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Title: Crime and Criminals Author: Lucy E. Parsons Date: March 25, 1906 Language: en Topics: class struggle, working class Source: The Liberator
Our saintly Christians and other goody-goody people throw up their hands
in horror, in contemplating the prevalence of crime among the “lower
classes.” Crimes, or unsociable acts among the “lower classes,” are only
a reflex of crimes or robberies of the upper or “better classes.” We rob
our children before they are born. How many thousands, yea millions, of
mothers among the working class are there who see a thousand and one
articles while in a state of pregnancy which their appetite craves or
their heart desires, and yet are unable to gratify it? They walk the
streets, gazing at the gorgeous displays, everything to attract the eye
and cause the heart to wish for, yet unable, owing to poverty, to
gratify such natural longings. What is the consequence?
The unborn child is impressed, it feels the same disappointment that the
mother feels; it is impressed upon it. We have robbed it before its
birth, it enters the world with an unsatisfied, grasping nature. This
proclivity grows steadily upon it with its growing years; the desire
grows stronger because of poverty, and, finally, the child reaches forth
and takes some one else’s property. This is theft, it is illegally done;
then society for the first time takes an interest in this human being.
It comes forward to punish the child, it is now ready to inflict torture
upon the victim of its own false, unnatural, inhuman system. How much
better, wiser and cheaper it would have been to make conditions natural
and social so that the child could have seen the light of Earth under
the best conditions possible, instead of—as is often the case—under the
worst conditions.
How much better this would be than to have to build great, gloomy
prisons, superintended by guardsmen, who harden and debase their natures
still more. And the case holds good with murders, legal and illegal, or
lynchings. The sensational press gives all the gory details of such
occurrences in great glaring headlines. They catch the eye of thousands
of prospective mothers; they are impressed by the horror and its
details, and they in turn impress the unborn child. The child is born,
it reaches man’s and woman’s estate, some adversity crosses its path,
and the old prenatal impression rushes upon it and an awful deed is
committed! The community is shocked and wonders where such a monster
could have come from. Another candidate starts for the prison or the
gallows. Thus the long procession is ever wending its way through the
ages. The hoary-headed old hag, society, throws up her hands in “holy”
horror when one of her children commits an awful deed. She never
recognizes the fact that this is only the reflex of her own misdeeds.
Crime is simply a social disease.
When society has grown wise enough to supplant the prison with the
schoolhouse, the teacher for the hangman and kind treatment for
punishment and substituting justice and kindness for brutality, we will
hear very little more about “crime and criminals.”