A popular essay on subjects of penal law, and on uninterrupted solitary confinement at labor, as contradistinguished to solitary confinement at night and joint labor by day, in a letter to John Bacon / by Francis Lieber.

  • Lieber, Francis, 1800-1872.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A popular essay on subjects of penal law, and on uninterrupted solitary confinement at labor, as contradistinguished to solitary confinement at night and joint labor by day, in a letter to John Bacon / by Francis Lieber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    is impossible to revoke the past, but the future may be pre- vented. Expiation, I said, is a purely moral action, and thus belongs to the forum of conscience alone. Political expiation would be infliction of suffering without object—cruelty; for I know of no other definition of cruelty than that it is the inflict- ing of suffering for no end, or for a bad one. 2. Necessity, Expediency.—The assumption of this ground seeks for the right of punishment in the very opposite to the previous one—in the effect of the punishment alone, entirely passing over the offender, the individual to be punished—in short, it affords no right of punishment, and destroys all marks of distinction between punishment, and acts of bare necessity which produce any degree of suffering in others; e. g. as was the case when, lately, part of the crew belonging to the unfor- tunate ship Medusa, resolved to throw overboard all who could not work the frail rafts from which salvation alone could be expected, and yet were consuming the scanty provision. Ex- pediency alone, can never afford us a standard of the application of suffering, or we might soon arrive at the resolution to kill all patients in a time of a contagious disease. Blackstone's instance of the inefficiency of all laws respecting the injury done to public roads by wagoners, and yet the want of a right to punish the latter with death, (even though it should be be- lieved that this punishment would prevent the evil,) is here in point. When pope Sixtus V. was enthroned, the states of the church swarmed with banditti. He made the communities answerable for the crimes which the robbers should commit in them; made the kinsmen of robbers pay the reward offered for the heads of the latter; pardoned and rewarded with money, and a pardon for some more friends, any lobber who would bring the head of a companion; visited with death any opposi- tion to the police, and said: as long as I live, each criminal must die. Thirty robbers had fortified themselves near Ur- bino. Mules laden with poisoned flour, were purposely driven past them, robbed, as was expected, and the brigands died.* * Ranke's Popes, their Church and State in the lGth and 17th centuries, Vol. L