852 THE CRIMINAL GROUP 



reaction in a movement which includes in its sweep the entire globe, 

 with its diversified interests of every sort. 



It is in the record of social evolution in the United States in the 

 West, and in Japan in the East, that this movement can best be 

 studied, for there it has been most recent, most rapid, and most 

 conspicuously consistent. Let us confine our attention, however, to 

 the United States. 



It would be an exaggeration of the truth to say that all of the most 

 fruitful reforms in criminal jurisprudence and in prison discipline 

 have originated in America, and yet the practical genius of this 

 nation, unfettered by precedent and tradition, has enabled it to adopt 

 and realize conceptions formulated by leaders- of thought in the Old 

 World, but which were regarded by their compatriots and con- 

 temporaries as visionary, until we demonstrated their utility and 

 value. Prison architecture may afford an illustration. The plan 

 of the prison of Ghent was stellar, that is to say, it was constructed 

 with wings radiating from a common centre; but it was not until an 

 American architect, who appropriated this fecund Flemish sugges- 

 tion, had devised the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, in the 

 city of Philadelphia, which is still occupied as a state prison, that 

 official and unofficial visitors from Europe discovered its merits and 

 imitated it -- at Millbank in London, and elsewhere. The arrange- 

 ment of cells next the outer walls, on both sides of a central corridor, 

 at Cherry Hill, was identical with that in the Hospital San Michele, 

 founded at Rome in 1704 by Clement XI, of which John Howard has 

 left us a description, illustrated by drawings. In the prison of 

 Ghent, however, the wing set apart for the detention of criminals 

 contained a tier or tiers of cells placed back to back, opening into 

 corridors next the outer walls (another idea borrowed from the 

 prison of Ghent), which was the method of construction followed in 

 the erection of the New York state prison at Auburn, the standard 

 architectural type of the distinctively American prison. 



If we turn to the criminal codes of the world, it was William Penn, 

 the Quaker, who, in giving laws to the commonwealth which bears his 

 name, erased, by a single stroke of his quill, all those bloody pro- 

 visions of English law which prescribed the penalty of death for 

 some two hundred listed offenses, and who limited capital punish- 

 ment to a single crime, that of willful murder. The theory of the 

 indeterminate sentence and conditional liberation, now incorporated 

 in so many American codes, had been advocated as a theory of legal 

 punishment by various distinguished Europeans - - Archbishop 

 Whateley, the brothers Hill (Frederick and Matthew Davenport), 

 Bonne ville de Marsangy, of France, and others. Captain Macono- 

 chie, of the Royal Navy of Great Britain, had experimented with it in 

 Australia, at Norfolk Island, combining it with the graded system; 



