Crime and Punishment
In Chesterton's day, the leading criminologists believed that criminal
behaviour was a form of illness. Consequently, they attempted a program of
"rehabilitation" of criminals that was analogous to medical
treatment. The causes of crime were thought to derive exclusively from heredity
and environment.
Chesterton's line of attack was to insist on free will and the role of human
responsibility in the choices made both by criminals and by the law abiding.
Chesterton is all common sense on this subject:
A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he
must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin. If a man is to be saved
from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging, he
must be not a patient but an impatient He must be personally impatient with
forgery. All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will.
Imprisonment, Chesterton believed, must
be thought of as a specific punishment for a specific crime. If imprisonment
were thought of as therapeutic, he reasoned, convicts would be kept in jail
until some "expert" decided they had "recovered"
(had been rehabilitated). If heredity and environment account for all crimes,
he argued, then law enforcement would become focused on certain types of people
(perhaps the poor) and in certain neighborhoods (perhaps the slums).
According to Philip Jenkins, an expert on both Chesterton and on criminology,
Chesterton's ideas were considered bizarre by the experts of his own day, but
have now become accepted as "mainstream" by the criminology
establishment and the courts. Jenkins calls Chesterton the "forgotten
prophet" in this field.
With the popular acceptance of sociobiology today, however, the idea of crime
as an illness may now be poised for a comeback.
[For further reading in Chesterton's
works, see "The Romance of Orthodoxy" in Orthodoxy; "On
the Science of Sociology" in Avowals and Denials; and "The Innocence
of the Criminal" in Fancies versus Fads. Also, read Jenkins in the
Aug-Nov 1990, Chesterton Review]. The original excerpt corresponds to Martin
Ward's Chesterton page.