Fear of punishment

“ The fear of punishment has always been ineffectual in preventing crime, for the reason that the very passion responsible for the crime masters the fear.... It is difficult to discuss these ravages on a purely physical basis, for the ramifications of cruelty are cumulatively intense, the higher they are carried. ”

“ More humane and reasonable legislators have sought to prove that punishment is curative—that the fear of punishment will deter people from doing wrong. A distinguished official of the Home Office gave it as his opinion only the other day that punishment, no matter how severe, will not act as a deterrent, if there is ever so slight a chance of the criminal's escaping it. ”

“ We may menace wicked men with punishment for wanton misdeeds, but it must be with just punishment. What could we say of a human father who exposed a child to temptation without explaining the consequences, and then condemned him to lifelong penalties for failing to make the right choice? We must firmly believe that if offences are finite, punishment must be finite too; that it must be remedial and not mechanical. We must believe that if we deserve punishment, it will be because we can hope for restoration. ”

“ If this is not so, then society has been acting upon a false theory in its repression of crime by the fear of punishment. But I believe legislation for this purpose has been based upon a correct knowledge of human nature, and that the average man with criminal tendencies is, to a certain degree, deterred from criminal conduct by a fear of punishment. ”

“ That punishment of which men used to talk so wisely and act so foolishly, what was it but the expression of their fear? And they had need to fear, since they—i.e., the rulers of society—were dwelling like an armed band in a hostile country. But we who live amongst our friends need neither fear nor punish. Surely if we, in dread of an occasional rare homicide, an occasional rough blow, were solemnly and legally to commit homicide and violence, we could only be a society of ferocious cowards. ”

“ In vain has it been sought to extirpate the custom by edicts of death against any man accepting a challenge, for it is founded on that which some men fear more than death; since without the favour of his fellows the man of honour foresees himself exposed either to become a merely solitary being, a condition insufferable to a sociable man, or to become the butt of insults and disgrace which, from their constant operation, prevail over the fear of punishment. ”

“ If I commit such a crime, says the spectator to himself, I shall be reduced to that miserable condition for the rest of my life. A much more powerful preventive than the fear of death, which men always behold in distant obscurity. ”

“ The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires: so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better"—it would be more correct even to go so far as to assert the contrary ("Injury makes a man cunning," says a popular proverb: so far as it makes him cunning, it makes him also bad. ”

“ And as she thought of all the evil deeds of that host of mankind known as criminals, and of that other host that punished them, she saw that both crime and punishment emanated from the same ignorant spirit of cruelty and fear. Would they ever learn of the great equity and tolerance, the simple love in nature? ”

“ Only fear of a severe punishment remains us from actions for which there exists a great temptation, either because we have a great desire for these actions, or are accustomed to them, or feel unhappy without them. ”

“ But it is very doubtful whether fear is a moral motive or whether it is a very effective deterrent. Social thinkers are agreed that punishment is a very {177} bungling method at the best. It does not show the presence of a very constructive imagination. ”

“ Does this fact make it compatible with the doctrine of causeless activity? Would not punishment, under this doctrine, be cruelty pure and simple? Punishment can be justified only if it can act as a cause determining human behavior. Society introduces fear of threatened punishment and memory of suffered punishment as motives into the mental life of its members, in order to inhibit criminal actions in those who are so natured that they will commit acts inimical to society when occasion offers, or when they are tempted. ”

“ The condemned man experiences a fear which is very terrible, but purely physical—an unconscious fear which upsets his moral nature.
During my several years’ stay in the convict prison I was able to study at leisure the prisoners who wished to leave the hospital, where they had remained some time to have their damaged backs cured before receiving the second half of their punishment. This interruption in the punishment is always called for by the doctor who assists at the execution. ”

“ The second pretext for torture is its application to supposed criminals who contradict themselves under examination, as if the fear of the punishment, the uncertainty of the sentence, the legal pageantry, the majesty of the judge, the state of ignorance that is common alike to innocent and guilty, were not enough to plunge into self-contradiction both the innocent man [154] who is afraid, and the guilty man who seeks to shield himself ”

“ Men would knock out one another's brains in order to get hung, and escape it. Men would cry aloud to the judge to hang them out of the way! It was the most terrible punishment known, for it was hopeless. ”

“ In proportion as punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, as a fluid rises to the same height with that which surrounds it, grow hardened and insensible; and the force of the passions still continuing, in the space of an hundred years, the wheel terrifies no more than formerly the prison. That a punishment may produce the effect required, it is sufficient that the evil it occasions should exceed the good expected from the crime ”

“ Society is asked, then, to denude itself of an instrument of punishment which, in the grave cases to which alone it is suitable, effects its purposes at a less cost of human suffering than any other; which, while it inspires more terror, is less cruel in actual fact than any punishment that we should think of substituting for it. ”

“ I replied that, in my mind, it was no punishment at all; and I am yet to learn what punishment can dismay a man conscious of his own innocence. Lightning, tempest and battle, wreck, pain, buffeting and torture have small terror to a pure conscience. ”

“ From the simple consideration of the truths hitherto demonstrated it is evident that the object of punishment is neither to torment and inflict a sensitive creature nor to undo a crime already committed. Can he, whose function it is, so far from acting from passion, to tranquillise the private passions of his fellows, harbour in the body politic such useless cruelty, the instrument either of furious fanatics or of weak tyrants? ”

“ And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at last, which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom—or even a straight if despairing decision. ”

“ My punishment is fixed,—it is worse than a death of shame; it is a life without hope! Every moment I feel, and shall feel to the last, the pressure of a chain that may never be broken or loosened! And yet, fool that I am! ”

“ You cannot correct moral infirmity by confining the victim of it among criminals, for no greater punishment can be inflicted on the feelings of man; and punishment destroys rather than encourages the latent susceptibility of our better nature. ”

“ This is only an imitation of nature, in which pain is a sanction and a deterrent. Family and school discipline have always rested on this artificial use of pain. It is, apparently, the 221most primary application of force or coercion. It combines directly with vengeance, which is a primary passion of human nature. Punishment is of this philosophy, for by punishment we furnish, or add, a painful consequence to acts which we desire to restrain, in the hope that the consequence will cause reflection and make the victim desist. ”

“ To every crime, which from its nature must frequently remain unpunished, the punishment is an incentive. Such is the nature of the human mind, that difficulties, if not insurmountable, nor too great for our natural indolence, embellish the object, and spur us on to the pursuit. ”

“ I had a great desire to know among other things all about the various grades of sentences and punishments, the varying severity of the different forms of punishments, the attitude of the convicts themselves. I tried to picture to myself the psychological condition of men going to punishment. I have mentioned already that it is unusual for anyone to be unconcerned before punishment, even those who have been severely punished and on more than one occasion. The condemned are overcome by an acute purely physical terror, involuntary and irresistible, which masters the man’s whole moral being. ”

“ So long as punishment persists it will be a subject of discussion and dispute. No doubt the idea of punishment originated in the feeling of resentment and hatred and vengeance that, to some extent at least, is incident to life. ”

“ The woes that are reserved for me are incapable alike of alleviation or intermission.
But I came not hither to recriminate. I came not hither to accuse others, but myself. I know the retribution that is appointed for guilt like mine. It is just. I may shudder at the foresight of my punishment and shrink in the endurance of it; but I shall be indebted for part of my torment to the vigour of my understanding, which teaches me that my punishment is just. Why should I procrastinate my doom and strive to render my burden more light? ”

“ They could dodge under the fences of the law and climb the barbed wire of morality with equal impunity, and the utmost rigor of punishment had little terror for those whose hardships could scarcely be artificially worsened. ”

“ Yet here we shudder at the terrors created by a guilty conscience, and approve, while we shudder, of the terrible punishment that is meted out for the wrong-doing. How very real it thus becomes to all of us! ”

“ We supposed it safer to hold aloof from the familiar hearth than to bear the hand of punishment. Thus we are fain to put off the punishment; we loathe going back and our wish is to lie hid here and escape our master's eye. ”

“ It is not the idea of pain that makes me abhor bodily punishment, but the deep humilation that the victim must feel. And also the harm it does to the one who punishes. Physical punishment embitters, but never cures. ”

“ We have simply added the misery of punishment to the misery of crime, and the cruelty of the judge to the cruelty of the criminal. We have taken the bad man, and made him worse by torture and degradation, incidentally making ourselves worse in the process. ”

“ There is not, I should think, any human infliction which makes an impression on the imagination so entirely out of proportion to its real severity as the punishment of death. The punishment must be mild indeed which does not add more to the sum of human misery than is necessarily or directly added by the execution of a criminal. ”

“ Either they brave it with reckless impudence; or, inanimate, they suffer it, half dead with terror; or they offer their heads with profound and sincere repentance.
Now the punishment is insufficient for those who defy it; useless for those who are already morally dead; excessive for those who repent with sincerity. Let us repeat it: society does not kill the murderer to cause him suffering, or to inflict the lex talionis; it kills him to prevent him from doing harm; it kills him that the example of his punishment may serve as a warning to murderers to come. ”

“ I suffer because the punishment which, by my crimes, I have brought down upon myself, is greater than I can bear; I suffer, too, because the last purpose I had left to live for, which was also a criminal purpose, has been defeated. ”

“ The strong impulse of the passions, and the hope of impunity, still impel daring and wicked men to commit the most detestable and atrocious crimes.
The Genius of Punishment, therefore, with his dark countenance and fiery eye, must yet awhile longer frequent the haunts of the children of men. ”

“ And indeed what prevents our asserting that people in prison under sentence of death are not punished till their heads are cut off, or that the person who has taken hemlock, and walks about till he feels it is getting into his legs, suffers not at all till he is deprived of sensation by the freezing and curdling of his blood, if we consider the last moment of punishment all the punishment, and ignore all the intermediate sufferings and fears and anxiety and remorse, the 343destiny of every guilty wretch? ”

“ On the contrary, we call every pain or suffering inflicted on an agent for committing a bad action, for no other reason than that it is bad, chastisement or punishment.
Punishment stands against damage or wrong; that is to say, against undeserved harm. The blows of fortune or of men are not always punishments. One may be struck without being punished. ”

“ Thus, though a malefactor, consulting only his own inclinations or feelings, might prefer death to perpetual imprisonment and hard labour, yet he may regard it as the worst of punishments, in as far as it demonstrates the greatest abhorrence and indignation in the community against the crime.
Second maxim. Punishment operates by sympathy, as well as by terror. Penal laws have a tendency to repress crimes not more by exciting a dread of the consequences, than by marking the strong sense entertained by others of their enormity, and the detestation in which they are held by mankind in general. ”