Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/302



While discussing the reformation of criminals it is distinctly in order to say something about the reformation of politics. For if the state have within itself the elements of criminality, how can it hope to reform criminals? There are those who pretend to believe that it is necessary to set a thief to catch a thief, but the policy of setting a thief to reform a thief has, I think, never found a defender. And yet it has frequently happened that those representatives of the state with whom criminals are brought most intimately and continuously in contact, policemen, police justices, sheriffs, sheriffs' deputies and jail-keepers, are only a shade, if at all, better than the criminals themselves. The thief-catcher is inevitably and by virtue of his office either something of a thief-reformer or of a thief-degrader.

Now, in treating crime as in treating any chronic disease, the hope of cure lies very largely in curative treatment during the early stages. And yet it is with the officials enumerated above as most likely to be tainted with criminal instincts that the man or woman suspected of crime is first brought in contact. Petty offenders and those living on the verge of criminality in our large cities, seldom get past this line of guardians of the peace, and live always more or less in their presence. The policeman to them represents the state. Three classes of persons who commonly offend against the law have an especially intimate acquaintance with policemen and police courts—I refer to gamblers, prostitutes and saloon-keepers. There are not very many criminals who do not either belong to these classes or to their patrons. It consequently follows that these classes and the more pronounced criminals through them, form their idea of the state and its morality, by what they see of it in the persons of the Rh