862 THE CRIMINAL GROUP 



inquiry, a full knowledge of the life-history of the convict, and of his 

 character and intentions, such as no court ever can. They are, or 

 should be, experts in criminal chicanery, who cannot easily be 

 deceived by hypocritical professions or by simulated and self-inter- 

 ested obedience to rules, who are capable of forming a tolerably 

 accurate judgment as to his actual state, and of determining whether 

 or not the treatment given him has produced a genuine change in his 

 attitude to the law and to the commonwealth. If any analogy is 

 needed, in order to justify the confidence reposed in them, it may be 

 found in the grant of precisely similar powers to the medical super- 

 intendent of every American hospital for the insane. 



Let us now go deeper, and probe this problem to the quick. Let us 

 ascertain, if we can, the underlying cause of the failure of lawgivers 

 and of judges to secure and establish criminal justice. Nothing could 

 be simpler or more obvious. The aim of both was to establish a 

 mathematical proportion between the guilt of every offense and its 

 appropriate penalty, and so to adjust one to the other. In order to 

 realize this design, a common measure of guilt and of pain is indis- 

 pensable. But no. such common measure exists. Justice is an 

 abstraction, elusive as a sunbeam, imponderable as a shadow. A 

 ^criminal court is a trap to catch sunbeams. Neither the legislature 

 nor the court can make use of a non-existing pair of scales with 

 imaginary weights. Yet this is the instrument which the legislature 

 gravely presents to the court, with an unuttered prayer that an 

 infinitely wise God may overrule all judicial blunders to his own glory 

 and the good of mankind. Grasp this thought firmly, and thereupon 

 the seemingly solid foundation of the current penal codes of Christen- 

 dom melts into vapor and disappears like a dream when one awakens 

 from sleep. Its unreality, its absurdity, at once become apparent to 

 the aroused normal intellect. 



If, then, the indeterminate sentence proposed nothing more than to 

 transfer responsibility for the achievement of an impossible under- 

 taking from the courts to the prison officials, its failure would be 

 assured in advance of its adoption. That is precisely what it does 

 not propose. 



It has been said, but without sufficient information, that the 

 researches and conclusions of the school of criminologists known as 

 criminal anthropologists were the original occasion and motive of the 

 introduction into American criminal jurisprudence of the principle 

 of the indeterminate sentence. There is no historic proof of the 

 truth of this assertion. Criminal anthropology, uncertain and vague 

 as its formulated teachings are in their yet partially developed stage, 

 has unquestionably rendered valuable service to science, especially 

 to the sciences of physiology and psychology, and to law. It has 

 devoted. its energies to the study of the criminal. It regards him as 



