Imprisonment
[ARTICLE UNDER CONSTRUCTION]
Annie Besant wrote:
The criminal is explained by reincarnation, as we have seen. He is only a young Ego in the savage state—nothing to be very sorry about, but something to help. Here again, comes the application of reincarnation to life. If you believe in it, you will not send your criminal to gaol, and let him out again, and then send him back again when he commits another crime. You will no more do this than you would send a small-pox patient to the hospital for a week, and then let him out again, and then send him back again for a fortnight, and the third time for three weeks. No, you send him until he is cured. That is the way in which you should deal with the morally diseased as well as with the physically. Train the criminal and educate him; do not punish him with harshness, for punishment which is revengeful injures still further the Ego who has come into our hands. Certainly do not set him free, any more than you would set free a dangerous animal to prey upon society, for he also is dangerous in his criminal state. But do not make his life miserable. Train him, educate him, and do not let him go until he has shown that he has learnt the lesson of right living. There is much talk of liberty, but you must learn that liberty is useless, nay dangerous, unless with it comes the sense of responsibility, unless self-control takes the place of outer compulsion. That which criminals want is training and discipline, and what they have a right to demand at our hands is not liberty, but education, not the license to commit crime after crime purging each with the imprisonment which follows it, but the discipline which will teach them industry, self-control and right living. When criminology has become a science based upon reincarnation then, and then only, will habitual criminals disappear. Prisons will become schools which shall educate, train, and refine, the elders will begin to realise their duties to their youngers, and instead of giving them votes will help them to develop virtues. That is a better way of dealing with criminals than the methods we employ in the so-called civilised nations of our day.