dge born of a woman
cannot weigh the moral responsibility of one who has committed murder or
theft. Not until the experimental and scientific method shall look for
the causes of that dangerous malady, which we call crime, in the
physical and psychic organism, and in the family and the environment, of
the criminal, will justice guided by science discard the sword which now
descends bloody upon those poor fellow-beings who have fallen victims to
crime, and become a clinical function, whose prime object shall be to
remove or lessen in society and individuals the causes which incite to
crime. Then alone will justice refrain from wreaking vengeance, after a
crime has been committed, with the shame of an execution or the
absurdity of solitary confinement.

On the one hand, human life depends on the word of a judge, who may err
in the case of capital punishment; and society cannot end the life of a
man, unless the necessity of legitimate self-defense demands it. On the
other hand, solitary confinement came in with the second current of the
classic school of criminology, when at the same time, in which Beccaria
promulgated his ideas, John Howard traveled all over Europe describing
the unmentionable horrors of mass imprisonment, which became a center of
infection for society at large. Then the classic school went to the
other extreme of solitary confinement, after the model of America,
whence we adopted the systems of Philadelphia and Harrisburg in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Isolation for the night is also
our demand, but we object to continuous solitary confinement by day and
night. Pasquale Mancini called solitary confinement "a living grave," in
order to reassure the timorous, when in the name of the classic school,
whose valiant champion he was, he demanded in 1876 the abolition of
capital punishment. Yet in his swan song he recognized that the future
would belong to the positive school of criminology. And it is this
"living grave" against which we protest. It cannot possibly be an act of
human justice to bury a human being in a narrow cell, within four walls,
to prevent this being from having any contact with social life, and to
say to him at the end of his term: Now that your lungs are no longer
accustomed to breathing the open air, now that your legs are no longer
used to the rough roads, go, but take care not, to have a relapse, or
your sentence will be twice as hard.

In reality, solitary confinement mak