when the most
thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an
excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the
dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past
when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is
"ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.

The widespread prison investigations, agitation, and education during
the last few years are conclusive proof that men are learning to dig
deep into the very bottom of society, down to the causes of the
terrible discrepancy between social and individual life.

Why, then, are prisons a social crime and a failure? To answer this
vital question it behooves us to seek the nature and cause of crimes,
the methods employed in coping with them, and the effects these
methods produce in ridding society of the curse and horror of crimes.

First, as to the NATURE of crime:

Havelock Ellis divides crime into four phases, the political, the
passional, the insane, and the occasional. He says that the
political criminal is the victim of an attempt of a more or less
despotic government to preserve its own stability. He is not
necessarily guilty of an unsocial offense; he simply tries to
overturn a certain political order which may itself be anti-social.
This truth is recognized all over the world, except in America where
the foolish notion still prevails that in a Democracy there is no
place for political criminals. Yet John Brown was a political
criminal; so were the Chicago Anarchists; so is every striker.
Consequently, says Havelock Ellis, the political criminal of our time
or place may be the hero, martyr, saint of another age. Lombroso
calls the political criminal the true precursor of the progressive
movement of humanity.

"The criminal by passion is usually a man of wholesome birth and
honest life, who under the stress of some great, unmerited wrong has
wrought justice for himself."[2]

Mr. Hugh C. Weir, in THE MENACE OF THE POLICE, cites the case of Jim
Flaherty, a criminal by passion, who, instead of being saved by
society, is turned into a drunkard and a recidivist, with a ruined
and poverty-stricken family as the result.

A more pathetic type is Archie, the victim in Brand Whitlock's novel,
THE TURN OF THE BALANCE, the greatest American expose of crime in the
making. Archie, even more than Flaherty, was driven to crime and
death by the cruel inhumanity of his surroundings, a