554
Tlic Green Bag.
does not merely consist in inflicting pain, although the presence of this element is essential to its efficacy: it consists rather in inflicting pain in such a way as will tend to discipline and reform the character. Such a conception of punishment excludes the bar barous element of vengeance; it is based upon the civilized ideas of justice and humanity, or rather upon the sentiment of justice alone, for justice is never truly just except when its tendency is also to humanize." These views of punishment under the criminal code are widely different in scope and effect, from those entertained by the writer in THE GREEN BAG. He would have the criminal flogged because it accords with his idea of criminal punishment, and gives the culprit actual physical pain. And whether or not the ordeal made of the criminal a better citizen would, in his estimation, be a merely secondary and unimportant matter, and more than likely a hopeless task. The writer's position is not endorsed by penologists and those who have made a study of social science, the broader and more humane view taken being that which looks somewhat to the future of the criminal, as well as to the offense committed and its punishment and the effect of the punishment inflicted as an example and a warning. One of the amendments to the Consti tution of the United States provides that "cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted." The writerin "The Popular Science Monthly," above quoted, defines "cruel pun ishments as including such penalties for crimes as are designed to inflict direct physi cal suffering, accompanied by circumstances of ignominy." He cites the whipping-post as an example of such punishment. For it will not be denied that the infliction of the lash does cause physical pain, and the writer in THE GREEN BAG admits that when a whipping is imposed on a man, "it is and always was a mark of degradation in the eyes of the communitv." Can anv civilized and
progressive country afford to stand sponsor for such manifest iniquitous statutes? The writer in THE GREEN BAG says the criminal is degraded by his brutal act and heart, and "is further degraded by the whipping to which he may be sentenced. So far as concerns his relations to his particular friends and associates, he ought to be, and this, however we may deplore his fall in the eyes of the world at large, is a strong argu ment for the infliction of this particular penalty. The social sting often goes deeper. A man hates to lose caste among those with whom he associates familiarly. The term 'jail-bird' shows how the community regards the man who has been once sentenced to imprisonment. But his mates often look upon him as none the worse for it. He has simply been unlucky. Let him be stripped and put under the lash, however, and he sinks in their estimation. It may, indeed, have another tendency from that fact. It may drive him from out of their company into that of honest men again." Here is an admission of the infliction of a cruel punishment, the effect of which is farreaching in the future career of the criminal. To argue, however, that it may induce the man who has been hopelessly degraded in the eyes of respectability and of his criminal associates, to seek associates in the future who wall forgive and forget his crime and his disgrace, among the non-criminal class, is about as reasonable as to expect water to flow up-hill. Nothing could be farther from the domain of probability. The better nature of the individual is rarely reached in that unexpected way. The tendency of such unusual punishments is to make the criminal class worse and to augment its numbers, and to have, generally, a demoralizing and brutalizing effect on all classes. It does not deter crime. Even in Delaware this is not claimed. And who, by the way, was ever known to refer to Delaware's local govern ment as pre-eminently clean and orderly? It is reported that there.is a public sentiment
