of these groups is again sub-divided into three, according to length of outstretched arms (_grande envergure_). Each of these groups contains about 600, and they are further sub-divided with reference to age, colour of eyes, and length of middle finger. Thus by means of four new anthropological characters (sex, height, age, and colour of eyes have long been noted) 80,000 photos can be easily divided into groups of 50. The measurements can be taken in two or three minutes, and require no special intelligence. When an individual stands as regards height at the border of two classes, he is put into both.

Thrusting a man into prison, when everything is said, is a measure only to be taken with the utmost circumspection, after consideration of the individual’s antecedents, and a clear conception of the ends to be attained by imprisoning him. To relegate almost indiscriminately to prison the miscellaneous army that file through a police court is an ignorant and dangerous policy; there is little hope of good result, and a considerable chance of evil result. If the period is for a few weeks only no permanent beneficial end can be anticipated, even under the best of conditions; while during so short a period no useful work can be commenced, so that there is a direct incitement to idleness. When the prison has been decided on, the period of detention must be indefinite, according to the results attained in the opinion of those competent officers specially appointed to form such decisions, and the liberation will be conditional.

It is a wholesome sign of progress that in so many European countries substitutes for the prison, in the case of minor offenders (_i.e._, occasional criminals), are being anxiously sought and gradually adopted. One cannot avoid seeing how many individuals are unnecessarily condemned even to penal servitude. In our convict prisons there exists a very excellent plan, entirely in accordance with rational principles, of forming what is called a “Star” class of convicts--that is, a “special class of those not versed in crime.” The authorities “cannot speak too highly of the general tone and behaviour” of these men, their “decidedly good disposition,” “keen anxiety to gain a knowledge of some sort of trade,” sense of “the moral degradation in which they have placed themselves,” etc. Their industry and freedom from prison offences are so marked, “and the special reports on the subject have been so uniformly to the same effect, that it is no longer necessary to call for such reports.” This is all very gratifying, but it is not at all clear that these men should have been convicts at all. There are other and more satisfactory methods of dealing with such persons.

It is not possible here to do more than touch slightly on the various methods of dealing with occasional criminals. The one that approaches most nearly to imprisonment is the method of pronouncing suspended sentences of imprisonment to hang over the inculpated individual during a limited period, at the end of which period, if his behaviour is good, the sentence lapses. Imprisonment is thus, as Mr. Tallack remarks, commuted into liability to imprisonment. This plan, applied to minor offences, was adopted in Belgium in 1888, and is in use in some of the United States. In England the First Offenders’ Act enables the magistrate to accept the prisoner’s own recognisances to come up for judgment if called upon, but the law does not seem to be applied so frequently as is desirable. The old English system of recognisances, in which the guilty party deposits a sum of money, is an excellent guarantee to society against his recidivism, and is deserving of extension to all those cases to which it may prove adapted. This plan has been adopted in the United States and in Denmark. A very large proportion of small offenders can be dealt with adequately by means of a fine. This should not be of too trifling a character when the offence has been frequently repeated, and the means of the offender are ample. Nor does it appear desirable that the offender should be allowed at will to choose between fine and imprisonment. The notion of reparation should be combined with the fine when possible, the offender, as Garofalo proposes, paying an indemnity to the injured person, and a fine to the community. With our abstract and impersonal method of dealing with crime, we are much too apt to forget the recompense that is due to the injured person. Féré has suggested that the State ought to undertake this reparation; the community, he argues, has failed in its duty of protecting one of its members, and it ought therefore to repair the injury which it has not known how to prevent. Crime being largely the result of social conditions, the damage it causes should be supported socially by the society which generated the individual. A more practical first step, however, seems to be a recognition that the criminal should be bound to repair the damage he had caused. This reparation should be on a very liberal scale, and with due regard to the anxiety or suffering inflicted on the injured party. When the offender is not in a position to pay money, there should, as Prins points out (and Sir Thomas More long before him), be suitable provision to enable him to give so many days of his labour to work out his penalty and reparation. In several European countries imprisonment for mendicity, vagabondage, and other minor offences, has been abolished, and compulsory work substituted: this is a reasonable change.

In the slightest cases of all, every end of social protection should be attained by a formal “caution.” The publicity which this involves is itself, under modern conditions of life, a sufficient safeguard.

The special and very numerous class of habitual drunkards must be dealt with by special methods. The method, if method it can be called, of treating such cases by a few days’ imprisonment is glaringly ineffective. It is a waste of public time and money, as well as a danger to the individual himself and to society. Habitual inebriates can only be dealt with fairly when they are recognised as diseased persons, to be treated on rational principles, and to be saved, whether they will or not, from doing injury to society and to themselves. It is incomprehensible that in so drunken a country as England this question should not before now have had serious attention, instead of being left to voluntary agency. To leave habitual alcoholism and its results to voluntary agency is as reasonable as it would be to leave the care and control of the insane to voluntary agency. The case for the control and treatment of the inebriate is, indeed, considerably stronger than that for controlling the insane.

To sum up briefly the points in the treatment of the criminal which have been reviewed in this chapter:--

Capital punishment is disappearing. There is, however, no reason to hasten unduly its complete extinction, because lifelong imprisonment, under existing conditions, is frequently less humane, and is not of greater value for purposes of social protection.

The prison needs to be made a far more active and thorough instrument of social reformation than it is at present. Great circumspection must be shown in selecting the individual whom it is desirable to send to prison, but when selected he must be retained until there is reasonable presumption that he will no longer be dangerous to society. In place of mere routine and surveillance, he must be subjected to intelligent and energetic treatment. While he should usually be guarded from contact with his fellow-prisoners, it is desirable, with due restrictions, to promote his intercourse with selected persons of the outside world. His conditional liberation should be delayed until he can be placed in some situation which will enable him to earn his own living. The plan of fixing beforehand the period of the prisoner’s detention appears to have nothing to recommend it, and should be entirely abolished.

In dealing with occasional criminals whom it is not necessary or desirable to put into prison, liability to imprisonment should be substituted. The system of recognisances and of fines to the community, together with reparation to the injured individual, should be developed and extended to all cases to which it may suitably be applied. When the offender is unable to pay a pecuniary fine, he should not be imprisoned, but compelled to give his work.

The class of habitual drunkards requires special and compulsory treatment in special asylums.