Section I. Detention

TREATMENT OF PERSISTENT OFFENDERS

Our review of the long-accustomed forms of punishment, all of them instituted mainly for deterrence, must be supplemented by consideration of the methods of dealing with convicted offenders which aim instead at seclusion or at reformation. They are intended, not for the average criminal, but for those who are either worse or better—less capable or more capable of reclamation—than he.

In the reaction of the nineteenth century against penal severities, a theory arose that punishments should be solely directed to the reformation of the offender. But protracted experience has shown that noble aim to be far more difficult of achievement than this theory presupposed. The great number of recidivists, a number now increasing in almost every country, sufficiently attests this. The great object of criminal law is to prevent crime; hence, if any particular offender has been convicted so frequently as to make it clear that he cannot be kept from crime through the medium of either reformation or deterrence, it remains only to effect that prevention in a direct way, by placing him in a seclusion where it will be impossible for him to repeat his offences. Unless so secluded, he will not only continue his offences, but will also train others to offend, and will moreover transmit his aptitudes to a tainted posterity. At the same time it has to be remembered that not all ‘persistent’ offenders are incorrigible; it has been well said that so-called incorrigible offenders are very often offenders whom no attempt has been made to correct.

PREVENTION OF CRIME ACT, I908

For social safety, an attempt was made, by the Inebriates Act, 1898 (61 and 62 Viet. c. 60), to provide State reformatories for the seclusion for three years of those offenders whose cravings for alcohol had proved to be incorrigible, but the experiment was a failure and the reformatories are now closed. Seclusion is still more advisable in the case of those with similarly incorrigible cravings for crime, on the principle that if they cannot be deterred they should be debarred the opportunity.