Individual Blame or Societal Irresponsibility?

There have been occasions when a judge has honestly and bravely stated the case against society in his official capacity, and has given judgment accordingly. There is the famous instance of the judge who by his outspokenness, followed by a sentence of one day's imprisonment on a man found guilty of bigamy, caused an alteration of the law to make divorce a possibility for poor as well as rich ; but such instances are rare, and belong too much to the past. The refusal of juries to convict for offences involving capital punishment brought society (and incidentally a very reluctant bench of judges) to throw over a penal code whose blind and stupid severities stood comparable to the atrocities perpetrated in war.

It was the self-righteousness of society which had made such things possible in the past ; and now, when the scientific study of human nature has so greatly advanced, it is self-righteousness still which keeps society blind to the maltreatment of human nature which goes on behind prison walls.

The criminal is one who suffers from a defective sense of citizenship a defect which we all share ; it is merely a matter of degree. It has been produced, or has been encouraged, in a society whose sense of citizenship is also defective or incomplete ; for until society stands for commonwealth and brotherhood, our individual citizenship is likely to be as defective as the social order in which it finds expression.

The criminal, therefore, only expresses in a fuller degree, more representatively, and with a stronger focus of illicit action against its weak places, the defects of our social system ; and we, taking hold of this deficient who is partly our own making, thrust him out of one defective social system into another still more deficient in the principles and incentives of good citizenship ; and there, very effectively in fifty-five cases out of a hundred or thereabouts, we stereotype his defect into a habit, imposing on it such a rule of life that it becomes not merely an aberration from average decency of conduct, but a conformity to type; for prison can hardly by any chance develop a sense of citizenship since from prison the sense of citizenship is not merely absent but systematically ruled out.

Even kindness and friendship are forbidden, which is, in a damned nutshell, about the best example of " the sin against the Holy Ghost " which I know. And until we make our prisons a training ground for citizenship making the repair and mending of lives the be-all and end-all of the system our prisons, like the society which has brought them into being, will themselves be mentally defective.