The prevention and repression of crime : being a report of the fifth section of the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy, Chicago, June, 1893 / edited by Frederick H. Wines.

Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention and repression of crime : being a report of the fifth section of the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy, Chicago, June, 1893 / edited by Frederick H. Wines. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    information from a great variety of books by ancient writers and general historians. I propose to give you some of the leading con- clusions to whicl^ my mind has been led. It seems that in the ancient times there was no imprisonment in the sense in which it is practised to-day. For instance, no mention of it is made in the penal law of Moses, and nothing was known about it at that time. In the New Testament and in Greek literature there is an occasional reference to imprisonment, but the word for it in Greek is precisely the word for bondage. It means to take a man and put him in chains, to fetter a man, when it is necessary to restrain him. The Romans cast some of the apostles into prison, but for what pur- pose ? Did they attempt thus to punish them ? Such an idea never entered their minds. Every prisoner was detained for a defi- nite purpose. He w.as held for trial, or to keep him out of the way of somebody who was his enemy ; but imprisonment as a penalty inflicted by law for crime did not exist. Prisons existed in the middle ages, but they were a sort of appendage of feudal power. Noblemen with castles always had prisons in them. Kings had prisons, into which they could throw their prime ministers, or wives, or anybody they could get hold of, and keep them there until they saw fit otherwise to punish them. But the idea of imprisonment as a penalty had not dawned upon the world. When do we find it? Not until the eighteenth century. Before that time, the punishments inflicted for crime were almost altogether of a different character. Sometimes men were mutilated. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had a great fondness for cutting up the human frame. They were the veritable ancestors of the greatest surgeons of modern times. They took poor devils up on the public way and cut off their ears, and put out their eyes, and split their noses, and chopped ofl their hands, and sometimes their feet; and if they had not done anything that required such horrible treat- ment, they put them in the stocks or in the pillory and invited the boys to throw stones at them; or they had the public hangman come and whip them. They would fine a man of noble blood half his possessions, if he were guilty of crime. But until comparatively recent years imprisonment for crime was unknown. How did the idea arise ? The prisons were originally used for the custody of men convicted of crime, and to confine anybody whom the law wished to hold for a certain purpose until a particular time. As the humanitarian spirit grew, men gradually revolted at