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Updated: June 19, 2025
The individual and his family and his social environment are all involved and changes in economic conditions affect the amount of crime. The task of the social reformer is to determine the causes of crime and to apply measures of reform and prevention. The science of the phenomena of crime is called criminology, that of punishment is named penology.
Numerous organizations are at work in the fields of poverty, immigration, the industrial problem, reform of government, penology, business, education, and religion, and thousands of social workers are devoting their lives to the betterment of society.
I couple these two words advisedly, for fifty years ago, pedagogics was a form of penology the boarding-school with its mentors, scheme of fines, repressions and disgrace! And now we have lifted penology into the realm of pedagogics. I doubt me much whether the present penitentiary is a more unhappy place than a boys' English boarding-school was in the time of Squeers.
In fact, he alleged heatedly, window breaking was a sign of peculiar viciousness. Incipient criminals usually started their infamous careers that way; you could read that in any book on penology. An example ought to be made. He'd bet this feller who threw the brick was a gangster.
So far, society has failed to recognise the end of the punishment it is entitled to impose. In the words of Dimitri Drill, a Moscow publicist, the new penology expresses that it "renounces entirely the law of retaliation as end, principle, or basis of all judicial punishment.
She worked for a present good, here and now, believing that we can reach the future only through the present. In penology nothing has been added to her philosophy, and we have as yet not nearly carried out her suggestions.
And when Herbert Spencer says that the process of doing away with evil is not through punishment, threat or injunction, but simply through a change of activities thus allowing the bad to die through disuse he states a truth that is even now coloring our whole fabric of pedagogics and penology.
As has been stated in a previous chapter, the new penology repudiates all such systems. The amount of pain which an individual is to be called upon to suffer may well be left to the higher tribunal. The obvious duty of man to his fellow-man who is depraved, is to endeavour to recover him. There is no satisfaction in punishing him, but there is every satisfaction in reforming him.
In truth, if M. Garofalo had employed such arguments to expose the absurdities of metaphysical penology, and to defend the heresies of the positive school, the latter would certainly not number him among its most eloquent and suggestive founders and champions.
It is perfectly right to show the wrong-doer the ultimate end of his chosen course, but there is no warrant for the strenuous effort which is made to force him towards it. A criminal's punishment should be made purgatorial and not internal. The old penology regarded him as a hopeless individual and proceeded with its hellish tortures without undue delay.
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