From My Writings and My Evenings by Runes Dagobert D.;

Author:Runes, Dagobert D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Philosophical Library, Incorporated

Chapter 6

Crime and Punishment

—Of God, the Devil and the Jews

If Society may be likened to a man, its institutions, like the organs of a man, may be of different ages. Some may be fresh and young, others, worn out and almost useless. A man may have young ears but old eyes, a good heart but a diseased stomach. So with society. Some of our laws may be young and true to reason, while on the other hand our ideas of judgment and punishment may be fossilized. We still throw offenders into pits and cages; and the chain gangs of Georgia are scarcely an improvement over the Bastille, except that now we have more prisoners to keep each other company and for a longer time.

I wonder who thought up the formula that throwing together lawbreakers and evildoers will purify the criminal mind. The great majority of our caged-in citizens are adolescents and other youthful knights of disgrace. To elect those who have erred and mass them with other moral failures, some of whom are repeaters with malignant instincts, is more an act of evasion than one of justice. How can one hope to improve the sense of social responsibility of a youthful offender by making him spend years and years in the exclusive company of other offenders? One ought rather to assume that daily association with criminal minds will harden and deepen existing negative tendencies and the dislike and distrust of surrounding social institutions.

Criminality is an infectious disease and herding together its victims is more likely to intensify the illness and tend to create crime plagues or crime waves, than to bring forth a cure. There is perhaps no all-curing serum for criminality or any other disease, but the packing together of criminals of all types and ages into cage-dominant communal life is little different from the dungeon system of medieval eras. The toilet facilities are more sanitary, and the diet is more balanced, but the principle is the same. After years of intimate living together with criminals, the offender walks out of the jail gates, not a better and kinder, but just “wised up” person. To be sure, there are certain offenders who should be eliminated from society, and little does it matter what happens to them—persons with biologically criminal instincts and violent tendencies so deeply ingrained in their sadistic minds that they can no longer be considered normal human beings and ought to be confined for life in heavily guarded penal colonies. These are the Capones and other ruthless mass killers, sex maniacs, pathological rapists, murderous assailants towards whom, unfortunately, the law has shown a peculiar leniency which, in almost every instance, has brought about a repetition of the offense. Our city streets are infested with vicious sex aggressors who are sent to jail for a year or two, readmitted again and again into society and given their freedom, which they use only to commit other atrocities. A glance at the police records of any large city will evidence

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