A Fragment Of The Prison Experiences Of Goldman Berkman In The State Prison Of Jefferson City Mo And The Us Penitentiary At Atlanta Ga

Author : Emma Goldman
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330343517
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (435 download)

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Download or read book A Fragment of the Prison Experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman written by Emma Goldman and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from A Fragment of the Prison Experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman There was a time - and that not so very long ago - when popular ignorance and superstition looked upon an insane person as one possessed of the devil or of some other evil spirit. They sought to drive the "evil one" out by beating and torturing the insane, and often even by drowning, hanging, and burning. We have fortunately passed that stage of stupid brutality. Today even the most ignorant man knows that insanity is a disease. But in regard to crime and criminals we are still in the stage of dark-age superstition. We look upon the criminal today as we did upon the insane fifty or seventy-five years ago. Most men still believe that by beating and punishing the criminal, by hanging and electrocution, we can drive the "evil spirit" out of him. This process is called reforming the criminal. Yet common sense and all human experience prove that the criminal is no more responsible for crime than the crazy man for his insanity. The pseudo-scientific theories of the Lombrosos in regard to crime and criminals have been thoroughly exploded and proven utterly fallacious. Even if the Lombroso myth that the criminal is born were true, what good would it do to punish him? There might be some social justification for his isolation, but how could the criminal, if born such, be held accountable for his criminality? But as a matter of fact - as modern criminology has proven beyond all dispute - the criminal is made, not born. He is the product of his environment, a child of poverty and desperation, of misery, greed, and ambition. He is at the same time the symbol and the proof of a diseased social condition, the miscarriage of perverted economic arrangements. Fully 97 per cent. of all crime is due directly to our economic institutions. The other 3 per cent. are traceable to the artificiality and neurosis of modern life, to the antisocial tendencies cultivated among the weeds in the neglected and mistreated garden of human life. I have been in close contact with so-called criminals for a great many years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.