Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Prisons, Police and Punishment: An Inquiry Into the Causes and Treatment of Crime and Criminals
Changes no doubt are coming, and better social conditions. Meanwhile, however, it is necessary that our treatment of the Criminal should be an aid to progress, and not an obstruction - as it so often is to-day. Mr. Charlton T. Lewis, President of the National Prison Association of the United States, has said that to consign a man to prison is commonly to enrol him in the criminal class (see Appendix C). But surely, if we are to have prisons at all, their action and result ought to be just the opposite.
I have ventured to indicate in the first few chapters of this little book some of the reforms in Prison management and Criminal procedure which are most needed, and which might at once be pressed forward; and in the Note at the end of Chapter IV I have made a list of these. Coincident changes must no doubt also take place in our Police-system, and to these I have alluded in Chapter V. Finally, since there is a growing feeling on all hands, especially among advanced officials and criminologists, that prisons and pun ishment are in their present form outworn, and productive of as much harm as good, I have endeavoured (in Chapter VI) to sketch a state of affairs in which the whole system of government by violence will lapse and become antiquated, leaving society free to shape itself by voluntary methods according to its own good sense: feeling assured that if society has good sense it will be able to shape itself in this way, and if it has not there does not appear much likelihood at present of its rulers being able to supply the deficiency.
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