Charles Nordhoff (1830-1901) wrote this essay for Harpers Magazine, and below the fold you will find the complete text, along with the source. Highlighted below is one paragraph that I especially liked, but the entire piece is a great read, now over 135 years later. Keep in mind though that I’m not advocating his position, but found his essay interesting on a number of levels.
The general conviction that, as Quetelet[2] puts it, “it is society which prepares the crime, the criminal being only the instrument which executes it,” has become so deep that society has in modern times conscientiously imposed upon governments the task of not merely confining but of trying to reform its crim ina ls. With Society organized as at present—that is to say, very rudely, imperfectly, and selfishly—we know that, given a certain density of population, and we shall find a certain definite and predictable number of thefts, of robberies, of burglaries, and murders. The diffusion of intelligence, the decrease of intemperance, and other circumstances affect this result, but they are themselves affected by density of population, and it remains true that the statistician can foretell with startling correctness how many thieves, burglars, robbers, and assassins there will be in any Christian community whose numbers per square mile he knows. Society being constituted as it now is, a certain proportion will be criminals, just as a certain other proportion will be dyspeptics, or will have weak eyes, and another proportion will be virtuous, self-denying, conscientious, and irritable. The burglar is as much the natural and legitimate product of society as Jim Fisk[3] was the inevitable result of the indecent scramble for wealth, and the semi-barbarous love of ostentatious living which distinguishes New York.
Originally from “What Shall We Do With Scroggs?,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine vol. 47, iss. 277, June 1873. By Charles Nordhoff.
Full Text:
According to the latest returns, there are in the United States forty-one State-prisons, of which New York has three, Pennsylvania and Indiana two each, and the other States one each, with the exception of Delaware, where the whipping-post saves them the expense of a penitentiary. The number of county jails is over two thousand; and there are, besides, houses of correction, local penitentiaries, etc., for adults, to the number of twenty-five, chiefly in New York and Massachusetts.
The State-prisons of this country contain at this time about 16,000 convicts; and there were in May, 1872, about 38,500 persons in confinement for various crimes and offenses, in prisons of all kinds, in the whole United States. The imprisoned part is mostly between sixteen and forty years of age, and compared to the general population between those ages, this would give about one to every 450 in a jail of some kind. [1]
When a man or woman is sentenced to prison for a term of years, society ceases to trouble itself about him almost as much as though he had been happily shot or hanged. While he remains in prison he is clothed, warmed, and fed, and more or less disciplined, at society’s expense, and, like a naughty child shut up in a closet, he does not “bother” any body except his keepers. When his term is served he is summarily turned out from the place which has meantime become home to him; and with his old clothes, and enough money to pay his way to the nearest big city, he is left to do what he chooses—or rather what necessity, weakness, ignorance, the force of old associations, the desperation of loneliness, all combined, may tempt him to do. His readiest friends are his old companions in vagrancy or crime, and the top of his ambition is to maintain his place among the great mass of the undetected. In some few cases he reforms, and becomes a more or less useless member of society. But all who have had to do with criminals report that genuine and lasting reform is but seldom found, and that when a boy once gets into jail, he will probably continue to prey upon society as long as he lives, and that on the score of economy, and leaving humanity out of view, it would have been better to shoot or hang him at the beginning.
The general conviction that, as Quetelet[2] puts it, “it is society which prepares the crime, the criminal being only the instrument which executes it,” has become so deep that society has in modern times conscientiously imposed upon governments the task of not merely confining but of trying to reform its criminals. With Society organized as at present—that is to say, very rudely, imperfectly, and selfishly—we know that, given a certain density of population, and we shall find a certain definite and predictable number of thefts, of robberies, of burglaries, and murders. The diffusion of intelligence, the decrease of intemperance, and other circumstances affect this result, but they are themselves affected by density of population, and it remains true that the statistician can foretell with startling correctness how many thieves, burglars, robbers, and assassins there will be in any Christian community whose numbers per square mile he knows. Society being constituted as it now is, a certain proportion will be criminals, just as a certain other proportion will be dyspeptics, or will have weak eyes, and another proportion will be virtuous, self-denying, conscientious, and irritable. The burglar is as much the natural and legitimate product of society as Jim Fisk[3] was the inevitable result of the indecent scramble for wealth, and the semi-barbarous love of ostentatious living which distinguishes New York.
When, therefore, Scroggs is detected, convicted, and sentenced to Sing Sing, society is guilty with Scroggs; and knowing this, it enjoins upon Scroggs’s keeper that he shall not torture Scroggs, that he shall give him enough to eat, and a fit place to sleep in, that he shall cause Scroggs to be instructed in letters and morals, and that he shall in general try to prepare him to become a useful member of society, instead of a beast of prey. And in order that all this may be done, and thus the guilty social conscience be put at rest, society, which is an Ass, puts politicians in the places of prison managers and inspectors, and then goes about its business. Its duty is done.
By-and-by Scroggs has served out his term, and unless he was a ward politician— in which case he is all right, and can take up his old calling without delay or hinderance—he is turned out of prison presumably reformed, with good impulses where bad ones were, with virtue triumphant in his bosom, and with an old suit of clothes on his back, and a dollar and a half in his pocket.
Now, if it was the duty of society to make a man of him, it has conspicuously failed. If it owed him any thing, it owed him far more than it gives him. For the most part, it has not even given him good superiors in prison. Within five years, on an investigation into the management of one of the New York State-prisons, an intelligent convict deposed that the prisoners were the only reputable people in the prison, and there was reason to believe at the time that he did not exaggerate. What with contractors who make fortunes out of the convicts’ labor—it is in evidence that a profit of fifty per cent per annum on the capital thus invested is very moderate, and that a hundred per cent is not unknown; what with politicians filling the places of keepers and subordinates, and making percentages of their own. With such examples of greed, incapacity, faithlessness to trusts, lack of economy, and general mismanagement before them, how can we expect the reformation of convicts confined in State-prisons?
In fact, they are not reformed; and if they were, their condition when they become freed men would not be much better than now. The ruling principle of prison management in modern times is that the protection of society against criminal spoliation shall be united with the thorough reformation of the transgressors. But suppose the criminal is morally reformed, is it not a fact that the life in prison has unfitted him for contact with the world outside; that he comes out a weakling in the race before him; that his life is a failure to begin with, and no career, however humble, opens to him where he may hope to rise and to make the best use of his energies?
Now, in place of building new prisons, why should we not try exile—penal transportation? We have in Alaska an immense territory, in almost every respect well suited to be the scene of a penal colony. It is isolated, and escapes would be easily prevented; it is almost uninhabited; it has a chain of islands suitable for separate colonies; its climate on the coasts is sufficiently mild, and yet not tropical, but bracing and healthful; it offers few or no temptations to vagrancy; and yet it is a country in which convicts who had served out their time, or earned their discharge, could live comfortably, and build up a new and prosperous society.
At present Alaska is a useless and expensive possession. Two Federal artillery companies hold possession; but it lies too far out of the way to tempt settlers. Used as a penal colony, to which the most hardened of our convicts might at first be sent, it would offer a clear field for interesting and valuable experiments in the management and reformation of criminals. It is not sickly, like the French penal settlement of Cayenne; nor has it, like Australia, a climate so mild as to enable runaway convicts to live a vagrant life in the bush. It is a country in which industry and foresight are necessary to enable a white man to exist; and thus the natural conditions of life would help in disciplining the criminals sent thither.
Being controlled by the Federal government, it is probable that, if Alaska became a penal colony, West Point officers would be its rulers and guardians; and these, who are, above all, strict disciplinarians, are admirably calculated to manage rightly a convict population, which needs, above all other things, to learn obedience to authority, and to be subjected to rigid discipline of mind and body. Moreover, the graduate of West Point is, as a rule, a man of honor and a gentleman. He knows nothing about contracts; he performs his duty; he is honest and respectable; and under his rule, at least, the convict would not commonly have before him a pernicious example of greed, and other low forms of vice.
There would be no lack of work in Alaska for a penal colony, however numerous. The country has no roads; it has no public buildings; it has no mechanic arts; it would need, if it had a population, artisans of all kinds; and for half a century to come a penal colony in Alaska rightly managed ought to be self-supporting, with abundance of useful labor for every convict.
By doing so, we manage the criminal that when he has suffered his punishment he may have, at least, the chance to begin a new and better life, and to make even his period of punishment as natural and healthful as is consistent with his seclusion from general society. And this can be best done by exile or penal transportation. It is not done at all under the State-prison system.
Two important points would be secured by establishing a penal colony in Alaska or elsewhere: First, society would rid itself, by a natural and proper method, of the human beasts who prey upon it, and threaten its security. It would say to the burglar, the robber, the confirmed thief, “You are no longer worthy to live among us; go into exile.” And, secondly, we should provide a future and open a career in a new land to such of the convicts as chose to reform and live honest lives.
And though the first cost of transporting convicts to so far off a region might be thought large, it would in the end be an economy. We should not need to build or to mismanage new State-prisons. We should be spared the job involved in the construction, and the job involved in the misrule. West Point would rule in Alaska without jobbery and with efficiency, I believe, and, in the long-run, the convicts would cost the States far less there than they now do in the home prisons.
With children’s aid societies to rescue the young from vice and crime, and deport our homeless children to the Western prairies, and with penal servitude in distant Alaska for the convicted criminal, we might hope to really and considerably decrease our criminal population.
Notes
1. As of 2002, according to the United States department of Justice, there are 6,732,400 individuals under correctional supervision, including 665,475 in jail, 1,367,856 in prison, 753,141 on parole, and 3,995,165 on probation. With the 2002 population of the United States at 288,368,698, 2.33% of Americans are under the supervision of the penal system. [Back]
2. Quetelet — Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-1874), Belgian statistician and sociologist who promoted a theory of “social physics.” [Back]
3. Fisk — James Fisk (1834-1872) was a railway robber-baron who once attempted to corner the United States gold market. [Back]