Again our present treatment of crime shows the community principle in two ways: (1) the idea of community responsibility for crime is spreading rapidly; (2) we are fast outgrowing the idea of punishing criminals merely, our object is to fit them into society.
First, the growing idea of community responsibility for crime. We read in an account of the new penology that “Crime in the last analysis is not to be overcome after arrest but before,” that crime will be abolished by a change of environment and that “environment is transformed by child labor laws and the protection of children, by housing laws and improved sanitation, by the prevention of tuberculosis and other diseases, by health-giving recreational facilities, by security of employment, by insurance against the fatalities of industry and the financial burdens of death and disease, by suitable vocational training, by all that adds to the content of human life and gives us higher and keener motives to self-control, strenuous exertion and thrift.” We of course do not exonerate the individual from responsibility, but it must be shared by the whole society in which he lives.
Secondly, the old idea of justice was punishment, a relic of personal revenge; this punishment took the form of confinement, of keeping the man outside society. The new idea is exactly the opposite: it is to join him to society by finding out just what part he is best fitted to play in society and training him for it. A former Commissioner of Corrections in New York told me that a number of people, including several judges, were looking forward to the time very soon being ripe for making the “punishment” of a crime the doing some piece of social service in order to fit the criminal into the social order. One man who had shown in his crime marked organizing ability had been sent to oversee the reclaiming of some large tracts of abandoned farm land, and this had worked so well that a number of judges wished to try similar experiments.
Thus criminals are coming to be shown that their crime has not been against individuals but against society, that it has divorced them from their community and that the object of their imprisonment is that they may learn how to unite themselves to their community. The colony system means that they must learn to live in a community by living in a community. This is the object of Mr. William George’s “Social Sanitarium,” where the men are to live in a graded series of farm villages, govern themselves, support themselves and also their families as far as possible, and pass from “village” to “village” on their way towards the society from which their crime has separated them.
This same principle, to make the life while under punishment a preparation for community life, underlay the work of Mr. Osborne at Sing Sing. Through his Mutual Welfare League he tried to develop a feeling of responsibility to the community, a feeling first of all that there was a community within the prison. All the men knew gang loyalty; it was Mr. Osborne’s aim to build upon this. He thought they could not feel responsibility to a community outside when they left unless they learnt community consciousness inside. He did not provide recreation for them solely for the sake of recreation; he did not allow them self-government because of any abstract idea of the justice of self-government; he tried to bring the men of Sing Sing to a realization of a community, to a sense of responsibility to a community. The two men who escaped from Sing Sing in 1916 and voluntarily returned had learned this lesson.38
Both these principles—community responsibility for crime and the necessity of fitting the offender into the community life—underlie the work of the juvenile court. The probation officer’s duty is not exhausted by knitting the child again into worthy relations; he must try to see that community life shall touch children on all sides in a helpful not a harmful way.
A future task for the juvenile court is to organize groups back of the child as part of the system of probation. All our experience is showing us the value of using the group incentive. The approval or blame of our fellow-men is an urgent factor in our lives; a man can stand any sort of condemnation better than that of his club. It was the idea of community punishment which was such an interesting part of the “Little Commonwealth” which Mr. Homer Lane established near Detroit for boys and girls on probation. If a boy did not work he was not punished for it, he did not even go without food, but the whole commonwealth had to pay for it out of their earnings. The whole moral pressure of the community was thus brought to bear upon that boy to do his share of the work—an incentive which Mr. Lane found more powerful than any punishment.
A colonel of the American army says that fewer offenses are committed in our army than in the Continental armies, not because human nature is different in America but because our methods of army discipline are different: the custom in our army is to punish a company for the offense of an individual; the company, therefore, looks after its own members.
The procedure of our courts also shows signs of change in the direction of the recognition of the group principle. Until recently we have had in our courts two lawyers, each upholding his side: this means a real struggle, there is no effort at unifying, one or the other must win; the judge is a sort of umpire. But the Reconciliation Court of Cleveland (and some other western cities)
