Cerberus on Trial
CERBERUS ON TRIAL THAT the treatment of criminals is both muddled and ominous practically everywhere in the United States is as plain as the architecture of a brick kiln. The evidence is not...
...Are we actually getting these results...
...It is likewise clear that isolation as used in many jails has often been cruelly unjust...
...It is not even confined to the dossiers of recent reports, one of them by the Attorney-general of the United States...
...You get it from the writings of almost every intelligent person who has had anything to do with the administration of justice from the police courts to the parole board...
...Indeed, it is abundantly evident that all hope for improvement lies in finding the right sort of leadership, which in turn can give the public authority in exchange for support...
...And whatever else may be said regarding the matter, it is at least sure that something must be done...
...Here, at least, improvement can be effected rather easily...
...He must also be a trained man, even an exceptionally well-trained man...
...The universities have no greater obligation than this to build up a sociological profession, interested not merely in theory or science but schooled in the art of molding human character...
...Humanitarianism has also affected not a few of those to whom society confides the law-breakers...
...Has society itself as a formula of principle based upon reason any adequate knowledge of what it is trying to do with crime...
...Finally, the preventive benefit sought by the imposition of long-term sentences has so increased the number of virtual "lifers" that proper segregation of men who are to be restored to society is impossible...
...But rogues of the worst description, who follow up one deed of violence with another, flit in and out of the penitentiary much as a sufferer from diabetes comes and goes from his doctor's office...
...It must seek its safety, calmly and resolutely...
...It is clear, for instance, that the Mutual Welfare League, a form of convict self-government which has functioned in at least two New York prisons, is a step too far in the direction of benevolence...
...Similarly, one knows that while the privilege of free trial by a jury of peers has resuited in leniency for dangerous men, the old inquisitorial system (so often identified with the benighted past) has been restored in forms which are particularly menacing because secret and all but illegal...
...Prisons cannot be both corrective institutions and penal colonies...
...The habit of erecting a pet virtue into a civil law must be curtailed if we are to keep what remains of our social integrity from disintegrating entirely...
...The real danger point in the whole situation is the utter confusion of ideas regarding the nature of penal justice...
...Humanitarianism has set up waves of mere sentiment, of cheap bosh, which play around a succession of desperate offenders like a flood of pink calcium light...
...The policeman is properly a guardian, a soldier...
...Two things ought, however, to follow from such actions: first, that those who are executed are really those who most directly menace their fellow-men...
...On the other hand there are concurrent waves of vindictiveness, which are not content merely to bubble round actual offenders but which fashion new modes of crime and then clamor for their punishment...
...So long as we confide the major problems of criminology to the police and the juries, there is no hope for real progress...
...In certain respects this worker has learned to agree with his fellows, and there is really something like a codex of psychiatric and preventive rules...
...second, that those who are jailed should either remain there as long as they are dangerous, or be corrected so that upon release they will be as gentle as lambs...
...But it is almost as necessary that our criminal Charon, in control of the passing from virtue to crime, should exercise his function with a certain semblance of common sense.n sense...
...And not the least part of that something is to forestall the creation of further crimes...
...Much of it may be wrong, but the only way mistakes can be corrected is through taking advantage of experience...
...We do not profess to have any remedy for the situation...
...Neither can tell us what to do...
...But what is its fundamental value, if it cannot be correlated either with public opinion or the administration of justice...
...That most of our prisons are terrible holes, antiquated, uncomfortable and vice-ridden, is news which might be discounted to some extent by the reflection that they remain, after all, better than the jails of fifty years ago...
...The evidence is not limited to the abundant supply furnished by a series of bloody riots...
...A glance at the trial records certainly indicates that the severest penalties are meted out to citizens whose sins have been unique and born in anger...
...Therefore it exacts the death penalty of certain malefactors and places others under lock and key...
...Retaliation has never in all history been a cure...
...During more than a century humanitarianism has been attacking the old conception of the criminal...
...the jury is a witness to guilt or innocence...
...others go to the opposite extreme and pattern their souls upon the model of the exceedingly well-done egg...
...Some of them are veritable sob sisters...
...Cerberus, the watch-dog, is on trial...
...The modern jailer, in short, is a person instructed by the public to accomplish two things which are diametrically contradictory...
...The logical outcome was the social worker, who brings a variety of sciences to bear upon delinquency...
...Today the leader cannot be merely a person who has had experience...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 9
