I agree with Kirchenheim that Dr. Kraepelin's scheme of seclusion
for unfixed periods is more practical and hopeful. When the
measure of punishment is fixed beforehand, the judge, as Villert
says, ``is like a doctor who, after a superficial diagnosis,
orders a draft for the patient, and names the day when he shall be
sent out of hospital, without regard to the state of his health at
the time.'' If he is cured before the date fixed, he must still
remain in the hospital; and he must go when the time is up, cured
or not.
Semal reached the same conclusion in his paper on ``conditional
liberation,'' at the second Congress of Criminal Anthropology.
And this notion of segregation for unfixed periods, put forward in
1867 for incorrigible criminals by the Swiss Prison Reform
Association, has already made great progress, especially in
England and America, since the Prison Congress of London (1872)
discussed this very question of indefinite sentences, which the
National Prison Congress at Cincinnati had approved in the
preceding year.
In 1880 M. Garofalo and I both spoke in favour of
indefinite segregation, though only for incorrigible
recidivists; and the same idea was strikingly supported in M.
Pages:
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296