Clarence Darrow

“ Can crime be cured? If not, can it be wiped out and how? What rights have the public? What rights has the criminal? What obligations does the public owe the criminal? What duties does each citizen owe society?
It must be confessed that all these questions are more easily asked than answered. Perhaps none of them can be satisfactorily answered. It is a common obsession that every evil must have a remedy; that if it cannot be cured today, it can be tomorrow; that man is a creature of infinite possibilities and all that is needed is time and patience. Given these a perfect world will eventuate. ”

“ When it is remembered that the greatest enemy to happiness and life is fear; when we realize that the constant battle of the primitive man was with the fear that peoples the unknown with enemies and dangers; when we remember that in some way, fear of poverty, of disease, of disaster, of loss of friends and life is the ever-present enemy of us all, it is evident that nothing but harm can come from the lessons of fear that are drilled into the victim in prison. Life furnishes countless ways to be kind and helpful and social. It furnishes infinite ways to be cruel, hard and anti-social. ”

“ Day after day they visit the jail and the lawyer, contriving means to save liberty or life. When the trial comes, they watch through its maze in a dazed, bewildered way. They know that the man they love is not the one who is painted in the court room, and at least to them he is not. If he is convicted and goes to prison for a term of years, then month by month the faithful family goes to see him for an hour in the prison, visiting across the table in open view of guards and others as unfortunate as they. ”

“ Punishment as something inflicted for the purpose of giving pain is cruelty and vengeance and nothing else. Whatever should be done to the criminal, if we have humanity and imagination, we must feel sympathy for him and consider his best good along with that of all the rest of the members of the society whose welfare is our concern.
While punishment cannot be defended, still self-defense is inherent in both individuals and society and, without arguing its justification, no one can imagine a society that will not assert it and act for its defense. ”

“ If only any one of almost an infinite number of things had been done or left undone, the dead would be alive or the disaster would not have befallen. Every man who is honest with himself knows that he has been a creature of conditions and chance, or at least what is chance as far as a man can see, and what was clearly chance to him. He knows that if he has met success, he has only been more in luck than the rest. If he has intelligence and human sympathy, he feels only pity for the suffering. He would never punish in vengeance or hatred. ”

“ His capacity, education and environment deny him the gambler's chance of a prize. As an honest man, he may raise a family, always be in debt, live a life of poverty and hardship and see nothing ahead but drudgery and defeat. This is why so many mediocre men are found in the mountains and oil fields prospecting for hidden wealth. With the chance of a fortune just before them, and no other opportunity to win, they spend their lives without a family or home, urged on by the hope of luck.
The man grown from boyhood into ways of vice and crime sees this hope and this hope only to make a strike. ”

“ Chance, accident and whim have been banished from the physical world. The acts of men alone are supposed to be outside the realm of law. There is a cause for the eternal revolution of the earth around the sun, for the succession of seed-time and harvest, for growth and decay; but not for the thoughts and actions of man.
All the teaching of the world is based on the theory that there is no free will. Why else should children be trained with so much care? Why should they be taught what is right and what is wrong? ”

“ This book comes from the reflections and experience of more than forty years spent in court. Aside from the practice of my profession, the topics I have treated are such as have always held my interest and inspired a taste for books that discuss the human machine with its manifestations and the causes of its varied activity. ”

“ Common honesty, common sense and common humanity alike plainly show that a large part of the crimes of violence are due to the war. Will hangings and life sentences stop them? And, if so, is it right for organized society to ignore its responsibility and place it on the young men that they innoculated with the universal madness? It is expecting too much to think that there is any process by which society can be made to think and feel. Some day, however, when the war fever passes away crime will again take its normal place. ”

“ The call to live a simple life, free from the conventions, customs and rules, to kill for the sake of killing, to get to the woods and streams and away from brick buildings and stone walls, is strong in the constitution of almost every man. Probably the underlying cause of the world war was the need of man to relax from the hard and growing strain of the civilization that is continually weaving new fetters to bind him. There must always come a breaking point, for, after all, man is an animal and can live only from and by the primitive things. ”

“ Questions of right and wrong are not determined by strict rules of logic. If public opinion could come to regard the criminal as it does the insane, the imbecile, or the ill, then a judicial determination would be the best. But as long as crime is regarded as moral delinquency and punishment savors of vengeance, every possible safeguard and protection must be thrown around the accused. In the settling of opinions and the passing of judgments, mob psychology is all-powerful and really, in the last analysis, every human question comes down to the power of public opinion. ”

“ Taking away the liberty of another has only one justification. The great mass of people in any community must and will act for self-defense. It needs no fine-spun theories to justify it. Hatred should have nothing to do with it. The conduct of man in this regard is only like that of the animal which destroys the one that is inimical to the pack or herd. The self-protection of the group is the same as the self-protection of the individual. Both the group and the man will save their lives against a lunatic or any other menace, regardless of the nature of the menace. ”

“ No matter how thorough the reform, the prisoner never goes back to society, or he returns after there is no longer a chance for him to be of use to the world or to enjoy life.
Those who say that punishment is for the purpose of reforming the prisoner are not familiar with human psychology. The prison almost invariably tends to brutalize men and breeds bitterness and blank despair. The life of the ordinary prisoner is given over to criticism and resentment against existing things, especially to settled hatred of those who are responsible for his punishment. ”

“ Every new crusade against crime not only sweeps away a large amount of work that has been slowly and patiently done toward a right understanding of crime, but likewise puts new statutes on the books which would not be placed there if the public were sane. When it does not do this, it increases penalties which work evil in other directions and awe courts, juries, governors and pardon boards, not only preventing them from listening to the voice of humanity and justice, but causing them to deny substantial rights and wreak vengeance and cruelty upon the weak and helpless. ”

“ O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell: you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder ”

“ Which decision is the more righteous, the one where hatred and fear affect the judgment and sentence, or the one where these emotions have spent their force?
Everyone who advocates capital punishment is really ashamed of the practice for which he is responsible. Instead of urging public executions, the most advanced and sensitive who believe in killing by the state are now advocating that even the newspapers should not publish the details and that the killing should be done in darkness and silence. In that event no one would be deterred by the cruelty of the state. ”

“ More than this, he could see in the original, fertilized cell, all its powers, defects and potentialities and could, in the same manner, look down through the short years during which the human organism, grown from the cell, shall have life and movement, and could see its varied environment. If one could see this with infinite wisdom, he could infallibly tell in advance each step that the machine would take and infallibly predict the time and method of its dissolution. To be all-knowing is to be all-understanding, and this is infinitely better than to be all-forgiving. ”

“ How many times has a previous experience, education, or a friend at the right time saved him from destruction?
The imperfect man travels this road; he is poor and friendless; his life is a long series of accidents great and small. The first accident that weakens his structure makes the second more certain and so on in increasing ratio until the end. Good luck crowds around one life, while ill luck and disaster follow another's footsteps wherever he goes with the persistency of his shadow.
In all the infinite number of chances one false step may be enough to bring final disaster. ”

“ Is it not plain that in America it has assumed the form of an obsession, biting us high and low, until we reek of it? It is likewise clear that it is a menace to any abiding peace and welfare; that it is still growing and leaving a bitter harvest of neurasthenics in its wake.
The criminologist must face the fact that, in spite of contrary pretenses by most of our social doctors, we are still in our work-a-day life guided almost exclusively by the mores—the folk-ways of old—founded on expediency as revealed by experiences, and acquired by the only known process, that of trial and error. ”

“ Even America hanged old women for witchcraft, a crime they could not commit. Practically all the victims of religious and political persecution have been guiltless of any real crimes, and among them were always many of the noblest of their age.
Every general change of religious or political ideas bears its quota of crimes. For whatever the religious or political organization, it always uses every means in its power to perpetuate itself. This is as true of republics as of monarchies, although the severity of punishment and the amount of heresy permitted change from time to time. ”

“ I think that the attitude of society toward the criminal makes the whole difference, and any improvement is out of the question until this attitude influences and controls the whole treatment of the question of crime and punishment.
If doctors and scientists had been no wiser than lawyers, judges, legislatures and the public, the world would still be punishing imbeciles, the insane, the inferior and the sick; and treating human ailments with incantations, witchcraft, force and magic. We should still be driving devils out of the sick and into the swine. ”

“ Still it has been the general opinion of those who have studied crime and influenced the passage of penal laws, that criminal statutes should be clear and explicit so that all would know what they must not do. It is obvious that if one is to be punished simply for doing wrong, there could be no judges or juries or jailers condemning and punishing and no crowds shouting for vengeance. All do wrong and do it over and over again, and day by day. It is not only those specific things that the great majority think are wrong, but the graver offenses that are meant to be the subject of criminal codes. ”