Crime & criminals : being the jurisprudence of crime, medical biological, and psycological / by Charles Mercier... with an introduction by Sir Bryan Donkin.

  • Mercier, Charles Arthur, 1852-1919.
Date:
1918
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Crime & criminals : being the jurisprudence of crime, medical biological, and psycological / by Charles Mercier... with an introduction by Sir Bryan Donkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    portant purpose, an afterthought, to reform him that is, to alter his mental constitution or temperament so that he may no longer wish to commit crime. We are to inquire by what means these ends can be best attained. 1. Retaliation.—The primary purpose of punish¬ ment is to inflict pain upon the offender in retaliation for the pain that he has inflicted. When we ourselves suffer injury at the hands of another person, we have an ingrained and deep-seated desire, the biological impor¬ tance of which is manifest on the face of it, to inflict injury in return ; only so can we live in security. When we witness the infliction of injury upon other members of the society to which we belong, or upon the society itself, we feel a similar craving to inflict injury upon the offender, and again the biological significance of the desire is manifest. It is a safeguard to the society. If such injuries are permitted, if they may be inflicted with impunity, society will sooner or later be destroyed. Retaliation and deterrence have the same root, and it may be that deterrence is the more primitive, or at least of equally primitive origin ; but in actual practice it takes second rank, as the means so often succeeds in ousting and superseding the end for which it was origin¬ ally employed. There is more in retaliation, however, than the mere infliction of injury upon the offender in return for the injury that he has done. The same craving that impels us to give him pain impels us to preserve a certain pro¬ portion between the injury that he has inflicted and the injury that he shall suffer, or rather between the turpi¬ tude of his offence and the severity of the punishment. No one would be content to inflict a reprimand upon a very atrocious murderer : everyone would feel the in¬ justice of visiting upon a trifling theft, or upon neglect