Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/542

 522 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

all punishments were enforced where the ecclesiastical courts had jurisdiction. As a result, revolutions, revolts, fanaticism, and suppres- sions of all kinds existed, and it was this condition which furnished the reaction of the reformative period.

In the injustice of the laws of the Middle Ages is found the root of the development of trial by jury, the present system of appeals, appearance by counsel, right to a speedy and public trial, right of being confronted by the accuser, rules relating to incriminating evidence and conviction upon one's own confession, or that of accom- plices, and many other rules of law and evidence. To this source may be traced, also, the abolition of crimes of religion, the abatement of the severity of punishment, and the separation of church and state which are found in the present century. The reformative tendency became well defined about the middle of the eighteenth century. Con- temporaneous with, and incident to, it was the development of the prison system. Previous to this time prisons existed, but not as places of detention for punishment or reform. They were used merely as temporary places of detention for those awaiting sentence to execu- tion, exile, transportation, or release. Imprisonment was not in itself a punishment. Together with the prison system came the establish- ment of asylums, workhouses, and reformatories. Insanity was recog- nized as a defense, and the study of the causes of crime and the nature of the criminal was entered upon. For the first time the idea of vengeance seemed disappearing in the background of history, and science and knowledge were supplanting fanaticism, superstition, and persecution. Education, moral training, discipline, were being introduced where only punishment and extermination had hitherto existed.

In contrasting this period of reform with that of repression, we find in the former the most absolute safeguards thrown up about the criminal, the state handicapped, and the most liberal rules applying to the defense. Nearly all of the present rules of evidence, which are so obnoxious to criminal anthropologists, can be traced to the reaction against the atrocities of the Middle Ages and to the determination to prevent a continuance of the "star chamber" methods. There remain, however, to a great degree, the same system of punishment, somewhat humanized, and the same disregard of the criminal and his surroundings which existed in the previous stages of the development of criminal law.

We have designated three periods of criminal law, using the idea