The man who avenges his personal wrongs
by personal attacks or vindictive retaliation, must sacrifice in some
measure the sympathy of the wise, the humane, and the good. So the
nation which avenges real or fancied wrongs crushes out the elements of
humanity and a higher life, which, properly cultivated, might lead an
erring mortal to virtue and peace. The proper object of punishment is
not vengeance, but the public safety and the reformation of the
criminal. Indeed, we may say that the sole object of punishment is the
reformation of the criminal; for there can be no safety to the public
while the criminal is unreformed. The punishment of the prison must,
from its nature, be temporary; perpetual confinement can be meted out to
a few great crimes only. If, then, the result of punishment be
vengeance, and not reformation, the last state of society is worse than
its first. The prison must stand a sad monument of the want of true
paternal government in the family and the state; but, when it becomes
the receptacle merely of the criminal, and all ideas of reformation are
banished from the hearts of convicts and the minds of keepers, its
influence is evil, and only evil continually.
Vice, driven from the presence of virtue, with no hope of reformation or
of restoration to society, begets vice, and becomes daily more and more
loathsome. Misery is so universal that some share falls to the lot of
all; but that misery whose depths cannot be sounded, whose heights
cannot be scaled, is the fortune of the prison convict only, who has no
hope of reformation to virtue or of restoration to the world.
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