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Prequel to Colleges for Crime/Warehouses for the Unwanted: Why American Reform Institutions Won’t Work by Jack Lawrence
Here is some background information and quotes on instutitions for the service that Jack Lawrence will be giving entitled: “Colleges for Crime/Warehouses for the Unwanted: Why American Reform Institutions Won’t Work,” and it will be on November 28, 2004.
This will be Part IV of the “Are We Losing Our Jeffersonian Liberties?” services.
QUOTABLE QUOTES ON CRIME & PUNISHMENT
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison—air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the warden is Despair.
—Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Whom God would drive mad,
First he must send to his hell—hole.
—Ezra Pound
Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character; and then he is never made radically better for its influence.While we diminish the stimulant of fear, we must increase to prisoners the incitements of hope: in proportion as we extinguish the terrors of the law, we should awaken and strengthen the control of the conscience.
—Dorothea Dix, Remarks on Prisons & Prison Discipline in the United States
...Channing went on to link the failure of family training directly to deviant behavior. Of the 156 inmates recently admitted [1844] to Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary ...fourteen had been orphaned by age 12, 36 were missing one parent or another soon thereafter, 143 had no religious instruction, and 144 never attended Sabbath School. ‘Such staristics,’ affirmed the minister, ‘tell at a glance that early neglect was certainly, in part, probably in great part, the cause of after crime.’....’The study of the causes of crime,’ he concluded, ‘may lead us to its cure.
—Founding member, William Henry Channing (cousin of William Ellery Channing, and also a Unitarian minister), in first annual report (1844) of the New York Prison ssn., excerpted in Rothman, David J., The Discovery of the Asylum (Little, Brown, & Co., 1971), pp. 73—74. Henry was more active as a reformer than his cousin, it appears.)
Thousands of convicts are made so in consequence of a faulty organization of society....They are thrown upon society as a sacred charge; and that society is false to its trust, if it neglects any means for their reformation.
—Samuel Gridley Howe, An Essay on Separate and Congregate Systems of Prison Discipline (Boston, 1846), p. 79 (Here, ‘Congregate’ equals the Auburn system, to which Dix and Howe were opposed.)
Many commit the same crime with a very different result.One bears a cross for his crime; another a crown.
—Juvenal
The Criminal Law
The Science of Penology, in these days, is chiefly in the hands of sentimentalists, and in consequence it shows all the signs of glycosuria. The idea seems to be to turn the dungeons and bullpens of the law into laboratories of the uplift, so that the man who goes in a burglar will come out a Y.M.C.A. secretary. To this end all harsh handling of the felon is frowned upon, and on the slightest showing of renascent piety in him he is delivered from his cage, almost with apologies.......and so the problem of dealing effectively with crime remains a puzzle, and crime itself continues to flourish. ...society, in order to protect the weak and botched against the bold and original, has had to proclaim certain acts, under certain circumstances, as too dangerous to be permitted, and hence as what we call criminal. Most of us aspire to the majority of these acts in secret, and some of us commit them surreptitiously, but the man who performs them in such a manner that the fact becomes notorious is a menace to the security of the rest of us, and we go through the solemn hocus—pocus of seizing him and trying him, and pump up indignation over his rascality, and finally visit upon him the thing called punishment.
The trouble with this so—called punishment, in a great many cases, is that it is hypocritical and dishonest at bottom, and thus at constant war with abstract justice and common sense. What we find practically is a crowd of poltroons in the jury box venting their envious hatred of enterprise and daring upon a man who, at worst, is at least as decent as they are; and a scoundrel on the bench lording it over a scoundrel in the dock because the latter is less clever than he is. In the old days this ill nature took the form of floggings, mutilations and damnations. In our own days, with an evil conscience gnawing the gizzard of the world, it takes the shape of formalities which tend to grow more and more ineffective, sentimental and meaningless. In particular, it takes the shape of a grotesquely circumscribed repertoire of penalties, so that the business of fitting the punishment to the crime becomes more and more difficult, even to the stray judge with intelligence.... The medieval judge had an almost unlimited series of choices; if no habitual punishment suited his purposes, he could devise a new one to fit the case....
Many old punishments deserve revival: ducking, whipping, transportation, branding, forfeiture of goods.... In the South Seas we have scores of almost uninhabited islands. Why not ship our felons out there and let them learn discipline by preying on one another? Or send them to Arkansas to butcher the politicians and the clergy? It is not only a way to get rid of them,...; it is a way to civilize Arkansas and the South Seas....
Excerpted from Mencken, H.L., A Mencken Chrestomathy (Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., 1953), pp. 112—118.
“Rule III: It is easier to convict ‘guilty’ defendants by violating the Constitution than by complying withiit, and in some cases, it is impossible to convict guilty defendants without violating the Constitution.Rule IV: Almost all police lie about whether they violated the Constitution .in order to convict ‘guilty’ defendants.
Rule V: All prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys are aware of Rule IV. Rule VI: Many prosecutors implicitly encourage police to lie about whether they violated the Constitution in order to convict guilty defendants. Rule VII: All judges are aware of Rule VI. Rule VIII:Most trial judges preten to believe police officers who they know are lying.
Rule IX: All appellate judges are aware of Rule VIII, yet many pretend to believe the trial judges who pretend to believe the lying police officers.
Rule X: Most judges disbelieve defendants about whether their constitutional rights have been violated, even if they are telling the truth.
Rule XIII:Nobody really wants justice.”
Excerpted from: Dershowitz, Alan M., The Best Defense (Vintage Books, Random House, N.Y., 1983), Intro, P. xii.
“As Miss Dix had gone from penitentiary to penitentiary and from prison to prison, she had been struck with the divergence of theory underlying their operation. It seemed to her that certain broad principles should govern the conduct of all penal institutions and that reformation of the individual, and not social revenge, should be the motivating thought... .She was incensed at the wretched health conditions in some of the larger prisons. Strong men were compelled to work all day at hard manual labor... then were denied the privilege of a bath at night. At Sing Sing when the water supply was low the men were on rare occasions allowed to bathe in the river. Not until 1844 did Rhode Island.. .decide that convicts in good health might be permitted to take a warm bath once in 3 months. Everywhere poor food, dark cells, and solitary confinement spread a foul discontent that undermined all hope for regenerating the criminal.”“Abraham Simmons.. .was discovered in the town of Little Compton. He was confined in a stone floored cell seven feet square. It was double doored and double locked, and without light or ventilation. The day that Miss Dix visited poor Simmons, the walls of his cell were coated with an inch of frost. The two comforts which made his bed were wet and the outer one was frozen stiff. The man himself, chattering and shivering, was tethered to the stone floor by an ox chain.”
'Sometimes he screams dreadfully and that is the reason we had the double walls and the two doors,' explained the woman.... 'His cries disturb us in the house.' 'How long has he been here?' inquired Miss Dix. 'Oh, above three years,' was the answer. “Despite the attendant’s protests that the man would kill her, Miss Dix walked into the cell, spoke gently to Simmons, took his hands and began to warm them in her own. She talked to him of release and care and kindness, the dim light of the lantern revealed a tear stealing down his hollow cheek.... 'My husband,' remarked the woman, 'sometimes of a morning rakes out half a bushel of frost, and yet he never freezes.'"
Marshall, Helen E., Dorothea Dix: Forgotten Samaritan (UNC Press/Russell & Russell, N.Y. 1937), pp. 99—100.
“HUNTINGDON COUNTY has no poor-house; but the poor are boarded with those who name the lowest receivable price. From the best information the idiots, epileptics, and insane, in this county, may be estimated at about sixty....”“I seldom refer to cases existing in private families, and never by name; but there is one in Huntingdon County, so well known, and so publicly exposed, that I feel a description of his condition, as given to me by a citizen, will be in place here, and serve to illustrate the fact that there are terrible sufferings, and miseries which call for speedy relief.... Immediately adjacent to the house is a small shanty, constructed of boards placed obliquely against each other. In this wretched hovel is a man, whose blanched hair indicates advancing years; not clad sufficiently for.. .decency; 'fed; like the hogs, and living worse; in filth, andnot half covered: the decaying wet straw upon the ground, only increases the offensiveness of the place.' In the rains of summer, and the frosts of winter, he is alike exposed to the influence of the elements. There is no fire of course. There is no room for such a luxury as a fireplace or stove! And there you may see him now, affording a spectacle so miserable and revolting, that you are thankful to retreat from a scene you have no authority to ....... .
Excerpted from: Dix, Dorothea, On Behalf of the Insane Poor: Selected Reports, chapter entitled, “Memorial Soliciting A State Hospital for the Insane,” submitted to the Legislature of Pennsylvania, Feb. 3, 1845.
