CONTENTS
The human use of human beings
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Author: Wiener Norbert (1894-1964)
Year: 1954
Where the law of Western countries is at present least satisfactory is on the criminal side. Law seems to consider punishment, now as a threat to discourage other possible criminals, now as a ritual act of expiation on the part of the guilty man, now as a device for removing him from society and for protecting the latter from the danger of repeated misconduct, and now as an agency for the social and moral reform of the individual. Therse are four different tasks, to be accomplished by four different methods; an unless we know an accurate way ofm proportioning them, our whole attitude to the criminal will be at cross-purposes. At present, the criminal law speaks now in one language, and now in another. Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime. Any code which is made, one-fourth on the eighteenth-century British prejudice in favour of hanging, one-fourth on the removal of the criminal from society, one-fourth on a half-hearted policy of reform, and one-fourth on the policy of hanging up a dead crow to scare away the rest, is going to get us precisely nowhere.
Let us put it this way: the first duty of the law, whatever the second and third ones are, is to know what it wants.
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