If such a system as has been rudely outlined were made absolutely secure, and the power of pardoning boards removed or greatly restricted, it might be wise to abolish the death penalty altogether. Juries might then have fewer scruples, and acquittals upon technical grounds, in spite of plain and abundant evidence, become less frequent. Mob law feeds largely upon the belief that even the worst criminals stand in little danger of punishment, but that "by hook or by crook"--mostly "crook"--especially if they or their friends can command means to hire lawyers and invoke the dilatory machinery of the courts, they are almost certain to escape. Whatever, therefore, tends to render the punishment of crime more speedy and certain is a direct discouragement to these sudden and savage outbursts of popular indignation against crime.
In the classification of offenders and their assignment to different penal villages, there would, no doubt, be some so atrociously and fiendishly criminal that it would be a cruelty to others and a mistaken kindness to them to permit them ever to go beyond their present prison walls. By the plan suggested, the penitentiaries in most of the States, now so crowded, while being relieved of a large part of their present tenants, could still be utilized for the confinement of these pariahs of crime.
Of course, in the working out of the plan suggested, there is abundant room for all the skill and wisdom which past history and modern experience can supply. Whether this or some better method shall finally prevail depends on so many uncalculated and incalculable contingencies, that he would be a very venturesome prophet who should attempt to forecast the future. It does not, however, seem reasonable that, in all the upheavals of modern thought, the questioning of old methods, and the suggestions of new and better ones, which these final years of the century are bringing, the treatment of the criminal classes shall be the one question that defies solution, or that the new æon which is soon to open shall find us still bound to a system which is confessedly a failure. Is it too much to hope that we can greet the opening of the twentieth century with a lustrum of prison reform, which shall bring at once the noblest mercy to the criminal, combined with absolute protection to society from its most avowed and most persistent foes?