se, to restore him to freedom when safe, and,
when that time does come, the unseemly contest in courts will disappear,
and justice, tempered with mercy, will have a chance.

XX

PUNISHMENT

Assuming that man is justified in fixing the moral worth of his fellow;
that he is justified in punishment for the purpose of making the
offender suffer; and that these punishments according to the degree of
severity will in some way pay for or make good the criminal act or
protect or help society or prevent crime or even help the offender or
someone else, what finally is the correct basis of fixing penalties?

No science, experience, or philosophy and very little humanity has ever
been considered in fixing punishments. The ordinary penalties are first:
fines, which generally penalize someone else more than the victim; these
with the poor mean depriving families and friends of sorely needed
money, and the direct and indirect consequences are sometimes small and
sometimes very great. These can be readily imagined. If instead of fines
a prison sentence is given, a sort of decimal system has been worked out
by chance or laziness or symmetry of figures; certainly it has been done
wholly regardless of science, for there is no chance to apply science
when it comes to degrading men and taking away a portion of their lives.
Generally ten days is the shortest. From this the court goes to twenty,
then thirty, then sixty, then three months, then six months, then one
year.

Why not eleven days? Why not twenty-four days? Why not forty days? Why
not seventy days? Why not four months or five, or eight or nine or ten
months? Is there no place between six months in jail and a year in jail?
The bids at an auction or the flipping of pennies are exact sciences
compared with the relation between crime and punishment and the process
of arriving at the right penalty. If in the wisdom of the members of the
legislature the crime calls for imprisonment in the penitentiary, then
the ordinary sentences run one, two, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty
years, and life, according to the hazard of the legislature, the whim of
the court, the gamble of the jury, or the feeling and means of
expression of the unthinking and pitiless crowd who awe courts and
juries with their cries for vengeance.

Neither does punishment affect any two alike; the sensitive and proud
may suffer more from a day in jail or even from conviction than another
would suffer from