This idea lurks in the slang word _omerta_ used by Italian criminals, which signifies not only to be a man but a man daring enough to break the law.
The curability of crime is an entirely novel idea, due to the Modern Penal School. As long as, in the eyes of the world, the criminal was a normal individual, who voluntarily and consciously violated the laws, there could be no thought of a cure, but rather of a punishment sufficiently severe to prevent his recidivation and to inspire others with a salutary fear of offending the law.
The penalties excogitated in past centuries were varied: flogging, hard labour, imprisonment, and exile. During the last century they have been crystallised in the form of imprisonment, as being the most humane, although in reality it is the most illogical form, since it serves neither to intimidate the offender nor to reform him. In fact, although prison with its forced separation from home and family is a terrible penalty for those honest persons, who sometimes suffer with the guilty, it is a haven of rest for ordinary criminals, or at the worst, in no wise inferior to their usual haunts. There is a certain amount of privation of air, light, and food, but these disadvantages are fully counterbalanced by the enjoyment of complete leisure and the company of men of their own stamp.
If imprisonment does not serve to intimidate instinctive criminals, still less is it a means of rehabilitation. In virtue of what law, should any man, even if he be normal, become reformed after a varying period of detention in a gloomy cell, where he is isolated from the better elements of society and deprived of every elevating influence--art, science, and high ideals; where he loses regular habits of work, the disciplining struggle with circumstances, and the sense of responsibility natural to free citizens and is tainted by constant contact with the worst types of humanity?
The autobiographies of criminals show us that far from reforming evil-doers, prison is in reality a criminal university which houses all grades of offenders during varying periods; that far from being a means of redemption, it is a hot-bed of depravity, where are prepared and developed the germs which are later to infect society, yet it is to this incubator of crime that society looks for defence against those very elements of lawlessness which it is actively fostering.