All this is changing--changing fast. Everywhere the churches are broadening out into more service, and the service broadening out beyond a little group of widows and fatherless, of sick and in prison, to embrace its true field--all human life. In this new attitude, how shall we face the problems of crime?
Thus: "It is painfully apparent that a certain percentage of our people do not function properly. They perform antisocial acts. Why? What is the matter with them?"
Then the heart and mind of society is applied to the question, and certain results are soon reached; others slowly worked toward.
First result. Some persons are so morally diseased that they must have hospital treatment. The world's last prison will be simply a hospital for moral incurables. They must by no means reproduce their kind,--that can be attended to at once. Some are morally diseased, but may be cured, and the best powers of society will be used to cure them. Some are only morally diseased because of the conditions in which they are born and reared, and here society can save millions at once.
An intelligent society will no more neglect its children than an intelligent mother will neglect her children; and will see as clearly that ill-fed, ill-dressed, ill-taught and vilely associated little ones must grow up gravely injured.
As a matter of fact we make our crop of criminals, just as we make our idiots, blind, crippled, and generally defective. Everyone is a baby first, and a baby is not a criminal, unless we make it so. It never would be,--in right conditions. Sometimes a pervert is born, as sometimes a two-headed calf is born, but they are not common.
The older, simpler forms of crime we may prevent with case and despatch, but how of the new ones?--big, terrible, far-reaching, wide-spread crimes, for which we have as yet no names; and before which our old system of anti-personal punishment falls helpless? What of the crimes of poisoning a community with bad food; of defiling the water; of blackening the air; of stealing whole forests? What of the crimes of working little children; of building and renting tenements that produce crime and physical disease as well? What of the crime of living on the wages of fallen women--of hiring men to ruin innocent young girls; of holding them enslaved and selling them for profit? (These things are only "misdemeanors" in a man-made world!)
And what about a crime like this; to use the public press to lie to the public for private ends? No name yet for this crime; much less a penalty.
And this: To bring worse than leprosy to an innocent clean wife who loves and trusts you?
Or this: To knowingly plant poison in an unborn child?
No names, for these; no "penalties"; no conceivable penalty that could touch them.
The whole punishment system falls to the ground before the huge mass of evil that confronts us. If we saw a procession of air ships flying over a city and dropping bombs, should we rush madly off after each one crying, "Catch him! Punish him!" or should we try to stop the procession?
The time is coming when the very word "crime" will be disused, except in poems and orations; and "punishment," the word and deed, be obliterated.
We are beginning to learn a little of the nature of humanity its goodness, its beauty, its lovingness; and to see that even its stupidity is only due to our foolish old methods of education.
It is not new power, new light, new hope that we need, but _to understand what ails us._ We know enough now, we care enough now, we are strong enough now, to make the whole world a thousand fold better in a generation; but we are shackled, chained, blinded, by old false notions. The ideas of the past, the sentiments of the past, the attitude and prejudices of the past, are in our way; and among them none more universally mischievous than this great body of ideas and sentiments, prejudices and habits, which make up the offensive network of the androcentric culture.
