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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    no prisoner can escape, because it takes place according to the first principles of human nature, common to all the good as well as the wicked, and to which the state has, therefore, no right to expose. The state says: thou hast offended, I must punish. We grant the right, hut the state has no right to corrupt, and it does corrupt positively, directly and not acci- dentally, because the corruption takes place as a necessary con- sequence of joint imprisonment, according to the nature of man, which the state has neither the power nor the right to change. The state has no right to corrupt; the prisoner can claim it, and ought to claim it, were he awake to his true rights and interests, and society claims it, because it demands to be pro- tected against crime, not to have it increased tenfold by wicked carelessness on the part of the state. What should we say of a teacher, who, in order to punish inattention, should choose a punishment by which necessarily and unavoidably inattention is increased, for instance, by placing the boy so that he may amuse himself by looking at a military parade? The least we could say would be, that he is a foolish teacher. Contamina- tion, therefore, making the criminal still worse than he is, is to be avoided. Let us rightly understand the matter: it is not a demand made on the score of charity, still less of overstrained philanthropy; it is a demand founded on the strictest right. The state which exposes to contamination, after having become acquainted with the fact, acts criminally if it persist, frequently more criminally than the offender, who may have been led to his offence by want, by utterly neglected education, by bad laws of the state itself. The state becomes the wilful perpetu- ator of crime, and, inasmuch as it frustrates the intended effect of its punishments, a cruel offender itself, because it inflicts suffering (the punishment) for no purpose: it becomes, lastly, the heedless squanderer of enormous sums, which the adminis- tration of penal justice requires—the annual budget of crime, as Mr. Quetelet so justly calls it—because it does not repress crime, but actually generates it, nurses it in hot beds, diligently taking care that no seed should be lost, but each one should thrive in the freest possible luxuriance. Though I use similes,