efer execution
if they had no hope of ultimate liberty. The general opinion of those
who had been in prison ten or twelve years out of a 'life' sentence was
in favour of execution at once, as being the less dreadful alternative,
so that with respect to punishment as a deterring influence, I have no
doubt that perpetual imprisonment would be more efficacious than the
capital sentence.

Those who are capable of deliberately taking human life with the view
of obtaining money, may be divided into two classes. The one class
comprising such as prisoners who perpetrate the crime cunningly and in
secret, in the firm belief that they will escape detection; the other
class are the highwaymen and garotters, who go daringly and violently
to work, pretty sure in their own minds that they will be clever enough
to escape.

With regard to the former class, the deterring influence is detection.
Capital sentence, perpetual imprisonment, or even a less severe
sentence would operate equally in preventing the commission of the
crime in their case, because the idea is not generally present in their
mind when they premeditate it, or is completely outweighed by the fear
of detection or discovery. With reference to the second and bolder
class, a lingering imprisonment would appear more horrible in their
estimation, and exercise an equal if not a greater deterring influence
than the scaffold. Some of those men with whom I have met would glory
in dying 'game' as they term it. Those who commit murder in order to
gratify feelings of revenge, usually, I believe, find the gratification
of the passion so sweet that they are for the time quite regardless of
their own lives; and when jealousy is the cause of murder, it often
happens that the murderer takes the law into his own hands and visits
upon himself the penalty. I met cases in point, and in none of them did
the fear of the death sentence operate against the perpetration of
crime. They had made up their minds to lose their lives, and did not
calculate on escape. Such cases are not common, however, and perhaps it
is not possible to prevent them occurring.

Those murders perpetrated for the love of money might to some extent be
prevented by the general elevation of the mass of society, and by
increasing the swiftness and certainty of detection; and I have come,
after long study of the subject, and from frequent contact with those
saved from the gallows, to the conclusion that capital punishment m