Criminality and economic conditions

I cannot better give Professor Prins’s opinion upon the subject of my work than by quoting what he says in his book, “Criminalité et répression”, and especially in his first chapter entitled “De la criminalité en général. Des classes criminelles. Des délinquants d’accident et des délinquants de profession.” There we read: “There exists no abstract type of a moral man, nor of a guilty man; crime is not an individual phenomenon, but a social phenomenon. Criminality proceeds from the very elements of humanity itself; it is not transcendent, but immanent; we can see in it a sort of degeneration of the social organism.”1

There is an environment favorable to moral health, where the tendency to crime is almost wholly lacking; there is a social environment where the atmosphere is corrupt, where unwholesome elements are heaped up, where the most vigorous perish, where criminality spreads like the mould in the dunghill; the tendency toward crime there is formidable, and we can say in this sense that it is a social fact with a social cause, and that it is in intimate connection with a given social organization.

Let us consider our own epoch for a moment. A century of progress and refinement is a century of vices; the increasing complexity of our mechanism creates, with new temptations, new occasions of falling. The car of civilization, like that of Juggernaut, destroys many of those who throw themselves under its wheels. The world has enormous appetites that it cannot satisfy: sensuality, greed of gain, a taste for and facility in speculation; the contrast between [179]great wealth and extreme poverty; the brutal necessities of the struggle for existence in the face of the concentration of property and of capital; the defects of the industrial organization, which abandons the proletariat to chance, keeps no watch over apprenticeship, and leaves the child of the working-man to the excitations of the streets and the promiscuity of the workshop, and finally sharpens everywhere the obscure instincts of animalism; all this recoils upon criminality with deplorable certainty. How far wrong we should be in such an environment simply to contrast the delinquent with the honest man! It is two social states that are contrasted; the one is based upon comfortable means, sociability, mutual protection, useful work, and thrift; the other upon poverty, isolation, egoism, and unproductive labor. And in the great urban agglomerations, pauperism, mendicity and vagrancy, idleness, the spirit of adventure, prostitution, the dissipation of strength, everything, in short, naturally concurs in developing social anemia.

“Take any district whatsoever, however poor, uncivilized, and wild, and you will always find in the great cities, London or Paris, New York or San Francisco, a worse environment and greater depravity. It is here, in the lowest slums, where never a glimmer of physical or moral well-being penetrates, that the disinherited live. They get a glimpse of the splendor of luxury only to hate it; they respect neither property nor life, because neither property nor life has any real value for them; they are born, grow pale, struggle, and die, without suspecting that for certain persons existence is good fortune, property a right, virtue a habit, and calm a constant state. Such is the natural and fatal home of criminality.

“In a quarter subjected to detestable hygiene, built upon marshy soil, devoid of drainage and potable water, furrowed with narrow and filthy streets, covered with hovels without life or air, where an atrophied population vegetates, epidemics are inevitable and propagate themselves with great intensity. In the same way, crime finds an easy and certain prey in the environment of the poor of a great city. The illegitimate and abandoned children, the children of convicts and prostitutes, the vagrants, etc. are so many designated recruits. Without family, without traditions, without fixed home or settled occupation, without relations with the ruling classes, what wonder that they have no other motive than complete egoism, no other activity than selfish and transitory efforts for the immediate satisfaction of their material appetites? The emigration from the country to the city still further increases this army and multiplies the chances of [180]crime. When the sons of peasants leave the plow for the workshop and come to seek fortune in the furnace of great cities, they follow the spirit of adventure; they must have, at any price, a means of subsistence, and as competition is great and temptations arise at every step, the prisons profit by this overplus that the country gives to the city. Another consequence of the immigration from the country is that the population becomes excessive, places are lacking, and wages fall below the living expenses. Ducpetiaux showed, in 1856, that the budget of the working-man in the great cities is lower than the sum representing the budget of the working-man in prison. This situation has not changed, and the laboring class, badly lodged, badly nourished, vegetate at the mercy of economic crises. The working-man is always on the verge of vagrancy, the vagrant always on the verge of crime. The whole proletariat is thus exposed in the front rank, and whether it is a question of sickness or crime, it is the first to fall.”2

“Such are the conditions of the development of the criminal classes, that is to say of the classes where we meet the tendency to crime. And it is of importance to remark that we can determine their legal character; they are the vagrants and delinquents by profession. They are clearly differentiated from the vagabonds and delinquents by accident. This distinction, which modern statistics has brought into relief, is now the basis of penal science, and the judge can no longer overlook it.

“The occasional delinquents constitute the minority, their life is regular, their instincts are right; a sudden passion, an unpremeditated outburst, a passing depression of the will, leads them into crime; a sort of fever dominates them and, the fit once past, their normal life takes up its course again.

“On the other hand, the professional delinquents, who make up the largest part of the population of the prisons, are really the criminal class. They are the hardened, the incorrigible, the recidivists. They form, by the side of regular society, the great rebel tribe, where gather and mingle poverty, ignorance, vice, idleness, and prostitution. The soldiers of this army obey, not a momentary desire, but a permanent tendency. They do not always commit crime for crime’s sake, but the most trivial incident drives them to it; they profit by every opportunity, and we can say that, as in certain circles virtue is a reflex act, so crime is a reflex act with them. Further, they have, quite like the civilized world, a public opinion which supports them, [181]arouses them, gives them their own kind of popularity, and constitutes, in a word, an incentive for the heroes of vice, just as the other public opinion encourages the soldiers of duty.

“What is true of criminal society as a whole, is equally true of the individual as such. In each infraction of the law, besides the accidental factor, i.e. age, character, temperament, in a word, the personal disposition, there is the collective or social factor, i.e. the environment, the permanent conditions, the general laws. With the occasional delinquent the individual factor predominates, it is especially the man that appears. With the habitual delinquent, it is the social factor, the collectivity that comes upon the scene.

“In the well-to-do, polished, educated classes, who have lacked nothing and have had the benefit of civilizing influences from the cradle, the fault is chiefly personal, and it is the exception. In the lower strata, where everything is lacking, where, to combat evil, men have neither in the present, social protection, nor in the past, the generations of ancestors who have enjoyed power, wealth, and education, it is chiefly collective. In this sense, then, the collective forces have a dominant action in criminality; in order to combat it these must be attacked, and the legislator finds in the law only a blunted weapon if he does not understand this supreme truth, the social character of criminality.”3

The preface to “Crime and its Causes” contains an abridgment of the opinion of the author upon the influence of economic conditions. He says there:

“Economic prosperity, however widely diffused, will not extinguish crime. Many people imagine that all the evils afflicting society spring from want, but this is only partially true. A small number of crimes are probably due to sheer lack of food, but it has to be borne in mind that crime would still remain an evil of enormous magnitude even if there were no such calamities as destitution and distress. As a matter of fact easy circumstances have less influence on conduct than is generally believed; prosperity generates criminal inclinations as well as adversity, and on the whole the rich are just as much addicted to crime as the poor.”4

The chapter “Climate and Crime” contains some observations that [182]are of interest in connection with our subject. In speaking of the great number of crimes against persons in Italy, the author says:

“Nor can it be said to be entirely due to economic distress. A condition of social misery has undoubtedly something to do with the production of crime. In countries where there is much wealth side by side with much misery, as in France and England, adverse social circumstances drive a certain portion of the community into criminal courses. But where this great inequality of social conditions does not exist—where all are poor as in Ireland or Italy—poverty alone is not a weighty factor in ordinary crime. In Ireland, for example, there is almost as much poverty as exists in Italy, and if the amount of crime were determined by economic circumstances alone, Ireland ought to have as black a record as her southern sister. Instead of that she is on the whole as free from crime as the most prosperous countries of Europe.”5

—This quotation is one of the best samples of Morrison’s logic and knowledge of facts! Italy is poor; Ireland is poor; the former has many crimes, the latter few. Hence, economic conditions are not an important factor. To say nothing of the care necessary in comparing two countries where the penal law, police, courts, etc. are very different, there is an error of logic in the quotation. For poverty may be in one of these countries a determinant that leads to a certain phenomenon, while in another country it does not lead to it, because neutralized by a counter-determinant. And then, the knowledge of facts that Morrison gives evidence of here, is not great. It is not at all true that in Italy every one is poor. On the contrary, there is plenty of wealth in that country, while Ireland, on the other hand, is drained by landlords who live elsewhere.6—

The chapter that interests us next is that entitled “Destitution and Crime.” “A ‘destitute person’ is a person who is without house or home, who has no work, who is able and willing to work but can get none, and has nothing but starvation staring him in the face.”7

According to Morrison there are two kinds of crime of which a destitute person may be guilty, namely theft and mendicity. Two questions must be answered, then, first, what percentage is there of these crimes? second, how far can one attribute theft and mendicity to destitution?

During the years 1887–1888 the number of cases tried in England [183]and Wales was 726,698, of which 8% were crimes against property and 7% offenses against the “Vagrancy Acts.” Consequently 15% of all the crimes might have been committed because of destitution. From investigations made by himself, half the thieves had work and were earning something at the time they committed their crimes.

Now we still have to explain the other half of the cases of theft. Those who committed these thefts were without work, then; but there were among them habitual criminals, and these could probably have found work, but did not want to work. Therefore they were not “destitute persons.” This leaves still 25% of the thieves. Among these destitution is now truly the direct cause. However lack of work is not the sole cause, but the fact that children of proletarians are left to themselves when their parents are sick or dead, enters in. And then many aged working-men become criminals because they are too old to work and no one supports them. Drunkards also at times come to commit crimes because of poverty, since they find it difficult to work. The estimate is, then, as follows:

Then come the infractions of the “Vagrancy Acts.” The offenses that are punished under these laws are chiefly prostitution, presence in public places with criminal intentions, presence in a particular house with criminal intentions, and carrying burglars’ implements. Prostitution aside, destitution ought not to be considered as the cause of these infractions, according to the author, because the guilty persons are those who ordinarily will not work and would not change their lot for anyone else’s. The class of vagrants is no more unhappy than any other; it has even its own philosophy. (—Who could be unhappy, then? This statement of the case gives one a great desire to ask the author how it happens that no people of means have adopted this enviable career.—) The same reasoning applies to most of the mendicants (45% of those who break the vagrancy laws), they do not want to work. Another fraction is made up of those who cannot find work; their number is difficult to determine; according to Morrison’s opinion it is not very high (he estimates it at 2% for mendicants). It is especially aged persons who belong to this class. There are two principal reasons for this. [184]

First, the increasing use of machines, which throw workmen out of employment, while increasing the possibility of utilizing the labor of women and children.

—However true this observation, it is nevertheless very incomplete. It is not the machine that is the cause, but the system of free labor, which throws everyone on his own resources when he can work no longer, whether this is from lack of work or from the disability of the worker.—

A second cause of vagrancy and mendicity is to be found in the Trades Unions. For these Unions have been able to obtain a uniform wage, and aged workmen must, in accordance with their rules, earn as much as the young ones although not able to do as much work. The employers, not being able to afford to give them the whole amount, discharge them.

The circumstance that there are more male than female beggars is a proof to the author that economic conditions are not the cause of mendicity, etc., for women ordinarily live under worse conditions than men.

“The only possible explanation of this state of thing is that vagrancy is, to a very large extent, entirely unconnected with economic conditions; the position of trade either for good or evil is a very secondary factor in producing this disease in the body politic; its extirpation would not be effected by the advent of an economic millennium; its roots are, as a rule, in the disposition of the individual and not to any serious degree in the industrial constitution of society.”8

After having stated that, in his opinion, prostitution also has little to do with economic conditions, Morrison arrives at the conclusion that 14% of the delinquents under the Vagrancy Acts have been made so by destitution; as such delinquents constitute 7% of the total of the criminal population, these destitute persons form 2% of the whole.9 Adding these 2% to the 2% of destitute persons among the thieves, we get a total of 4%. Further, the author estimates the destitute persons among the other criminals (those not punished for theft or infractions of the Vagrancy Acts) at 1%. Of all criminals, then, 5% have become such from destitution, according to Morrison.

—I shall not insist upon proving that these calculations have little value. In the first place all the figures are only estimates, [185]without any indication of what they are based on. In the second place Morrison has only proved, supposing his estimates are correct, that 5% of the criminals belong to a category defined by the author himself. All this gives him absolutely no right to conclude that economic conditions are not a powerful factor in crime. Just where the writer believes that the question has been solved the difficulties properly commence. If we wish to treat the question of vagrancy in a scientific manner we must ask: how does it happen that with the present mode of production there are found persons who prefer vagrancy to work? This is one of the questions that must be answered, yet for Morrison it does not exist. The causes of professional theft, alcoholism, etc. seem, according to the author, to have nothing to do with economic conditions. I shall show in the second part of this work how far wrong he is.—

The following chapter treats of “poverty and crime.” To prove the slightness of the causal connection between the two, Morrison gives the following table:

England is six times as rich as Italy, and the figure for theft is greater; hence, economic conditions are not causes, etc. etc.10

—It has been some years since Quetelet pointed out (see Chap. II, Sec. II, of this work) that absolute wealth throws no light on the criminal question, because the total wealth of a country gives no idea of its distribution. Yet Morrison thinks that the preceding table proves the correctness of his statement!—

The author sees a second proof in support of his reasoning in the fact that during the prosperous period of 1870–74 criminality in England was greater than during the period of economic depression from 1884 to 1888. (—See our summaries of the works of Tugan-Baranowsky and of Müller, where it is shown that the economic conditions [186]of that period do have a relation to criminality. There is perhaps no country where the connection between crime and the course of economic events is so close as in England; and it is surprising that there are authors like Morrison who are so little in touch with the situation, and who yet express themselves so decidedly.—)

In America the immigrants commit fewer crimes on the average than those who are born in the country; the position of these last being better, economic conditions are not causes of crime. (—As if assertions as vague as this: “the American has a better position than the immigrant”, could have any value!—)

Morrison sees another proof in the fact that the criminality in the English colony of Victoria, where prosperity is fairly general, differs little from that of other countries where the prosperity is less. (—See A. Sutherland, “Résultats de la déportation en Australie”, Compte Rendu du Ve Congr. d’Anthr. Crim., p. 270, where it is shown that criminality in Australia on account of the deportation of English criminals is great, but has fallen continually since 1850, and now is not so high as in Italy, Sweden, Saxony, and Prussia. So this proof given by the author is not convincing.—)

Then the author draws attention to the fact that, according to him, the number of criminals in the different classes of society in England is proportional to the respective numbers of individuals in each of these classes. Finally he also thinks that his thesis is supported by the fact that during the summer months the prisons in England are more populated than in winter.

—The author deceives himself, for to find out that more crimes are committed in winter than in summer one has only to consult, not the statistics of the prisons, but those of the courts; the former give no information as to the time when the offense was committed; it is even probable that a part of the prisoners incarcerated in summer committed their offenses in winter. Many writers who have not fallen into this error have come to the conclusion that crimes and misdemeanors against property, which are those chiefly in question, increase in winter and decrease in summer.

If one wished to make a complete criticism of Morrison’s work it would be necessary to write a whole book, so great is the number of his errors and omissions, which is why I refer to the second part of my work.

The fundamental error of the author is that he believes that the question of how far economic conditions lead to crime is exhausted when the effect of poverty has been investigated. This is only [187]a part (though an important one) of the question, which though apparently simple is in reality very complicated.

Finally, I must protest against the unmerited reproach that the English Trades Unions are the cause of criminality among aged working-men. We live in a society in which a great proportion of the men wear themselves out for a small wage in order to enrich others, and where aged working-men who can now do little or no work are tossed aside like oranges from which the juice has been squeezed. When they commit crimes, therefore, it is society that is the cause of it, and not the unions, which, after years of struggle, have succeeded in getting higher wages for their members than those of non-union labor.11—

The following quotation, taken from “Die gesellschaftlichen Ursachen des Verbrechens”,12 gives the opinion of this author in a few words:

“Crime is the necessary result of the joint action of two groups of conditions. The first group is due, partly to the innate, partly to the acquired character of the agent; the other to the environment surrounding him. The microbe of crime flourishes only in the culture medium of society. This sentence, which has gradually become a commonplace, indicates the significance of social conditions for the origination and development of criminality.”13

“It is obvious that a diminution in the number of certain crimes may be brought about by an improvement in the social order. The impulse toward crime is undoubtedly quickly strengthened by social conditions, and also quickly made weaker. Political and religious offenses become so much the more numerous, the more definitely and relentlessly the dominant opinion takes its stand against diverse persuasions. If today a certain tendency in art were to attain state recognition and the protection of the criminal law, tomorrow the aesthetic heretic would be persecuted as the religious heretics were persecuted in earlier centuries. The sexual instinct will constantly long for satisfaction and take it where it finds it. If you prohibit the possibility of such satisfaction within the bounds of legality, the [188]instinct will break the bonds and lead to crime. And whoever finds neither bread nor work will, in the great majority of cases, be able to discover ways and means of securing the one without the other at the expense of society.… ‘The beast in man’ is in all circles, in all strata of our society.… But the beast, with all its wild passions, with rage and hate, with covetousness and envy, with thirst for blood and insatiable vanity, is it not derived from father or mother, who have drained the pleasures of life or the woes of life to the dregs, who were corrupted in blood through their own fault, or without their own fault, before they gave life to the germ to which they imparted the curse of their forefathers as a heritage?

“A reorganization of our social order will materially lessen the impulsion to crime in the men who are living today, but infinitely more important and infinitely more permanent will be its effect upon coming generations. While diminishing the number of those tainted by heredity it will tame the beast in man. This is no Utopia. It will be easier, perhaps, to underestimate the effect of such a transformation, than to appreciate its full value.

“But which transformation? That is the question that we must answer, if we are not to be pushed aside as harmless visionaries.

“Our entire education, in school as in life, rests upon suggestion. What keeps us from crime is the inhibitory ideas, which are instilled into us until they permeate our flesh and blood and control our actions, without our being conscious of it. ‘Thou shalt’, ‘thou shalt not’, these general prescriptions of right and morality, of religion and philanthropy, or whatever you choose to call it, must determine our conduct, unless we stop to consider, hesitate, and delay.…

“The inhibitory ideas, however, retain their force only if we live in the community of our fellows, the enclosed circle held together by like views and a community of interests. Put upon his own resources, the true man makes himself known. But the men who can do this are rare. The great majority of us need outside support. Who has not seen in his own experience how the judgment and prejudice, the beliefs and superstitions of his associates have a determining effect upon him; how he supports others and is supported by them? Break up the enclosed circle and you weaken or annihilate the inhibitory ideas; shatter society to atoms, so that each stands by himself in the war of all against all, and you set loose whatever evil instincts have their roots in us; ‘declass’ man and you have driven him into the arms of crime.

“And this declassing has been most abundantly provided for by [189]our present economic system. It has unshackled egoism without setting any bounds to it. It reaps what it sows. In the proletariat it has created the very medium in which the microbe of crime flourishes. Next to the wealth of individuals lies the misery of the masses. Do we still wonder, then, that the criminal-statistician laments an increasing number of cases. Every society has the criminals that it deserves.”14

—The opinion of Professor von Liszt and of other bio-sociologists with regard to crime is a union of the doctrine of the Italian and French schools. Having already given a criticism of these schools I will limit myself to a few remarks.

The formula, “every crime is the product of an individual factor on the one side, and of social factors on the other”, is of little value for the question, being applicable to every act, even the most laudable, and explains very little of what is peculiar to crime. A more special examination of the so-called individual factor of crime shows that it is formed, for example, of great needs, of highly developed muscular strength—in short, of things which do not belong to crime alone; or it may be a lack of moral conceptions (the result of an unfavorable environment, of bad education, etc.). A veritable individual factor is to be found only in some special cases, where crime is the result of a predisposition, resulting from a morbid mental condition, combined with unfavorable circumstances. At times, then, crime is the resultant of an individual factor with a social factor; in most cases this is not so. In maintaining that it is always these two together which give birth to crime, one makes use of a commonplace, since by individual factors are understood conditions necessary to every act; or else the statement is quite inaccurate.

Finally it may be said also that most of the bio-sociologists, while recognizing the great influence exercised by environment do not give any description of this environment. It is not enough to name social imperfections existing in our days, and to demand their reform, one after another; we must first of all find out whether these imperfections are connected with the present economic system, and can be removed without attacking the system itself.15— [190]

In his work, “Verbrechen und Wahnsinn beim Weibe”, Dr. Näcke treats the criminal question from the medico-anthropological point of view. However, his remarks upon the connection which exists between economic conditions and crime are very important. In the fifth chapter, entitled, “Die anthropologisch-biologischen Beziehungen zum Verbrechen und Wahnsinn beim Weibe”, he puts the question: can one fix the idea of “crime” anatomically?

According to him the answer must be an absolute negative. “Semal is right when he says: ‘The moral sense is a slow and gradual acquisition of the ages.… The conscience of peoples like that of the individual, calls every act moral that is useful to the agent himself or to others.…’ Every people, then, fixes the concept ‘crime’ according to the moral code prevailing among them at the time; it is consequently not rooted in man physiologically, but is as Manouvrier brilliantly demonstrates, purely sociological. It is therefore really nonsense to seek for anthropological stigmata for a sociological concept.

“But another consideration also leads us to the same result. The stability of a people demands the establishing of certain boundaries, called ‘laws’, the transgression of which might disturb the social order, and therefore must be punished. But the laws form only single boundary marks, not a tight enclosure, so that between them many, consciously or not, pass through without being caught or [191]punished. Besides, the laws of a higher morality do not always correspond with the prevailing legal system, so that many things are offenses in the eyes of the moral code that are not such in the eyes of the law, a fact which, as is well known, the conscienceless take advantage of. It is plain, therefore, that there are innumerable transgressions that are not punished, innumerable criminals who pass as honest men, so that we cannot really speak of criminals and honest men, but simply of the punished and the unpunished.

“Punishment is, however, as we have already seen, a poor criterion. Habitual criminals are often not nearly so depraved as many persons of good reputation, especially in certain districts whose moral concepts are of a very elastic kind; or as others who have, to be sure, been punished but once, but who, in all their actions, have always been crafty criminals.”17

“As there is to be found no such thing as absolute bodily and mental soundness, so there is no such thing as an absolutely ‘honest’ man. ‘We are altogether sinners’, say the Scriptures with entire truth—and not in thought only—none of us is proof against becoming a criminal, and under certain circumstances, even a great one.”18

“There is an unbroken gradation from the purest to the worst man. When we speak simply of ‘criminals’ we mean only those standing on the farthest step, who are not always, however, the worst. It is a question, then, of the refuse of the world, and not of real crime. In every environment there are always individuals who become evil-doers exclusively or chiefly through circumstances—this possibility no mortal can escape—and on the other hand there are those who owe this in part (seldom, however, exclusively) to their inferior psychic personality, which allows them to run counter to the prevailing morality and drives them to breach of the law; these last constitute the criminals in the narrow sense.”19

In chapter VI, “Zusammenhang von Verbrechen und Wahnsinn”, the author explains that in case an individual factor exists, it is not ordinarily this alone that leads to crime, but it must be coupled with a social factor.

This is what Dr. Näcke says of the causes of this individual factor: “Indeed it is even probable that in the last analysis the individual factor is dependent upon the environment, since this so influenced the parents, grandparents, etc. that the germ of the next generation must have been injured directly or later through corrupted blood [192]or narrow pelvis on the part of the mother (both again dependent upon the environment).”20

Further along he makes this idea more specific, when he is examining the different causes of crime. Among these causes the author cites the following:

• 1. Lesion of the germ (favored especially by the marriage of degenerates).
• 2. Alcoholism.
• 3. Syphilis.
• 4. Malnutrition and unhealthy mode of life.
• 5. Excessive labor of women and children.
• 6. Bad domestic life.
• 7. Desertion in which children under age are left.

The author sums up in the following terms: “In what has gone before we have attempted to pick out and follow up some threads of the complex social fabric, in the firm persuasion that only an improvement of the environment in its thousand-fold ramifications will be able effectively to combat crime, and gradually to exert a favorable influence upon the individual factors, which are certainly not to be undervalued.

“If we survey the whole matter, everything comes in the end to the stomach-question; only so long as this is not solved—and perhaps it never can be satisfactorily solved—must we keep the point of view given above practically before us, which, upon the solution of the matter, becomes in large measure no longer necessary.”21

The work of Dr. Havelock Ellis, entitled “The Criminal”, contains only one passage which is of importance for the question of [193]criminality considered from the economic point of view. Like most bio-sociologists he considers the social factors as the most important. This is the passage in question:

“The problem of criminality is not an isolated one that can be dealt with by fixing our attention on that and that alone. It is a problem that on closer view is found to merge itself very largely into all those problems of our social life that are now pressing for solution, and in settling them we shall to a great extent settle it. The rising flood of criminality is not an argument for pessimism or despair. It is merely an additional spur to that great task of social organization to which during the coming century we are called.

“It is useless, or worse than useless, to occupy ourselves with methods for improving the treatment of criminals, so long as the conditions of life render the prison a welcome and desired shelter. So long as we foster the growth of reckless classes we foster the growth of criminality. So long as there are a large body of women in the East of London, and in other large centers, who are prepared to say, ‘It’s Jack the Ripper or the bridge with me. What’s the odds?’ there will be a still larger number of persons who will willingly accept the risks of prison. ‘What’s the odds?’ Liberty is dear to every man who is fed and clothed and housed, and he will not usually enter a career of crime unless he has carefully calculated the risks of losing his liberty, and found them small; but food and shelter are even more precious than liberty, and these may be secured in prison. As things are, the asylum and the workhouse, against which there is a deep prejudice, ingrained and irrational, would have a greater deterring effect than the prison. There are every morning in Paris 50,000 persons who do not know how they will eat or where they will sleep. It is the same in every great city; for such the prison can be nothing but a home. It is well known that the life of the convict, miserable as it is, with its dull routine and perpetual surveillance, is yet easier, less laborious, and far more healthy than that to which thousands of honest working-men are condemned throughout Great Britain.”23