INSTINCTIVE CRIMINALITY. 295 



having good clothes and friends. But how long it will 

 take to drive it home, and cleave the prejudice of 

 centuries, one hardly dares to prophesy. 



The records of our criminal courts prove con- 

 clusively that the various legal pains and penalties 

 have no deterrent effect whatever upon the instinctive 

 criminal ; they have no more effect upon him than 

 had the chain and the whip upon the ravings and 

 violence of the maniac of fifty or a hundred years 

 ago. Why then continue them ? It would be more 

 humane and Christian-like, having recognised the 

 perverted moral instincts of criminals, to save them 

 from themselves, and at the same time protect 

 society, by secluding them at once and finally from 

 that society with which they are organically unfitted 

 to mix. 



Dr. Maudsley says : " It would, perhaps, in the 

 end make little difference whether the offender were 

 sentenced in anger, and sent to the seclusion of 

 prison, or were sentenced more in sorrow than in 

 anger, and consigned to the same sort of seclusion 

 under the name of an asylum. The change would 

 probably not lead either to an increase or to a 

 decrease in the number of crimes committed in a 

 year." * But on the face of it his argument is bad. 

 In the first place, the seclusion of the asylum and 

 that of the prison are to-day anything but the same. 

 In the one secluded life is made as tolerable as may 

 be, in the other it is made as intolerable as possible, 

 * "Responsibility in Mental Disease," p. 26. 



