Remarks on the principles of criminal legislation, and the practice of prison discipline / by George Combe.

  • George Combe
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the principles of criminal legislation, and the practice of prison discipline / by George Combe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    believe that punishments which do not naturally arise from the offences committed are awarded from any other than vindictive feelings; and tliis non-belief in the purity of the motives with which they are administered (which attaches more or less to all artificial punishments) has, in Mr. Hill's opinion, a strong tendency to excite angry and revengeful passions, almost incom- patible with moral improvement.* We so thoroughly concur in ]Mr. Hill's views, as to anticipate that an avowed change in om* -system of convict treatment from the revengeful, vindictive, punitive principle, to that of humanity and reformation, would operate more effectually in deterring the ill-disposed from crime than om* present method. As tilings now stand, the criminal law may be personified by imagining a figure of a giant form standing astride over the Island, armed with a halter in one hand and a lash in the other, supported on each side by solitary cells, tread-mills and crank-wheels, on whose countenance no trait of human sympathy or pity could be traced, but only stem and inexorable severity. Such an image would naturally excite terror and loathing in the good; but in the eyes of the natiu-ally ill constituted, it would be invested with a strange and incom- prehensible interest. Being in itself the personification of all the low, harsh, and unamiable elements of human nature, it would be a reflex of their own consciousness; and seeing it assume an attitude of threatening, they would feel this as a challenge, and theii instinctive impulse would be to defy it. Let the ciiminal law, on the contrary, be such as would be fitly represented by a similar gigantic figure, resplendent with physical strength and moral dignity and beauty; show it diffusing beams of compassionate benignity on suffering offenders; stretching forth its arms to rescue them from misery and crime, and to train them to happiness and virtue; and we venture to predict that the whole effect would be reversed. Such a spectacle would address itself directly to whatever spark of good feeling existed in the wavering population, and turn the balance in favour of virtue and not of crime; it would not incite or defy them to a contest, by exhibiting their own passions in its features and action; the individual who braved it would be reckoned not a hero, but a fool, even by his own class of minds, and by the favourably constituted as a moral lunatic, whom it was the interest and the duty of all to restrain. A change like this would form an epoch in the history of civilization. Whenever the physiology of the brain shall have become part of the education of the people, high and low, it will inevitably follow; meantime ignorance must take its course, sowing error, and reaping suffering and disappointment. We repeat, that men deficient in the moral and intellectual * See Mr. Hill's cliaptcrs On the Principles of Puiiishraeiit,—^pp. 145, 185-90, 281-3.