THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMINALS. 551 



or poverty, and upon the designing person who, after thinking the 

 matter out, elects to run the risks of his action, punitive punish- 

 ment has a deterrent, and consequently a curative, effect; but he 

 adds that iipon the criminal from instinct and upon the habitual 

 drunkard it has no more effect than had the whip and the chain 

 upon the ravings of the maniac of a hundred years ago, and these 

 cruel and impotent agents it must soon follow to the oblivion of 

 the things that were. 



The system of treatment that the leai-ned doctor advocates 

 should take the place of the present is prolonged incarceration 

 upon an indefinite sentence in an industrial penitentiary. He 

 thinks that every Judge should be empowered to send any person 

 convicted before him to an indefinite term of incarceration in such 

 penitentiary, provided at least three previous convictions could be 

 proved. In tliis institution the plank bed and solitary confinement 

 would be luiknown. In the place of such treatment every effort 

 would be made to improve the criminal so far as possible morally, 

 physically, and intellectually, and from this place he would be set 

 free on parole only when it was thought that his anti-social 

 instincts had become sufficiently blunted to enable him to mix in 

 societ}' with safety. He adds, finally, that the continued seclusion 

 of the instinctive criminal would very materially limit the produc- 

 tion by propagation of this most undesirable class. 



The Criminal Law of nearl)^ all, if not of the whole, civilised 

 world, provides that additional punishment may be inflicted upon 

 those previously convicted. It is somewhat singular that the 

 author of " Crimes and Punishments" expressly dissents from this 

 being justifiable. His grounds for doing so he puts as follows: — 

 From the point of view of the public interest, which in theory is 

 the only legal view, it is no mitigation of a crime that it is a first 

 offence, nor any aggravati(m of one that it is the second. The 

 injury to the public is precisely the same whether the criminal has 

 broken the law for the first time or for the thousandth and first, 

 and to punish a man more severely for his second offence than for 

 his first because he has been punished before is to cast aside all 

 regard for that due proportion between crime and punishment 

 which is, after ail, the chief ingredient of retributive justice, and to 

 inflict a penalty often altogether incommensurate with the ijijury 

 inflicted on the public. 



Probably it is such reasoning as this that induces some Judges 

 to ignore previous convictions. It may be safely averred, how- 

 ever, that the great consensus of opinion is that the present law 

 providing for increased punishment after previous convictions is 

 founded on strict justice and common sense. In many instances it 

 would be a relief to society, and the criminal also, if the latter, 

 after being several times convicted, were separated from his kind 

 for the remainder of his life, with the qualification that Dr. 

 Strahan provides as to the possibility of regaining his liberty. 



