If one year of imprisonment is not enough, we'll make it ten
years, and if an aggravation of the ordinary penalty is not enough,
we'll pass a law of exception. It is always the blind trust in
punishment which remains the only remedy of the public conscience and
which always works to the detriment of morality and material welfare,
because it does not save the society of honest people and strikes
without curing those who have fallen a prey to guilt and crime.
The positive school of criminology, then, aside from the greater value
attributed to daily and systematic measures of social hygiene for the
prevention of criminality, comes to radically different conclusions also
in the matter of repressive justice. The classic school has for a
cardinal remedy against crime a preference for one kind of punishment,
namely imprisonment, and gives fixed and prescribed doses of this
remedy. It is the logical conclusion of retributive justice that it
travels by way of an illusory purification from moral guilt to the legal
responsibility of the criminal and thence on to a corresponding dose of
punishment, which has been previously prescribed and fixed.
We, on the other hand, hold that even the surviving form of repression,
which will be inevitable in spite of the application of the rules of
social prevention, should be widely different, on account of the
different conception which we have of crime and of penal justice.
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