A popular essay on subjects of penal law, and on uninterrupted solitary confinement at labor, as contradistinguished to solitary confinement at night and joint labor by day, in a letter to John Bacon / by Francis Lieber.

  • Lieber, Francis, 1800-1872.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A popular essay on subjects of penal law, and on uninterrupted solitary confinement at labor, as contradistinguished to solitary confinement at night and joint labor by day, in a letter to John Bacon / by Francis Lieber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    right we have to punish, and the real end we have in view in punishing; a necessary consequence of which has been, that no fixed standard of punishment has ever been established, and punishments of excessive cruelty as well as others showing a morbid philanthropy, are found with the same race, and at the same time in curious contradiction to each other. The Ger- man, French, and most Italian jurists have, with great zeal, and not unfrequently with much shrewdness and close reason- ing, inquired into the origin of all penal right, but they have again greatly neglected the practical operation of the various systems.* None of the parties have paid sufficient attention to the psychologic part of penal law, treating the whole matter, not only the principles, as a general one, without sufficient reference, and a thorough scientific inquiry into the neverthe- less close relation which must ever exist between punishment and the given state of civilization, on the one hand, or to the psychologic state of the criminal himself on the other. I do not hesitate in confessing that the part of the fourth volume of Blackstone's Commentaries, which treats of punishments, has ever appeared to me as one of the least successful passages in that classical work, however useful some remarks of his were for the time, when Romilly had not yet directed public atten- tion to the injudicious cruelty of many barbarous laws in the code of Britain. Chancellor Kent, than whom no author has better and more justly succeeded in establishing himself far and wide over a vast country as authority in one of the gravest causes of mankind—the administration of justice—during his lifetime, and to whom I feel the deepest gratitude both as a citizen of the United States and individually, for the indulgent views he has been pleased to take of my humble labors—glides still more briefly over this subject, which has perplexed for so many centuries the ablest philosophers and inquirers into the dearest interests of society, from Aristotle to Kant, from Kant down to the latest times. t * The French, of late, may be mentioned as making an exception to the last remark. 9