Moral delinquency

“ The writer concurs in this opinion, but at the same time, he thinks it of the utmost importance to observe, that as the original injunction or command was assuredly subsequent to the sense of moral delinquency, and was directed in the view of a relief to the conscience of man, so the continuance of the practice, according to any perversion of the primitive and consequently proper institution, is always connected with, and in fact implies, the existence of a feeling of personal demerit and danger. ”

“ It is said to be making a great fuss about a very little matter—a little bit of cloth. And is it possible that any New Churchman can look at the cloth, and overlook the momentous question of moral delinquency here involved? This ought to show us how exceedingly low and grovelling our minds are. Suppose a man should steal from you a pair of old shoes ”

“ There is only one possible answer to the question, “What is to be done with the feebleminded person who is delinquent?” He must be cared for, but he must be cared for in a place where we care for irresponsibles. The jail or prison or reformatory, is not for him, neither must he be turned loose on the streets or sent back to the home and environment in which he has already become a delinquent.
In the present state of our laws and customs, delinquency is the one means by which we are able to get hold of a [Pg 14] certain type of mental defective and provide for him as he should be provided for. ”

“ When people make a merit of delinquency, instead of that hypocrisy which is properly such on account of its counteracting virtue, they study another which is the reverse of it, because it feigns vice. ”

“ The moral image defaced by vice, or buried beneath the accumulation of crime, begins to assume its earlier charms, begins to move under its superincumbent mass, and, with a recognition of its proprieties and value, vice and crime not only lose attraction, but become hideous and repulsive; the spirit of hostility to the world is gradually weakened, and a lively sensibility to all the duties of social life takes the place of that wretched resolve to misapply power by felonious appropriation, and indulge passion in the violation of the laws of decency and morals. ”

“ Louise de Koven Bowen, Flexner and Baldwin, are pretty largely agreed that the causes of delinquency, and hence of criminality, are as follows: (1) The defective home—made defective by illness, poverty, shiftlessness, ignorance, immorality, desertion, divorce, death—is the leading single causal element. Nearly all criminals begin their careers as disobedient sons. The law of obedience and self-discipline, if not observed in the home, is learned later only at the expense of anti-social and criminal acts. (2) Mental defectiveness often causes delinquency. ”

“ Not only are they free from the egotism, insensibility, laziness, and lack of moral sense peculiar to the ordinary criminal, but their abnormality consists in the excessive development of noble qualities, sensibility, altruism, integrity, affection, which if carried to an extreme, may result in actions forbidden by law, or worse still, dangerous to society. ”

“ Many of the criminals so called are not responsible for their acts. Their apparent moral obliquity is, in reality, a mental deficiency, for which they are not any more to blame than you or I. I have seen men who had been guilty—yes, even convicted of most heinous crimes, who from the very conformation of their heads revealed certain things that, to say the least, should have been considered in mitigation of their supposed guilt. ”

“ But I tell the right honorable gentleman, that controlled depravity is not innocence, and that it is not the labor of delinquency in chains that will correct abuses. Will these gentlemen of the direction animadvert on the partners of their own guilt? Never did a serious plan of amending of any old tyrannical establishment propose the authors and abettors of the abuses as the reformers of them. ”

“ Such "justice" has the double advantage of being speedy and readily comprehended of a rudimentary intelligence as long as the temptation has been resisted. But when evil instincts, that none asks of Nature, have caused the fall of delinquents, the morbid moral sense, more or less distorted, which urged them on to violent deeds, makes them conscious solely of the violence of which they are now [Pg 135] the object, and drives them to take sinister revenge. ”

“ When a great crime is committed our blood boils, and we cry aloud for vengeance; but a little correct reflection on such occasions will do us no harm. The criminal inherited a bad moral organization, and was, perhaps, surrounded by evil associates from the cradle to manhood. ”

“ For if a fundamental distinction may be made in the evils that different delinquents are forced to suffer, surely the less important and ancient distinction between the modes of establishing the delinquency, according to the nature of the evil inflicted, even more easily may be justified. ”

“ In the place of domestic and social affections, the criminal is dominated by a few absorbing passions: vanity, impulsiveness, desire for revenge, licentiousness.
Moral Sense
The ability to discriminate between right and wrong, which is the highest attribute of civilised humanity, is notably lacking in physically and psychically stunted organisms. Many criminals do not realise the immorality of their actions. ”

“ Is not the crime the result of moral degradation gradually asserting itself in two individuals, whose moral and intellectual faculties are the same as those of other men, but who fall, step by step, into vice and crime? ”

“ While it is undoubtedly an encouraging fact that the attitude of the community towards delinquency is rapidly changing and is assuming more the position of sympathetic inquiry into the causes and remedies, it is none the less a fact that the law remains as of old,-sternly searching for the responsible parties. ”

“ We will leave to the jurists the great civic labor resulting from having brought the individual as well as the crime under consideration, in relation to the social phenomenon of delinquency—in other words, of having substituted an anthropological for a speculative attitude. Whether the delinquent should be cured, or simply isolated, or even subjected to punishment; whether the prison should be transformed into an asylum for the criminal insane; whether the penal laws should be reformed on principles of a higher order of civil morality: these are problems which interest us only secondarily. ”

“ It will be seen that vagrancy, or the habit of wandering abroad, under colour either of distress, or of some ostensible, though illegal occupation, having claims on the sympathies of the uninformed, constitutes one great source of delinquency, and especially of juvenile delinquency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ It is undoubtedly true that delinquencies of a positive and unequivocal character are often kept private, and the offending parties, after a brief interval, betake themselves again to evil courses; and when some act of gross turpitude is exposed, it is regarded as the first development of a depraved character, whereas in fact it is only the last of a long series of criminal acts. ”

“ When a crime is committed within the precincts of good society, we are greatly shocked; but we do not often notice the debasement of character which leads down to it, and still more rarely notice the instances in which fear or some other motive arrests demoralization before the final step, and leaves the delinquent as it were in a condition of moral suspense. ”

“ We know nothing, as yet, except by inference about the correlation of delinquency with the influence of bad companions outside the home, bad school adjustment, the effect of broken families aside from the early death of the mother, absence of proper recreation, and many other stimuli for delinquency which social workers have been studying for years by less conclusive methods. ”

“ Under such guidance he followed them to their haunts of dissipation: he was initiated into their orgies, and soon became the boon companion of the vilest of the vile—of a set of villains who wore the semblance of gentlemen, and yet, at heart, were as deeply dyed with crime as the wretch who expiates his guilt on the gallows. Strange that society banishes from its temples those who break the laws of men, yet welcomes with open arms the offender against the laws of God and the dictates of natural justice. ”

“ The horrible impress of naked and hardened villany—the light and mirthful delirium of crime—the wanton manifestations of vice, in all its shapes, and the unblushing front of debauchery and profligacy—constituted, when brought together in one hideous group, a sight which made his heart groan for human nature on the one hand, and the corruption of human law on the other. ”

“ But in beings so utterly ignorant, and so destitute of all moral perceptions, such offences could hardly be considered as criminal; not one, at any rate, deserving of wounds and death at the caprice of a fellow-creature acting on his own impulses, unchecked by any legal or judicial control. ”

“ But it is not the sinner alone who suffers by this conduct of men in power, it is the innocent too; and who but a fiend would punish the innocent with the guilty? It would denote a moral and perfect fitness for any place but heaven, to take pleasure in afflicting, unnecessarily, even the vilest sinner; what then must be the moral complexion of that man's soul, who can sport with the unmerited sufferings of the crimeless, and take an unearthly satisfaction in multiplying the tears and agony of the innocent wife and the stainless orphan? ”

“ The smallest deviation from the rigid path of religious virtue or worldly honour is visited with the severest penalty, and the delinquent is irrevocably lost, and for ever excluded from the pale of society. With such a punishment hanging over their heads, apart from the natural instinct to virtue, a faux-pas is rare indeed amongst the highest classes of society. ”

“ Then, when, under the influence of men, he outrages society, and in his maniac madness violates the law of the land, and becomes a felon, wasting away his days in the gloomy prison, or expiating his crimes upon the gallows, they forget what they have done, and, turning to the poor, crushed, and bleeding heart, which they have pierced with a thousand sorrows, cry out, "You, O mother of that guilty man, have not done your duty, and society holds you responsible for all his suffering and for all his crimes. ”

“ I found also that those who manifest acute sorrow and real remorse after a criminal act, have committed that act either under the influence of a violent passion which has momentarily stifled the moral sense, or by accident, without intention.” He concludes that the two great psychical conditions for crime are moral insensibility and perversity, with two accessory moral anomalies, imprudence and lack of foresight. ”

“ Yet of all our criminals only a very small proportion have been in a condition to obtain the average intellectual and moral culture of our times.
Our present mode of treating criminals does no good to this class of men, these victims of circumstances. I do not know that their improvement is even contemplated. We do not ask what causes [Pg 310] made this man a criminal, and then set ourselves to remove those causes. We look only at the crime; so we punish practically a man because he had a wicked father; because his education was neglected, and he exposed to the baneful influence of unholy men. ”

“ We charge this offender with no crimes that have not arisen from passions which it is criminal to harbor,—with no offences that have not their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper,—in short, in [with?] nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, dyed in grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core. ”

“ If such an individual is to be classified by his delinquency he might find himself at one time a disturber of the peace, at another time a murderer. Furthermore, just as the individual might commit different sorts of crime, so the same crime might be committed by individuals belonging to entirely different types. ”

“ He observes that mainly from the ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists, begs the fundamental questions of right and [Pg 162] altruism. ”

“ And who knows what effect may be produced on a criminal by an incessant, forced meditation on the crimes which he had committed, and their punishment? Far from this, thrown into the midst of a ruffianly crowd in whose eyes the least sign of repentance is cowardice, or, rather, treachery, which they dearly expiate, for, in their savage obduracy and in senseless distrust, they look upon as a spy every man (if there should be such a one) who, sad and mournful, regretting his fault, does not partake of their audacious thoughtlessness, and shudders at their contact. ”

“ Every species of control, moral or physical, is taken into account; every aberration which disturbs the balance of the mental faculties is allowed to operate favourably in excusing the delinquent who is brought to judgment; and nothing but free, determined wickedness is punished by the laws of man. Whatever injury has been sustained by society, crime is not imputed to the person who has been an unwilling instrument of wrong. ”