Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/167

Rh Next as to the main point, the measure of punishment: 1. It should be such as clearly to outweigh the profit of the offense: including not simply the immediate profit, but every advantage, real or apparent, that has weighed as an inducement to commit it. 2. The greater the mischief of the offense, the greater is the expense that it is worth while to be at, in the way of punishment. 3. When two offenses come into competition, the punishment for the greater should be such as to make the less preferred; thus robbery with violence to the person is always punished more severely than simple robbery. 4. The punishment to be so adjusted that, for every part of the resulting mischief, a motive may be provided to restrain from causing it. 5. The punishment should not be greater than is needed for these ends. 6. There should be taken into account the circumstances affecting the sensibility of the offenders, so that the same punishment may not operate unequally; as age, sex, wealth, position. 7. The punishment needs to be increased in magnitude as it falls short of certainty. 8. It must be further increased in magnitude as it falls short in point of proximity. Penalties that are uncertain and those that are remote correspondingly fail to influence the mind. 9. When the act indicates a habit, the punishment must be increased so as to outweigh the profit of the other offenses that the offender may commit with impunity: this is severe, but necessary, as in putting down the coiners of base money. 10. When a punishment well fitted in its quality cannot exist in less than a certain quantity, it may be of use to employ it, although a little beyond the measure of the offense: such are the punishments of exile, expulsion from a society, dismissal from office. 11. This may be the case more particularly when the punishment is a moral lesson. 12. In adjusting the quantum, account is to be taken of the circumstances that render all punishment unprofitable. 13. If, in carrying out these provisions, anything occurs tending to do more harm than the good arising from the punishment, that thing should be omitted.

In regard to the selection of punishments, Bentham lays down a number of tests or conditions whereby they are fitted to comply with the foregoing requirements: 1. The quality of variability: a punishment should have degrees of intensity and duration; this applies to fines, corporal punishment, and imprisonment, also to censure or ill name. 2. Equability, or equal application under all circumstances: this is not easy to secure; a fixed fine is an unequable punishment. 3. Commensurability: that is, punishments should be so adapted to offenses that the offender may clearly conceive the inequality of the suffering attached to crimes of different degrees of heinousness; this property can be grafted on the variable punishments, as imprisonment. 4, Characteristicalness: this is where something can be found in the punishment whose idea exactly fits the crime. Bentham dilates upon this topic, in order to discriminate it from the old crude method of an eye for an eye; cases in point occur abundantly both in the family and