James Devon

“ I do not say that there are not those who gamble for the sake of the excitement, but that these do not come to prison as a result. The man who does run grave risk of landing there is he who gambles for the money that he may win but that he usually does lose.
The desire to shine among others is at the root of much of the foolish and criminal conduct of many men and women. It is not necessarily an evil desire, but the methods adopted to secure admiration may result in evil. There is much talk of the dignity of labour, side by side with the worship of money. ”

“ If they are the cause of the criminal act, how is it that they are admittedly present in others who are not criminals? It would certainly simplify the work of the police if they knew that they could with any degree of safety look for the perpetrator of certain kinds of crime among men with heads of a given shape; but anyone who glances at the illustrated papers will see for himself as many villainous-looking faces among notable people, even among able people, as he will find in a prison. ”

“ Not only can offenders be boarded out, but they are and always have been boarded out. Whenever a man leaves prison he has to board himself out. I do not propose to let loose on the community any more offenders than are let loose at present. Indeed, I do not propose to let any of them loose at all, but simply to do for them, in their own interest and that of their neighbours, what they are doing for themselves to the great loss of us all. When any one of them does reform at present it is only by one way ”

“ His life there is one of monotonous routine whether his sentence be short or long.
The prison surprises visitors by its quiet and by the conspicuous cleanliness which is its characteristic feature. Yet it is not surprising that people should be able to keep the place clean and tidy, when they have little else to do and no opportunity for making it dirty and untidy. The cleanliness and tidiness of a prison is different from that of any household. It is not the cleanliness and tidiness of healthy life. It is part of the prisoner’s work to keep his cell and its furniture in order. ”

“ The physician is taught that it is his duty to save life, apart altogether from its personal value. When he is called in to a patient it is no affair of his whether the sick person is a saint or a sinner; it is his duty to do his best for the patient irrespective of any question of character, and to risk infection as readily for the sake of the wicked as for the sake of the good. At the behest of the law he has to take a part in the killing of a man whom he has been instructed to attend in order that at the proper time he may be led to death in a state of good health. ”

“ Granted the existence of such circles, it is easy to see how defiance of the law may get a young man the admiration of his fellows; and as there are parts of the city where homage is rendered to him who has most frequently and cleverly outraged the law by stealing, or by tricking its representatives—where so far from honesty being esteemed a virtue it is sneered at; where chastity is at a discount, and the thief, rake, and bully is the ideal character—there is no reason for any wonder that in the face of punishments there is no lack of offenders. ”

“ The fact that a man holds a position is not proof of his fitness to fill it; and respect for an office makes it all the more incumbent on honest men to scrutinise and criticise the actions of the person who occupies it. Loyalty to the public service is too often confused with servility to those in the upper ranks, resulting in something very like a conspiracy to magnify their importance (which would be a small matter) , and to induce the public to attach an undue weight to what they say, though their statements may appear foolish enough. ”

“ Boys are still whipped for some offences and in certain cases. To say that it is better to whip a boy than to send him to prison, is only to admit that whipping is the less serious of the two methods of injuring him; and in some cases the boys are whipped for no other reason. There is a well-founded reluctance to sentence them to detention in any existing institution, combined with a belief in the necessity of inflicting some penalty on them for their misdeeds. The boy has done wrong and he must pay for it. The world is so constituted that we are all the children of our acts ”

“ The Press, which reaches a wider audience than the pulpit, is becoming more a means of making money for its proprietors than a medium for the formation of reasoned opinion; and some papers have organised sweepstakes under the thinnest disguise. ”

“ It may be that some of those who do not return to prison have been checked in their career by the treatment they have received, but as a matter of fact, there are a great many people sent to prison who ought never to have been there at all. In my opinion it is beyond dispute that our methods result in the making of criminals; that in the majority of cases imprisonment not only does no good, but does positive and serious harm. It should not be forgotten, however, that there is no ground for supposing that the prison system is intended to reform those who come within its operation. ”

“ The great mass of men and women—rich and poor—do keep free from grave offences, living their lives quietly and discharging their duties as citizens according to their light and their ability; but these false ideals stimulate many to the commission of crime. It is well, therefore, to remind ourselves and others that ultimately a man is judged not by what he has but by what he is, and to recognise that a man is foolish if he sacrifices his life and dwarfs his personal development for any social advantage whatever. ”

“ A prison ought merely to be a place of detention in which offenders are placed till some proper provision is made for their supervision and means of livelihood in the community.... The prison in which they would be placed would not be a reformatory institution where all sorts of futile experiments would be made, but simply a place of detention in which they would be required each to attend on himself until he had made up his mind to accept the greater degree of liberty implied in life outside. ”

“ The city is the product of our industrial pursuits and the methods by which they are followed; but the city as it exists is no more necessary to the life of the community than the city before the day of Public Health Acts was a necessary part of our civilisation. Men could live conveniently near each other and work at the same occupation, at least as efficiently, if they had room, as is possible under the cramping conditions that exist at present. Man’s life ought to be something more than his work; and there will be more who work to live when there are not so many who merely live to work. ”

“ Drink is often a cause of poverty; but to attribute poverty mainly to drink is wantonly to libel thousands of our poorer fellow-citizens who live far cleaner lives than many of their critics. On the other hand, it is equally unsafe to attribute drinking mainly to poverty, for many who indulge freely are possessed of considerable means, and the practice is not peculiar to any social condition. That some are driven to drink as a refuge from the monotony of their lives is undeniable; but if poverty makes some men drunkards it makes others teetotalers. ”

“ A study of confirmed criminals may be interesting pathology, but it is the study of the beginner in crime that will prevent the formation of the criminal class, in so far as it affords means for enabling us to deal sanely with them.
When an atrocious crime is perpetrated there is intense public interest shown in the criminal. He is examined in a distorted mirror and his parts are magnified. The more extraordinary he is, the more monstrous he appears, the greater the sensation. Yet the ordinary men and the ordinary offences are at once the more common and the more important. ”

“ There are some crimes which in themselves shock us to such an extent that we find it difficult to believe that any sane man would commit them. In a book such as this I can only refer to certain sexual offences without discussing them, but even in these cases the crime need not infer insanity. We are no more justified in saying that a man is mad if he does a mad-like thing than in calling him wise if he does a wise-like thing. A man’s criminal acts are only to be judged in relation to his other conduct if we would form a rational opinion as to his mental condition ”

“ In spite of their vicious acts, it is never an evidence of wisdom to assume that vicious people are greater fools than others. That they behave foolishly, from the standpoint of their own and our interest, is quite true, and so apparent that it needs no emphasis. The question is, Do we, who are so much wiser than they, show that wisdom in our treatment of them? ”

“ As a matter of fact, at present we destroy the lives of these people in another way. Instead of curing them of their evil propensities we twist them still further, and kill any sense of public spirit in them as effectively in the process as we could do if we suffocated them. If they were put in the lethal chamber that would be an end to them. As it is, we have to set apart respectable citizens, not to make them better, but simply to watch them marking time before engaging in another period of disturbance. ”

“ Drink has brought misery and degradation on many, through their own indulgence or that of those on whom they have been dependent; if it does not cause, it is often an aggravation of poverty; and it is with no wish to minimise its ill effects that I protest against exaggerating them. Our social troubles are not traceable to any one cause, and it is not profitable to single out a particular vice and place all evil to its account; nor is the practice more laudable when the vice is not one to which we are ourselves inclined. By all means let temperance be taught and drunkenness be discouraged ”

“ Children know that wrongdoing on their part is sometimes the occasion and the excuse for an exhibition of temper on the part of their parents; and they take their punishment with the best grace they can and keep out of the way next time they misbehave. A whipping in cold blood they do not take in the same spirit; and they are right.
The great objection to any arbitrary punishment is that it may do far more harm than good. Suppose a child is disobedient and obstinate, and the father proceeds to whip it into obedience. If he succeeds the child may, through fear, avoid such conduct in the future ”

“ Blame them by all means; but let us be just, and having settled how much they are to blame—not a very profitable task—let us set about to find how far we are to blame; having punished them, what about punishing ourselves? ”

“ That a prisoner should be clean is wonderful; that people who have been committing breaches of the peace, assaults, thefts, and have been generally a nuisance or a terror to the public, should be moving about at work or at exercises quietly and peaceably, should be so obedient and tractable that one warder can look after twenty of them and seldom have anything to report to their discredit, is far more wonderful. These people are sent to prison because they cannot obey the law, but while in prison they are not rebellious ”

“ When efforts to help a man result in failure it is a safe working rule to assume that the fault is at least as much in the nature of the means employed as in the man. They may have been very good means, but they have not been applicable in the case; which is just to say that the result is the test of their suitability. This is all so obvious that in practice it is disregarded, and we persist in the foolish assumption that people on whom our patent pills fail to act are incorrigible; though the fact is that the offender is no more incorrigible than the reformer, and is sometimes not so stupid. ”

“ There is a sentiment of brutality that is quite as dangerous as any sentiment of pity, and a great deal more harmful; but pity for the criminal need have very little part in consideration for his reform. He may be, and often is, far from being an estimable or attractive person, and the last thing he needs is pity. A man may be a good physician or surgeon without being given to anything approaching sentiment that is maudlin; but whether he is full of pity or not he must be sympathetic—that is to say, he must be able to appreciate the standpoint of those with whom he is dealing. ”

“ Health is the greatest of blessings, but the man who is always concerned for his health is not the healthy man; time passes, and he may lose his life while he is preparing to live. He is encouraged to examine himself, and all the possible ailments which may annoy him are described and their significance exaggerated till he gets nervous. A specific is found for every ill to which the flesh is heir, and its efficacy is trumpeted till some equally infallible cure replaces it in public estimation. ”

“ The injured party is always to blame to some extent, and is hurt because he has failed to estimate the danger accurately and to avoid it successfully; but others may be to blame also. The fault is never wholly on one side. To the girl the law resembles the traffic in the street; and when she is knocked down she and her friends regard her as the victim of misfortune.
That is not the standpoint of the visitor. She may have known nothing of the trials and temptations of the poor, save what she has seen from the outside. Hunger has never been her attendant; poverty has been unknown to her. ”

“ Repression is necessary, no doubt, but repressive powers should only co-exist with power to reward. Even a donkey will go further after a carrot than when driven by a stick. It never does any good to a man to treat him as a machine, and the tendency to do so under the name of discipline is a root vice of the system. In the convict prison, as in the ordinary prison, during the last few years the grinding mechanical routine has been relaxed, and the amazing discovery has been made that it is easier and better to manage men if you recognise that they are men than to regard them as mere numbers. ”

“ We may alter conditions in such a way that the tendency to disease or crime will be lessened; but when a person has become diseased we have to know something more about him than the fact that he shows certain symptoms before he can be treated in any rational way and with a prospect of his recovery. So when he has committed a crime we must know more than that fact before there is much hope of being able to correct him. There is as much quackery in the practice of making punishment fit crime as in that of making remedies fit diseases. ”