These conclusions take us far beyond the limit of penal severity,
and at the same time they suffice to combat the objection commonly
raised against those who think, like ourselves, that repressive
justice ought to concern itself not with the punishment of past
crime, but with the prevention of future crime. For whilst the
advocates of severity, and those whom I will call the
``laxativists,'' virtually think (apart from a few platonic
statements) only of punishments as remedies of offences, we on the
other hand believe that punishments are merely secondary
instruments of social self-defence, and remedies ought to be
adapted to the actual factors of the offence. And since the
social factors are most capable of modification, so we say with
Prins that ``for social evils we require social cures.''
M. Tarde, then, was not quite accurate in his remark that my
conviction as to the very slight efficacy of punishments is a mere
consequence of my ideas on the anthropological and physical
character of crime, and that, ``on the contrary, the
preponderating importance which he has assigned to the social
causes logically debars him from accepting this conclusion.'' As
a matter of fact, punishment regarded as a psychological motive so
far as it is a legal deterrent, and as a physical motive so far as
it implies the confinement of the person condemned, would more
naturally belong, in abstract logic, to the biological and
physical theory of crime.
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