Читать книгу The Story of my Life - Clarence Darrow - Страница 12

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Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the freewill to select his course. On this question biology has much to say. The beginning of individual existence is in the fertilized cell. When this is accomplished a great deal has happened to the growing life. A large and important part of the character of the child is formed before his birth. The potential strength or weakness of the structure is contained in the embryo. If the fertilized cell has the capacity of only a dwarf it can never produce a robust man instead. What is true of the body is true of the mind and its quality. The mind is the manifestation of the bodily activity. The same origin probably determines some of the larger instincts and tendencies. Surely the unborn has nothing to do with consciously controlling these. Sex is fixed before birth, and this has vital domination over the outcome of life. Color also is determined in the germ plasm, and the white man has an infinitely better chance than the black man.

No one chooses his parents or early environment in the first years which are all-determining after birth. Some are born to poverty, some wealth; some are born of wise parents, more of foolish ones. The early years of life are the most important in the development of the child; this is the special time for forming habits necessary in determining conduct. Education should begin at once, and should be in the hands of intelligent people who understand the nature and tendencies and building of the young. Nothing is truer than that "the child is father to the man." The child should be so carefully observed that parents and teachers are able to detect the trend of its mind and the best aptitudes of the youth. Training should always be with the view of equipping him for self-support, and should be manual as well as mental. No child should go forth from school or home without the best possible mental and physical development for facing its future in the world.

Our compulsory school laws, as administered, do not and cannot perform that function. To force a child into school when he has no capacity or trend for that sort of education is worse than useless. It does not educate, but fosters a spirit that grows rebellious and desperate. He sees others doing just what he cannot do and decides that he is therefore inferior to the rest. Children are naturally fairly adapted to some occupation. They may not care for books, but may like to make a chair, a table, or an automobile. Among rich and poor alike, comparatively few really care for books. Children like to play or work with their hands, which could easily be discovered by watchful, sensible parents and teachers, and if perchance children change their tastes and interests, the course of training should be changed accordingly. In modern cities we now have perhaps one manual school to ten of the other kind. It should be entirely the other way; there should be ten manual-training schools to one of those that teach reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar and the rest of the non-essentials that are taught in schools.

An announcement in a grammar school that any boy who wished could go to work in an automobile factory or an electric shop, or even at a carpenter's or bricklayer's job, and be given the same credits as if he remained in school, would at once disrupt the classes. Books and the education that goes with them is of very late origin. The fact is, even among the grown-ups, very few people now care for books. Let any one look at his neighbor's library, or even at his own, if he doubts it. It is perfectly plain that at birth any two children are equally good or bad, if one is so senseless as to use those words. No one is either good or bad; still, two boys may start apparently alike, and in a very few years one may be in the penitentiary and the other in Congress. What has caused this difference in results? There can be but two causes: one, natural equipment; the other, training and opportunity. If it is natural equipment, then surely no credit or blame should attach to the individual. If due to training, the individual is no more responsible for that. As a matter of fact, most of the individual comes from training and environment. There are but few, even among idiots, who cannot fairly well fill some useful position if rightly trained. Very rarely do clergymen or college professors or carpenters or steamfitters or other skilled workmen go to prison. Almost all the prisoners are persons who had no opportunities or advantages in childhood and early life. If this does not account for their position, something else will, and does.

The boy who lags in his class soon has an inferiority complex that is apt to follow him through all his life. To begin with, he does not want to go to school, which makes plain his deficiency. He plays truant; if forced back to books this increases his resentment. School, at best, is a hopeless bore to the average boy; each day, all through the term, he watches and waits for the playtime and for school to be dismissed at night. When he leaves the classroom he can find plenty of other boys with the same deficiencies that he feels in himself. These are the children of the poor; themselves untrained and incapable of directing improvement in their offspring. The rich can find other avenues for their children who cannot or will not learn; they can become stock brokers or follow some other kind of business and thus adjust themselves to life.

Practically all the inmates of prisons come from the homes of the poor, and have had no chance to become adjusted to conditions. Neither were they taught any occupation or trade to fit them for the stern realities of the world, when they are beyond the school age. The inmates of prisons are mostly the product of large cities, where as boys they had all sorts of companions; their playgrounds were the streets and the alleys, and such vacant spots as the poor of great cities can find. They enter unoccupied buildings and take out lead pipe which they sell to junk dealers. How else would such children get possession of a few coins for themselves? They do not know the meaning of an allowance. Their petty thefts furnish the excitement and emotion necessary to growing life which they can get in no other way. On account of playing ball on the streets, and slight delinquencies, they have already made the acquaintance of the policeman in their neighborhood. Soon they are on the blacklists and taken into the police stations and Juvenile Courts. They want the things that so many other boys get in some other way, but they do not have any other way. Their course is the straight and narrow path from the simplest misdeeds to the penitentiaries and electric chairs, and as inevitable as the course of the other boys who pass from grade schools to graduate from colleges. Who is to blame? To say that it is the fault of the one who goes the luckless way is a travesty upon logic, common sense, and the first elements of fair dealing.

This is not the history of an isolated case. It is the story of almost all of those who tread a dark and tangled maze which leads to disgrace, despair and, often, death in the electric chair. Every one who has the power to think and cares to investigate knows that this is true. And yet people who are discerning and humane can reason out no way to prevent crime excepting by inflicting untold misery, degradation, and dire vengeance upon the victims who are plainly the product of our boasted civilization. While these boys are training for prison they see the sons of the rich living in luxury such as their world has never known. They ask themselves many questions to which they are unable to find any reply.

Almost all convictions are for crimes against property. Aside from these, a growing list is furnished by the fanatical prohibitionists. These are fast piling up their victims under the Volstead Act. For all of this class of offenses, the blame really rests upon prohibition itself. The toll of these victims will continue to increase until Volsteadism is dead, or the public shall have lost the manhood to fight for and preserve their personal rights.

Some of the victims of chance languish long in prison; others are humanely fried to death by the State. Law makers are not students; they are politicians, and the common mass, that is clamoring for greater and more barbaric penalties, do not study or think; they only hate. In fact, there are no murders in the sense portrayed in stories and fables, and the dreadful present-day detective yarns, save for a few, so exceptional and so far apart that they cannot justly be cited as examples. We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair. The man thrust into one of these torture-chambers sees upon the menacing walls:

"All hope abandon ye who enter here!"

Small wonder that men kill to avoid arrest and the prospect of a prison existence. They know that in so doing they are facing almost certain death, but they take that chance rather than face a life of torment in prison.

The second largest number of killings occur between husbands and wives, lovers and sweethearts, men and women in the various sex relations, and most of them are the result of jealousy. For these no penitentiaries are of the least avail; neither men nor women who reach this pass care for consequences, and often seek to kill themselves without the aid of the law, and are frantically disappointed if they fail. Many of these cases could be prevented by sensible divorce laws, which would give easier rights to dissolve unhappy marriages.

People talk of criminals as though they were utterly different from "good" people; as though specially created in order that a large class of the community should have the pleasure of hating them. Those who enjoy the emotion of hating are much like the groups who sate their thirst for blood by hunting and hounding to death helpless animals as an outlet for their emotions. Property crimes, as I have stated before, come from the desire to get something, and the inhibition against getting it except in certain ways. The contrary ways are supposed to be evil because they have been forbidden by law, and all that are not forbidden are supposed to be honorable. Is the desire to get things in spite of all odds confined to criminals? Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

No one would steal without feeling that he wanted the property and could get it in no other fairly easy way. Machinery has made production easier and less costly; the population is steadily increasing; machines are doing so much of the work that there is constantly a large proportion of men who have no jobs; and even where men do have employment the great majority are so close to poverty that a shade of hard luck or loss of work reduces them to want. In a world of such abundance that we are constantly limiting production, most men live so near the life line that they are always worried for fear of still greater need. To get anything like a fair living men are forced to work longer and harder than there is any need to toil. Great as is the output of the United States to-day, it could doubtless be doubled if distribution were so general and equal, or nearly so, as to give all a chance for a decent living. If useful labor could get fair returns, the loafers, the idlers, the speculators, and even many professional and business men would go to work. Not half the men who are engaged in activities are usefully employed. If our great Captains of Industry, who have the wisdom and ideals, and who now understand organization, would give the same attention to the distribution of wealth as they do to its production, want and crime would disappear. Instead of that, our law makers and influential men think only of harsher laws and more terrorizing brutalities. Every seer, student, prophet, and scientist has taught that man cannot be controlled by fear. To employ that method is to admit defeat before even attempting a saner course.

No doubt there are some men and women who, from mental or physical defects, may always require isolation from their fellows, but this should not be accomplished in the spirit of retribution and revenge, but with an attitude of kindness and consideration. Saving criminals, in its last analysis, is only saving children. And if we save the criminal and the crime we will at the same time save the hypothetical victim.

It is indeed strange that with all the knowledge we have gained in the past hundred years we preserve and practice the methods of an ancient and barbarous world in our dealing with crime. So long as this is observed and exercised there can be no change except to heap more cruelties and more wretchedness upon those who are the victims of our foolish system.

To hold back what are called the evil forces by walls and dungeons and ropes is like an effort to keep back the flow of waters in a mighty river by damming up the stream; the water manages to seep through or work its way around, or mount high enough to sweep away the dam.