644 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE CALIFORNIA PENAL SYSTEM. 



By CHARLES HOWARD SHINN. 



THEORETICALLY every new commonwealth in organizing 

 its institutions can measurably avoid the errors of older com- 



v 



munities, and can venture upon promising experiments elsewhere un- 

 tried. In practice, however, new States are usually compelled to face 

 unforeseen difficulties, and although their various departments gain 

 something in flexibility, they lose in systematic organization. They 

 have the faults as well as the virtues of the pioneer. 



Penology, like every other department of human thought, is a 

 battlefield of opposing principles. But I know of nothing in print 

 more inspiring to the officers of the State engaged in prison and reform 

 work than Herbert Spencer's Essay on Prison Ethics. It is likely 

 that many of the people who should read it are not aware of its value 

 and interest to themselves. Beginning at the foundations, Mr. Spen- 

 cer makes a lucid exposition of the necessity of " a perpetual readjust- 

 ment of the compromise between the ideal and the practicable in 

 social arrangements." As he points out, gigantic errors are always 

 made when abstract ethics are ignored. 



If society has the right of self-protection, it has, as Mr. Spencer 

 asserts, the right to coerce a criminal. It has authority to demand 

 restitution as far as possible, and to restrict the action of the offender 

 as much as is needful to prevent further aggresssions. Beyond this 

 point absolute morality countenances no restraint and no punish- 

 ment. The criminal does not lose all his social rights, but only such 

 portion of those rights as can not be left him without danger to the 

 welfare of the community. 



But absolute morality also requires that while living in durance 

 the offender must continue to maintain himself. It is as much his 

 business to earn his own living as it was before. All that he can 

 rightfully ask of society is that he be given an opportunity to work, 

 and to exchange the products of his labor for the necessaries of life. 

 He has no right to eat the bread of idleness, and to still further tax 

 the community against which he has committed an aggression. " On 

 this self -maintenance equity sternly insists." If he is supported by 

 the taxpayers the breach between himself and the true social order is 

 indefinitely widened. 



Such principles as these could easily have been made a funda- 

 mental part of the California prison system when the State was organ- 

 ized, for the famous Code of Reform and Prison Discipline, prepared 

 about 1826 by a New Orleans lawyer, Edward Livingston, was well 

 known to some of the ablest men of pioneer California, and a strong 



