As such, notwithstanding its attractive features (for
it indicates a step in advance towards the positive system of
social defence, which desires to see the application of collective
defence to the individual's power of offence), it seems to me to
be destined, not long after its earliest application, to deceive
the anticipations of happy and beneficent results, such as its
advocates entertain.
Moreover, the conditional sentence, precisely because it is
a graft on the old classic stock of penal justice, has another
very serious defect, inasmuch as it overlooks the victims of the
offence.
Its advocates, in fact, continue to maintain that reparation of
damage is a private concern, for which they benevolently recommend
a strict remedy, but which they nevertheless, in practice,
entirely overlook.
The offender who is conditionally sentenced is, therefore, to
secure a suspension of punishment--which, indeed, it is as well to
remember, he also secures, often enough, by a legal limitation,
or, as in Italy, by the remission of punishments under three
months, accorded whenever (as is generally the case) there is a
petition for pardon. But is there any one who gives a thought to
the victims?
From this point of view it may even be said that the conditional
sentence makes things worse than before; for the victims are not
to have so much as the satisfaction of seeing punishment inflicted
on those who have injured them, in cases of assault, theft,
swindling, and the like.
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