False imprisonment

“ Inferior degrees of the same offence of false imprisonment are also punishable by indictment (like assaults and batteries) and the delinquent may be fined and imprisoned [50] . And indeed [51] there can be no doubt, but that all kinds of crimes of a public nature, all disturbances of the peace, all oppressions, and other misdemesnors whatsoever, of a notoriously evil example, may be indicted at the suit of the king. ”

“ For the point of punishment, an indictment will lie at the king’s suit, against the false imprisoner, grounded on this statute, for the vindication of the public justice of the nation; and the party, if found guilty, shall be punished by fine and imprisonment. For the relief of the person injured, he may have an action of false imprisonment, wherein he shall recover damages; or an action on the case grounded on this statute, wherein he shall have the same remedy. ”

“ Every confinement of the person is imprisonment, whether in a common prison or a private house, or even by forcibly detaining one in the streets or highways. The law punishes false imprisonment as a crime, besides giving reparation to the party injured, through an action of trespass. ”

“ But the traverser is not content with acting merely on the defensive. It appears that he is a persecuted innocent man; upon an illegal warrant, without proper evidence, attacked, robbed, put in jail; all for having a few harmless publications about him. Why does not this persecuted man bring his action for false imprisonment? Why do not his counsel advise it? The warrant was issued upon probable cause on oath. ”

“ It is also a misdemeanor to assist a criminal, with a view to effect his escape, though he does not escape from jail.
§26. A person taking upon himself to act as a public officer, and taking or keeping a person in custody unlawfully or without authority, is false imprisonment; for which the offender may be fined or imprisoned.
§27. The offenses mentioned in the last four sections, being of a lower grade than those defined in the preceding sections, and not being punishable in a state prison, are usually called misdemeanors, and are punishable by fine or imprisonment in a county jail. ”

“ And from this he went on to reflect upon the horrible but unquestionable fact that every year a certain proportion, and perhaps a very considerable proportion, of those who suffered the penalties of the law, and even the death-penalty, are innocent men,—victims of false or mistaken evidence. ”

“ Unless heavier punishment is sanctioned under the authority of a law previously established, imprisonment not to exceed 2 years shall be imposed upon anybody deliberately making false or grievous statements, fit to injure the welfare or the prestige of the government of the Reich, the National Socialist Workers’ Party, or its agencies. ”

“ They are, a fallacious scale of moral responsibility; absolute ignorance and neglect of the physio-psychological types of criminals; intervals between verdict and sentence on the one hand, and between the sentence and its execution on the other, with a consequent abuse of pardons; disastrous practical effects of corruption and of criminal association in prisons; millions of persons condemned to short terms of imprisonment, which are foolish and absurd; and a continuous, inexorable increase of recidivism. ”

“ Are we to end by discovering that everybody is a criminal, and ripe for jail? or shall we be driven to the realization that the fundamental idea of imprisonment for crime is itself the most monstrous of crimes—and try something else? What else is there to be tried? Are we to leave criminals to their liberty among the community? ”

“ In order to make felons of honest men, who never had a criminal thought, they passed by that state to seize on one that makes conspiracy to obstruct the mails a crime punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary. To hound these men into the penitentiary is their purpose, yet they call this respect for law. Conspiracy from the days of tyranny in England down to the day the General Managers’ Association used it as a club has been the favorite weapon of every tyrant. It is an effort to punish the crime of thought. ”

“ An error, not less common than it is contrary to the object of society—that is, to the consciousness of personal security—is leaving a magistrate to be the arbitrary executor of the laws, free at his pleasure to imprison a citizen, to deprive a personal enemy of his liberty on frivolous pretexts, or to leave a friend unpunished in spite of the strongest proofs of his guilt. Imprisonment is a punishment which, unlike every other, must of necessity precede the declaration of guilt ”

“ There will be criminals, was the theory, and they must be punished. They must therefore be secured in jails, and the object of imprisonment is intimidation from crime, not the improvement of criminals. ”

“ If it is certain that he has committed the crime, he should either be excluded from social intercourse or sentenced to mate good the damage, provided the criminal is not dangerous and the crime not grave. It is absurd to sentence a man to five or six days imprisonment for some insignificant misdemeanor. You lower him in the eyes of the public, subject him to surveillance by the police, and send him to prison from whence he will go out more corrupted than he was on entering it. It is absurd to impose segregation in prison for small errors. ”

“ Suppose a man to be convicted of a crime of which he is innocent. As he has been convicted, the evidence, though fallacious, is overwhelming. He is sentenced to a term of imprisonment—say penal servitude. He serves his sentence and is in due course discharged. He is now free; but the conviction stands against him. He is a discharged convict. His name is in the prison books, his photograph and his finger-prints are in the Habitual Criminals’ Register. He is a marked man for life. ”

“ No one who lays any claim to enlightened opinion upon subjects of this character believes any longer that arrest and incarceration in a penal or corrective institution is a final answer to the social obligations of the community in behalf of the so-called casual vagrant, the wandering citizen, the itinerant wage-worker, or petty criminal, as they are miscalled. It may be true, perhaps, that a three or six months’ imprisonment is the only present available means for “straightening up a drunk” or getting some “evil spirit” out of a young man’s heart. ”

“ The men are now released, after undergoing two years’ imprisonment—released, not by the efforts of the police who swore away their liberty, nor by the jury who condemned them, nor by the judge who sentenced them, but by means of an anonymous letter and the arrest of the real criminals for another crime—released really by an accident which, while it restores them to liberty, cannot remove from them the taint of the gaol. ”

“ The prison policy of falsehood may be illustrated by the uses to which the parole law is put. This unfortunate measure was no doubt conceived by its parents in love and charity, to supply prisoners with a stimulus to reform by rewarding them for it with early release from imprisonment. If a man's conduct while serving his sentence had been orderly and obedient to rules, he was to be freed after serving about one-third of his appointed time ”

“ Especially am I sensible of the claim upon me of those voiceless fellow men of mine still behind the bars, who cannot help themselves, who have honored me with their tragic confidences, who have believed that I would do my utmost to let the truth be known and show the world what penal imprisonment really means. ”

“ Public report, his flight, his extrajudicial confession, that of an accomplice, menaces, and his constant enmity with the person injured, the circumstances of the crime, and such other evidence, may be sufficient to justify the imprisonment of a citizen. But the nature of this evidence should be determined by the laws, and not by the magistrates, whose decrees are always contrary to political liberty, when they are not particular applications of a general maxim of the public code. When punishments become less severe, and prisons less horrible ”

“ These offenders immediately acknowledge their crime, with unassumed remorse, frequently so keen that they instantly commit, or attempt to commit suicide. When convicted—as they seldom are by a jury—they are always repentant prisoners, and amend their lives, or do not become degraded, so that in this way they encourage superficial observers to affirm as a general fact, and one possible in all circumstances, that ameliorative effect of imprisonment which is really a mere illusion in the case of the far more numerous classes of born and habitual criminals. ”

“ But I think it would render the community just as safe, and be more just to the accused if, in cases of circumstantial evidence where there is the least doubt, the sentence should be imprisonment for life with a provision in the law that there should be no pardon unless the innocence of the life convict was conclusively proven. ”

“ IV. It needs no further demonstration that the modern organisation of punishment, based partly on the assumption that we can measure the moral culpability of criminals, and partly on an illusion as to their general amendment, and almost entirely reduced, in consequence, to imprisonment and the cell system, has absolutely failed to protect society against crime. ”

“ And the Government, with a false show of impartiality and justice, affected to be very scrupulous, and to give a prisoner who was charged with an offence for which his life was liable to be forfeited every opportunity to defend himself. ”

“ Imagine, that after eight months’ detention, the prisoners were remanded for some months more, “there being no evidence of any crime against them!” And when at last they were brought before a jury, there was not a single overt act of a treasonable nature proved against them. ”

“ It is, because the accused and convicted are thrown indiscriminately into the same prison; because imprisonment is rather a punishment, than a means of securing the person of the accused; and because the interior power, which defends the laws, and the exterior, which defends the throne and kingdom, are separate, when they should be united. If the first were (under the common authority of the laws) combined with the right of judging, but not however immediately dependent on the magistrate, the pomp that attends a military corps, would take off the infamy ”

“ The effects of the imprisonment are to vitiate its inmates, to extend their acquaintanceship with each other, to corrupt the prisoner charged with an offence of which he may be innocent, and to confirm in guilt the young and inexperienced offender. ”

“ I have lately read a book connected with penal servitude, by an anonymous writer, in which this innocent lamb is whining throughout of his hardship in being compelled to herd with criminals; and it says a great deal for his imitative capacity that he should so naturally and so thoroughly have adopted the almost universal “injured innocence” tactics of the habitual criminal. One great nuisance at all prisons is the almost universal habit that prisoners have of protesting their innocence ”

“ Only those imprisoned for the smaller offenses of a single incidence of petty larceny, receipt of felons, or accessory to a felony, or some other trespass not punishable by life or limb shall be let out by sufficient surety. Prisoners who were outlawed or escaped from prison or are notorious thieves or were imprisoned for felonious house-burning, passing false money, counterfeiting the King's seal, treason touching the King himself, or other major offenses or have been excommunicated by the church may not be released. ”

“ There was another point which I vividly realized since the very first weeks of my imprisonment, but which, in some inconceivable way, escapes the attention of both the judges and the writers on criminal law—namely, that imprisonment in an immense number of cases is a punishment which strikes quite innocent people far more severely than the condemned prisoners themselves. ”

“ When I say that every State prison is to be a reformatory, I except, of course, from its operation, those sentenced for life for murder, or other capital offenses, and those who have proved themselves incorrigible by repeated violations of their parole. ”

“ Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human strikes, he must be struck accordingly.
Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then through the gamut of their prison activities.
False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular. ”

“ Of course if there is no justification for it a suit for malicious prosecution and false arrest may arise; but most persons who resort to such tactics are "judgment proof" and the civil law has no terrors for them at all. At least fifty persons out of every hundred would gladly pay an unrighteous claim rather than be subjected to the humiliation of arrest, even if their confinement were of the most temporary character. ”

“ The parole and the indeterminate sentence, framed to open the way to reform of prisoners, is used by prison officials to intimidate and debase them; and if any ex-convict ventures to defy this fortified despotism, the immediate rejoinder is, "Who can believe a jail-bird? A man wicked enough to steal or murder is wicked enough to lie, and is not the malicious motive of the lie apparent?" ”

“ The chief incident which occurred during my imprisonment in Scotland, was a conspiracy among the convicts to murder the night officer and make their escape in a body. I was not considered "safe" for the job, and knew nothing of it until it had miscarried. The chief conspirator was my friend the "cracksman," who made tools out of portions of his bedstead, that opened not only the lock of our own cell, but that of every other cell in the prison, if required. ”