Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/769

 SOCIAL CONTROL II. LAW AND PUBLIC OPINION.

LAW. Legal sanctions are aimed at the acts of men rather than their neglects, because it is more important to prevent interference than to enforce coöperation. Our laws thus appear to restrain from acts rather than to incite to them. Still, when people trust their lives to a combination of men, say a train crew, in the confidence that each will do his duty, failure to coöperate becomes disastrous, and is punished as criminal negligence. In the army, where failure to do appointed tasks may bring ruin, physical punishments are used to stimulate as well as to restrain. The punishments of the civil and the military courts comprise most of the control directly exercised over the individual by the state.

While conceivably the state might secure obedience to its laws by punishment, by reward, or by both, punishment is the chief instrumentality used. Nor is this strange when we remember how easy is the infliction of great pains and how difficult the affording of great satisfactions. However preferable a scale of prizes to a scale of dooms, the latter will be used so long as it is so cheap to give pain and so expensive to confer pleasure. In dealing with a disturber, society seeks to guard itself not only against future acts of this particular offender, but against would-be offenders as well.

The first object might be gained by killing, disabling, confining or reforming him. The first three make further wrong-doing impossible, but as they succeed by power over the body rather than by power over the mind, they are not cases of control at all. Reformation, on the other hand, does aim at psychic control rather than physical constraint, but it employs religion,