Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1886 — What Are Cruel Punishments? [ARTICLE]

What Are Cruel Punishments?

When men, under the impetus of the indignation and horror that are occasioned by the commission of crimes that bear the stamp of deliberate cruelty or atrocity, undertake to apply what are popularly deemed adequately severe remedies, their action generally embodL its Lu. Lit; Rl’.lKi Oi L iUS6 versed in matters of social or governmental science, are as mischievous in their tendency as the evils sought to be remedied. It not infrequently happens, in cases of crimes Jf deep atrocity, that citizens resolve to avenge the wrong immediately, by lynching the offender. The folly and" wrong of this method of meting out punishment in a civilized community are now universally conceded by calm-thinking and intelligent men. Again, it will happen that this same spirit of impatience at the slow processes of law and of distrust in the ordinary legal methods of punishment for crime will find its expression in an equally wrong and illogical method, towit, the adoption of legislation providing cruel methods of punishment for certain crimes, in the belief that the evil of their frequent perpetration may be remedied in that way. Upon reflection, it will be found that both methods have their origin ifi the same erroneous conception of the scope and object of punishment for crime. Under the designation “cruel punishments,” I include all such penalties for crimes as are designed to inflict direct physical suffering, accompanied by circumstances of ignominy. The whip-ping-post is an example. The infliction of such penalties proceeds upon the theory of retaliation, and, for this reason, is improper and vicious. The legitimate province of all laws relating to penalties for crime is punishment simply. Anything that is inflicted beyond this, whether against law, as by mob violence, or by legislation, as in the case of retaliatory punishments, exceeds the legitimate scope of penalties for crime. There may be scriptural precedent to the contrary, but we must not adopt as a divine precedent, applicable to all nations, those rules which were laid down for a particular people, in a remote and barbarous age. Many things that are faithless, treacherous, unnatural and cruel, find a seeming sanction and precedent in the Mosaic law. Punishment, in its proper acceptation, means the protection of society, as represented by the State, against the inroads of the individual upon its welfare, or, as it is called in criminal-law phrase, “the peace of the State.’’ It is only when the enroachments of the individual upon the rights of others amount to a public wrong that they are punishable criminally, and then it is only the wrong to society, and not the sin, that is cognizable by the tribunals. —Lewis Hockheimer, in Popular Science Monthly for April.