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 With the Compliments of 
 The Prisoners' Aid Association of Canada. 
 
 
 How to Treat 
 
 The Criminal Classes* 
 
 By Lyman Abbott, D.D. ^^^^ 
 
 n.f:- 
 
 L..^i 
 
 
 
 TORONTO : 
 
 DUDLEV 4 BuHNS, PniNTrRS. 
 
 1896. 
 
 
How to Treat the Criminal Classes. 
 
 BY LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D. 
 
 There 're in every community avowed and open enemies 
 of the social order, men who disregard it and are endeavour- 
 ing to break it down and to destroy it. They are what we 
 call the criminal class. Some of these criminals drift into 
 crime ; some of them perpetrate occasional crime ; some are 
 educated for crime ; some consecrate themselves to crime as 
 their profession, as men consecrate themselves to medicine, 
 law, or theology. And they are a very * onsiderable class. It 
 is estimated that in the United States, if you take all the crimi- 
 nals and all the people who are dependent upon the criminals, 
 something like one in every seventy belongs to the criminal 
 class. And this criminal class has been, on the whole, increas- 
 ing throughout Christendom. In Great Britain apparently 
 not, though the statistics do not fully agree ; but in Spain it is 
 said to have doubled within ten years ; in France to have 
 increased several hundred per cent, within the last quarter of 
 a century ; and in the United States to have increased one- 
 third faster than the population since the Civil War. 
 
 These are very serious facts. What are we to do with these 
 enemies of the social order ? Hov shall we treat them ? 
 
 *A sermon preached at Plymouth Church, Brooklju. Reported 
 stenographically, and revised by the author for the Outlook. 
 
 I 
 
Society has very often given two answers to this question. It 
 has sometimes said, Get rid of them. The simplest way to 
 get rid of them is to kill theui. Until a very recent period 
 that was the method ordinarily pursued. In Great Britain, 
 under Henry VIII., two hundred and sixty-three crimes were 
 punished with death ; and even as late as the close of the last 
 century, two hundred crimes were so punished. It is esti- 
 mated that in the reign of Henry VIII , 72,000 persons were 
 hung in Great Britain. And it is even said by some authori- 
 ties in penology that one reason why the criminal class is not 
 increasing in Great Britain is that the progenitors and 
 ancestors were killed off by that remorseless process in past 
 centuries. 
 
 Bui we are now too humane to continue that process. We 
 no longer kill them. But we banish them. We send them 
 to Botany Bay. I have seen it seriously proposed to organize 
 a penal colony in Alaska. Why ? To get rid of them. 
 France sends them to a chain-gang. We send them to the 
 prison and shut them up and forget them. A boy steals an 
 apple from an orchard ; steals a lot of apples ; he keeps on 
 stealing apples. What shall we do with him ? We bring him 
 before a magistrate and send him to a gaol and lock the door 
 on him and forget about him. Do you know what a gaol is ? 
 I read a description of an American gaol from General 
 BrinkerhofiT, of Ohio, who is an authority on penology : 
 
 " To establish a school of crime requires (1) teachers skilled in the 
 theory and practice of crime ; (2) pupils with inclination, opportunity, 
 and leisure to learn ; (S) a place of meeting together. All these 
 recjuirements are provided and paid for by the public, in the creation, 
 ort;ani/.ation, and e(juipment of county gaols and city prisons. With 
 less than half a dozen exceptions, all the gaols and city prisons in the 
 United States are s(diools of this kind, and it is difficult to conceive 
 how a more efficient system for tlie education of criminals could be 
 devised. . . Every observant gaoler knows with what devilish skill 
 
the profesBors of this school ply their vo<!ation. Hour after hour they 
 beguile tiie weariness of enforced continunient with marvellous tales of 
 successful crime, and the methods by which escajjc has been accom- 
 plished. If attention fails, games of chance, interspersed with obscene 
 jokes and ribald songs serve to amuse aiul Mhile away the time. In 
 this way the usual atmosphere of a gaol is made so foul that the 
 stamina of a saint is scarce strong enough to resist. Let a prisoner 
 attempt to be decent, and to resist the contaminating influences 
 brought to bear upon him, especially in a large gaol, and he will find 
 that, so far as personal comfort is concerned, lie might as well he in a 
 den of wild beasts." 
 
 That is what comes of the attempt to solve the penal 
 problem by simply locking the criminal up and forgetting him. 
 
 The other remedy — it seems worse, but I am inclined to 
 think it is in some respects better — is to hate the criminal and 
 hurt him ; and, lest you should think what I say to you is 
 rather strong language, I will read from an authority on thi<= 
 subject. I read from Sir James Stephen's " History of Crimi- 
 nal Law " : 
 
 " 1 think it highly desirable that criminals should be hated, that 
 the punishment inflicted upon them should be so contrived as to give 
 expression to that hatred, and to justify it so far as the public pro- 
 vision of means for expressing and gratifying a natural healthy senti- 
 ment can justify and encourage it." 
 
 This man has done society a wrong ; he is a wicked man, 
 so we must hate him. We must give expression to that hate 
 by hurting him. We will put him in the pillory, and fling 
 stones or rotten eggs at him ; we will tie him to the whipping- 
 post and beat him ; we will send him to the prison and make 
 it as uncomfortable as we can for him. In one form or 
 another we will give expression to the hatred of the man who 
 has done society a wrong. That plan has been tried, and on 
 a large scale. It went along concurrently with the plan of 
 getting rid of the criminals by killing them. Men imagine 
 that the Inquisition in the Middle Ages expressed the rancour 
 
6 
 
 and bitterness of the Church. They are mistaken. The 
 cruelty was not of the Inquisition, it was of the Middle Ages ; 
 and the same cruelty which was expressed in punishment of 
 heresy was expressed in punishment of all other crimes. The 
 Church simply said, Heresy is a crime. Then society said» 
 You are to hate the criminal and you are to hurt him as much 
 as you can ; and this is the way in which society carried out 
 this principle of Sir James Stephen : 
 
 "The wheel, the caldron of boiling oil, burning alive, burying 
 alive, flaying alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the ordinary 
 expedients by which the criminal jurists sougiit to deter crime, by 
 frightful examples which would make a profound impression on a not 
 over-sensitive population An Anglo-Saxon law punishes a female 
 slave convicted of theft by making eighty other female slaves each 
 bring three pieces of wood and burn her to death, while each con- 
 tributes a fine besides. 
 
 " In France women wore customarily burned or buried alive for 
 simple felonies. The criminal code of Charles V., issued in 15.30, is a 
 hideous catalogue of blinding, mutilation, tearing with hot pincers, 
 burning alive, and breaking on the wheel. . . In England to cut 
 out a man's tongue or to pluck out his eyes, with malice prepense, was 
 not made a felony until the fifteenth century, in a criminal law so 
 severe that, even in the reign of Elizabeth, the robbing of a hawk's 
 nest was similarly a felony ; and as recently as 1833 a child of nine 
 was sentenced to be hanged for breaking a patched pane of glass and 
 stealing twopence- worth of paint." 
 
 There is no danger of a revival of that kind of torture ; 
 certainly not. But when Sir James Stephen says we are to 
 hate the criminal and to give expression to that hate, that is 
 not written in 1542, that is modern, and it is the expression 
 of the same philosophy which finds its expression in these 
 horrible cruelties of the Middle Ages. The theory is this : 
 Man i{ endowed with an instinct of vindictive justice ; and he 
 is to gratify that vindictive justice. When a man has done a 
 wong and caused a suffering, he ought to suffer a wrong, and 
 we ought to inflict it. The function of society is to exercise 
 
that vindictive or retributive justice. That is the claim. And 
 in doing this it will deter men from perpetrating crime. The 
 man who has suffered the penalty will not do the wrong again. 
 He will say, It does not pay. And the man who looks on 
 and sees the penalty inflicted, he will not do a like wrong, he 
 will say. It will not pay. And thus society will protect itself 
 from crime. This is the theory. Vindictive justice is the 
 motive ; protection of society the end ; and ti»e deterrent 
 power of fear the means. 
 
 I believe that the whole system that is built up on those 
 three foundation-stones is wrong from foundation-stone to 
 topmost pinnacle. It cannot be reformed. It should be 
 eradicated. It is wrong in every part of it. It is true there is 
 an instinct of retributive justice in man ; and he is to con- 
 sider what is the end for which it is given him, and that end, 
 not the gratification of his blind instinct, is to determine the 
 punishment. 
 
 And as the satisfaction of the sentiment of revenge is not to 
 be the motive, so the protection of society is not to be the 
 aim. Society is not to be satislled always to say, There are 
 700,000 criminals in the United States : how shall we guard 
 ourselves against them ? It is not to corral them and put a 
 fence around them. It is not to secure society from the thief, 
 the robber, the assassin. The protection of society is not the 
 end. It is something higher, it is something better. And the 
 deterrent power of fear is not the means. It has been tried, 
 and it has failed. Men are not deterred from crime by fear. 
 We have broken men on the wheel ; have boiled them alive ; 
 have hung them. We have done it in public. We have 
 gathered the criminal class around the gallows to see the 
 execution and be deterred by the crime, and the man to be 
 
 1 
 
hung has made his speech and " died game," and the meu 
 who gathered to see the execution have gone back to plunge 
 deeper in crime than they did before, Severe penalty insti- 
 gates, duplicates, multiplies crime. It does not prevent. 
 
 I want to make my meaning as to this just as clear as I can. 
 I deny that we have any right to administer justice, if by 
 justice is meant the giving to every wrong deed its proper and 
 just equivalent in penalty. That is not our function. God 
 has r ' authorized us to do it. He has not given to one ma i 
 a right to determine what is the legitimate and proper penalty 
 to fall upon a fellow-sinner for the wrong he has done. On 
 the cjntrary. He says we are not, and He says so clearly and 
 explicitly. Judge not. He says. And by that He does not 
 mean, do not judge unfairly, do not judge inequitably ; He 
 means, Judge not. It is not our business to administer 
 justice 
 
 Hate the criminal and express your hatred, says Sir James 
 Stephen ; he is the enemy of society. Christ says, Love him, 
 and by love cure him. What Christ says, Paul says, possibly 
 even more explicitly : Recompense to no man evil for evil. 
 What does that mean ? Repay to no man the evil for the evil 
 he has done you. Repaying evil to a man because he has 
 done evil against you, this is retributive justice, and Paul says 
 You are not to do it ; when a man has done an evil, you are 
 not to measure what amount of evil is to be given back to 
 him. " Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give 
 place unto wrath : for it is written, Vengeance is Mine ; I will 
 repay, saith the Lord." That word " vengeance " is literally 
 " execute justice." That is what the Greek word means. 
 " Dearly beloved, execute not justice ; I will execute justice 
 that belongs to Me, saith the Lord." 
 
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 We are neither to get rid of" the crin^'iial, nor nre we to 
 execute justice on the criminal. Our sole, single business in 
 life is to work out redemption. We have not the fight and 
 we have not the capacity to execute ji'scice. " Prisoner at the 
 bar, stand up. You are accused of s'.ealing a pair of shoes ; 
 you are found guilty ; I will determire what i^- the right and 
 just penalty to give to you because yoL stole that pair of shoes." 
 Mr. Judge, are you prepared to do tha^ ? Do you know who 
 that man's father and mother were? Do you know what his 
 ancestry was? Do you know what temptations surrounded 
 him ? Do you know what early influences surrounded him ? 
 Do you know even whether you or he is the worse sinner ? 
 
 And as we have neithei the right nor the capacity, so we 
 have not the power. That is the way we administer justice 
 when we try to adjust the penally to I'.he wrong-doing. Two 
 men — this is not a fanciful case— two men committed a 
 burglary. One of them was an old offender. He had per- 
 suaded the other man to join with him, They were arrested. 
 The younger man was ashamed of himself ; was sick of the 
 wiiole business ; wanted to plead guilty, take his punishment, 
 pay his debt, and begin life over again. He went before a 
 severe judge and received a sentence of twenty years' im- 
 prisonment. The old offender knew of that judge's severity, 
 got a shrewd lawyer, had his case put off, got himself brought 
 before a good natured judge, and received three years' im- 
 prisonment. Cio before some j\ dges for sentence before 
 diwiier and you will get one kind of a setitence , go after 
 d'nner and you will get another kind of a sentence. After 
 all, judges are very much like the rest of us. I am not con- 
 demning judges ; I am condemning the vhole attempt on the 
 part of n.ankind to determine how penalty should be adjusted 
 to the wrong-doing. 
 
10 
 
 Christ tells us we are not to undertake to administer justice 
 — that is to say, this wrong-doing deserves this amount of 
 penalty : now visit it on the criminal. What then ? We are 
 to administer redemption. And from the beginning to the 
 end of our criminal system, from the letter A to the letter Z, 
 from the very starting-point to its final consummation, there 
 is to be one object, and only one object — namely, the reforma- 
 tion of the offender. It is not to be the satisfaction of retribu- 
 tive justice, it is not to be the protection of society ; it is to 
 be, simply, solely, singly, the reformation of the wrong-doer, 
 and the reformation of the class to which the wrong-doer 
 belongs. 
 
 In the first place, its root is not to be hatred of the criminal, 
 it is to be love and pity for the criminal. Philosophers all 
 discriminate between sin and crime. There is a distinction. 
 What is it ? Sin is any violation of God's law. Crime is any 
 violation of man's law. Some crimes are not sins. It was a 
 crime to give a glass of water to a fugitive slave in 1850, but 
 it was not a sin. Now, how does God treat men when they 
 violate His law ? He comes to earth ; He identifies Himself 
 with them ; He be:.;s their stripes in His own person ; He 
 suffers the penalty of their wrong-doing, and by His own life 
 and sufferings here on the earth He endeavors to reclaim 
 them. And then He turns to them and says, Even as Je.^us 
 Christ forgave you, so also do you. 
 
 Do not misunderstand me ; do not think I am arguing for 
 sensationalism ; do not think I approve of sending flowers and 
 cakes to prisoners. It is said that when a man is in prison 
 for murdering his wife, he is almost sure to have offers of 
 marriage received from women, in case he gets out. That is 
 not the kind of pity I am speaking for. It is not sentiment. 
 
 f' 
 
 fi 
 
11 
 
 It is the sense in one's self. Here is a horrible calamity that 
 has come upon this man : how can we help him to a new and 
 better life ? Christ treats sin as disease, and He comes to 
 cure the disease. We shall nnt start our criminal system 
 aright until we get wholly rid oi this notion that we are to 
 hate the criminal and hurt him, and come back to the funda- 
 mental Christian notion that we are to love and pity and 
 redeem and cure the criminal. That is to be the starting- 
 point. Love is to be the motive, the inspiration. And, that 
 being the inspiration, everything is to be attuned and set to 
 that. 
 
 In the first place, to give some specifications, imprison- 
 ment ought not to be the first penalty. In Massachusetts 
 they are trying what they call a probation system. It is work- 
 ing, apparently, very well. When any child is arrested, he is 
 not first sent to a prison. The State official whose function 
 it is to be the guardian of such children, is called into requisi- 
 tion. He is told to examine the case. He brings his report 
 to the judge. If it will do, the boy is sent back to his home, 
 and then the guardian is to keep an eye on him. If he has 
 not any home, or any adequate home, the guardian finds a 
 home for him. If there is not any home that can be found 
 for him, the guardian puts him into an institution. The 
 institution is the third and last resort. Whether the method 
 is right or wise is not the question—the spirit is admirable. 
 What Massachusetts is doing for children it is also beginning 
 to do for men— for there are some men that are twenty-one 
 who are children in will-power, and even in intellect. The 
 great majority of criminals are weak. 
 
 When a man is sentenced, the sentence should be adjusted 
 with reference, not to the crime he has committed, but wholly 
 
12 
 
 to the cure to be accomplished. Not that this ideal could be 
 instantly reached, but that this ideal is to be kept constantly 
 in view. I confess I am amazed at our patient folly. We 
 arrest a man in New York for drunkenness ; we send him up 
 to the Island for ten days ; he stays there just long enough to 
 get sober, and then he is discharged. He comes back to New 
 York; in twenty-four hours he is arrested again for drunken- 
 ness and sent to the Island again for ten day.s. There are 
 men in New York who spend two-thirds of the time on the 
 Island. We are paying Police Justices in New York for that 
 operation. What we ought to do is this : When the man is 
 arrested for his first drunkenness, his friends should be found, 
 if he has any ; when he is arrested for the second or the third 
 or the fourth, patience should be exercised : but when the 
 right time comes, he should be put into an institution, the 
 object of which is to cure men of inebriacy, and if he cannot 
 be cured, he should stay there the rest of his life. You say. 
 Would you imprison a man for life for getting drunk ? No ! 
 I would not ; but I would keep him in an institution for life 
 rather than let him come out to prey upon the community by 
 his drunkenness. 
 
 The sentence should be adjusted wholly with reference to 
 the remedy Men will say. Can you be sure the man is cured ? 
 No ! we cannot. Will you not have some men discharged as 
 cured who will come out and prey on society ? Certainly. 
 We cannot do anything perfectly in this life. We cannot 
 adjust the penalty adequately to the crime committed. But 
 under the one system over fifty per cent, come back and prey 
 upon society again, and under the other system less than 
 twenty per cent. 
 
 When the man is in the prison, all the discipline of the 
 
 •c 
 
r 
 
 13 
 
 prison should be conducted with simple reference to reforma- 
 tion. It is a disgrace to our nineteenth-century civilization 
 that boys should be sent to ich a i^^aol as that General 
 Brinkerhoff describes. It is done every day in this State of 
 New York. When the man is arrested, separate confinement 
 should be the beginning ; he should be put by himself and 
 studied there by himself for the first month, or six months, or, 
 as in England, nine months, before he should be allowed to 
 mingle with his fellows. The mingling then should be under 
 such authority as to prevent the increasing and stimulating of 
 crime. There should be schools in the prison for the purpose 
 of teaching this man how to earn a livlihood by honest inuustry 
 when he comes out. There should be an industrial system— 
 not to make money, but to make men. We have gotten rid 
 of the contract system in this State. Formerly we took 
 p.isoners, put them in State prison, sold their labour to a con 
 tractor, and told him to see how much he could get oi.t of the 
 prisoners. And the man who went in hating industry came 
 out hating industry worse than ever. Industry should be 
 organized for the purpose of making the man industrious, not 
 for the purpose of making the prison self-supporting. 
 
 The plan which I have hinted at underlies what is known 
 as the Elmira Reformatory system ; it underlies the probation 
 system of Massachusetts; it underlies the separate confine- 
 ment, (iroup these all together, and out of them construct 
 the ideal system for the moment. A man is arrested ; he is 
 brought before the court. Inquiry is made into his life, his 
 character, his surroundings, his friends. If it is found that he 
 has some friends who will be responsible for him, who will 
 take care of him, who will see that this thing does not occur 
 again, he is put under the tutelage of these friends. If it is 
 
14 
 
 found that he has no such friends, or that no such trust can 
 be reposed in them, or that his criminality is too firmly fixed, 
 he is sent to a prison, put into a separate cell, compelled to 
 reflect. His industry is carried on in his cell; he is kept 
 separate from the other prisoners ; is not allowed to come out 
 into fellowship until he has proved some degree of submission 
 to authority, some degree of readiness for reform. Then he 
 is put into a school and into a workshop ; but the work is 
 organized to secure development, not to secure money for the 
 State or the prison ; and the school is organized for the moral 
 culture as well as the intellectual culture of this man. His 
 record is kept. There are three grades in the prison. He 
 begins ai the lowest; if he falls back he is put back into 
 cellular confinement ; if he goes forward he is put into the 
 second grade ; if he still improves, he is put into the third. 
 A court sits in the prison to determine the length of his 
 imprisonment ; and when he has proved that he is able to 
 earn an honest livelihood and is determined to earn an honest 
 livelihood, then some employment is found outside where he 
 can earn an honest livelihood, and he is set free. 
 
 I want you to notice two things: one, that, though this 
 redemptive system is not yet perfected, it protects society 
 better than the punitive system. When a man is killed, it is 
 true he will not trouble society any more, but when he is 
 reformed he will not trouble society any more ; and experi- 
 ence demonstrates that the way to reform those that lie out- 
 side the circle is to reform the men that lie within it. And 
 the second thing I want you to notice is this : An English 
 writer criticises the Elmira Reformatory. He says. Perhaps it 
 does discharge eighty per cent cured, but what is its effect on 
 the criminal population outside? It does not deter them. 
 
15 
 
 He is mistaken. One of the Judges of the Criminal Courts 
 of New York tells me that criminals plead not to be sent to 
 Elmira under the indeterminate sentence. The criminal 
 would rather take ten years in Sing Sing than a chance of 
 getting out of the Elmira Reformatory in five years. For the 
 one thing a determined criminal does not want is to be put 
 under influences that are all the time saying to him, You shall 
 be honest ; the one thing he hates is to be reformed. 
 
 Redemption and retribution are, so far as this world is con- 
 cerned, different spellings of tTie same word ; and the best and 
 most effective deterrent is a penalty which holds the grip of 
 law on the wrong-doer until he becomes a right-doer. Christ's 
 method of dealing with the enemies of society is to treat them 
 as diseased men ; to pity them, not to hate them ; and to 
 administer for them a system of redemption, not to attempt 
 the impossible task of administering a system of retributive 
 justice.