The effects of simple afflictive punishments are easily estimated, because their consequences are all similar in quality, and immediately produced. The effects of all other punishments are not ascertained without great difficulties, because their consequences are greatly diversified, are liable to great uncertainty, and are often remote. Simple afflictive punishments must always be borne by the parties on whom they are inflicted: all other punishments are deficient in point of certainty: the more remote their consequences, the more these consequences escape the notice of those who are deficient in foresight and rejection.
Around a simple afflictive punishment a circle may be drawn, which shall inclose the whole mischief of the punishment; around all other punishments the mischief extends in circles, the extent of which is not, and cannot be marked out. It is mischief in the abstract, mischief uncertain and universal, which cannot be pointed out with precision. When the effects of punishments are thus uncertain, there is much less ground for choice, for the effects of one punishment may be the same with those of another. The same consequences often resulting from very different punishments. The choice must therefore be directed by probability, and be governed by the presumption that certain punishments will more probably produce certain penal consequences than any other.
Independently of the bodily sufferings resulting from them, punishments which affect the exterior of the person, often produce two disadvantageous effects, the one physical---the individual may become an object of disgust; the other moral---he may become an object of contempt; they may produce a loss of beauty or a loss of reputation.
One of these punishments, which has a greater moral than physical effect, is a mark producing only a change of colour, and the impression of a character upon the skin; but this mark is an attestation that the individual has been guilty of some act to which contempt is attached, and the effect of contempt is to diminish goodwill, the principle that produces all the free and gratuitous services that men render to one another; but in our present state of continual dependance upon each other, that which diminishes the goodwill of others towards us, includes within itself an indefinite multitude of privations.
When such a mark is inflicted on account of a crime, it is essential that a character should be given to it, which shall clearly announce the intention with which it was imposed, and which cannot be confounded with cicatrices of wounds or accidental marks. A penal mark ought to have a determinate figure---and the most suitable, as well as the most common, is the initial letter of the name of the crime. Among the Romans, slanderers were marked on the forehead with the letter K. In England, for homicide, committed after provocation, offenders were marked in the hand with the letter M (for manslaughter), and thieves with the letter T. In France, the mark for galley-slaves was composed of the three letters GAL.
In Poland, it was the custom to add a symbolical expression: the initial letter of the crime was enclosed in the figure of a gallows. In India, among the Gentoos, a great number of burlesque symbolical figures are employed.
A more lenient method, which may be referred to the same head, is a practice too little used, of giving to offenders a particular dress, which serves as a livery of crime. At Hanau, in Germany, persons condemned to labour on the public works were distinguished by a black sleeve in a white coat. It is an expedient which has for its object the prevention of their escape; as a mark of infamy, it is an addition to the punishment.
On the score of frugality, deforming punishments are not liable to any objection; disablement and mutilation are; if the effect of either is to prevent a man getting his livelihood by his own labour, and he has no sufficient income of his own, he must either be left to perish, or be supplied with the means of subsistence; if he were left to perish, the punishment would not be mere disablement or mutilation, but death. If he be supported by the labour of others, that labour must either be bestowed gratis, as would be the case if he were supported on the charity of relations and friends, or paid for, at public cost; in either case it is a charge upon the public. This consideration might of itself be considered a conclusive objection against the application of these modes of punishment, for offences that are apt to be frequently committed, such as theft or smuggling; the objection applies, however, in its full force, to such of these modes of punishment only as have the effect of depriving the particular individual in question of the means of gaining his livelihood.
In respect of remissibility, they are also eminently defective; a consideration which affords an additional reason for making a very sparing use of them.
In respect also of variability, these punishments are scarcely in a less degree defective. The loss of the eyes, or of the hand, is not to a man who can neither read or write, the same degree of punishment as it would be to a painter, or an author. Yet, however different in each instance may be the degree of suffering produced by the mass of evil to which the infliction of the punishment in question gives birth, all who are subject to it will find themselves more or less affected of these inequalities, and therefore of the aggregate amount of the punishment in each particular instance, it is impossible to form any estimate; it depends on the sensibility of the delinquent, and other circumstances, which cannot be foreseen. By a slothful man, the loss of a hand might not: be regarded as a very severe punishment, it has not been uncommon for men to mutilate or disable themselves to avoid serving in the army.
In point of variability, the several classes of punishment now before us, when considered all together, are not liable to much objection; there is a gradation from less to more, which runs through the whole of them. The loss of one finger is less painful than the loss of two, or of the whole hand. The loss of the hand is less than the loss of an arm. But when these punishments are considered singly, the gradation disappears. The particular mutilation directed by the law, can neither be increased or diminished, that it may be accommodated to the different circumstances of the crime or of the delinquent. This objection recurs again under the head of Equability. The same nominal punishment will not always be the same real punishment.
In respect of exemplarity, the punishments in question possess this property in a higher degree than simple afflictive punishments, this latter species of punishment not being naturally attended with any distant consequences (their infamy excepted), the whole quantity of pain it is calculated to produce is collected, as it were, into a point, and exposed at once to the eyes of the spectator; while of the other, on the contrary, the consequences are lasting, and are calculated perpetually to awaken in the minds of all, to whose eyes any person that has suffered this species of punishment may happen to present himself, the idea of the law itself, and of the sanction by which its observance is enforced. For this purpose it is necessary, however, as has been already observed that the penal mark should be such as at first glance to be distinguished from any mark that may have been the result of accident---that misfortune may be protected from the imputation of guilt.
The next property to be desired in a mode of punishment is subserviency to reformation. In this respect the punishments under consideration, when temporary, have nothing in themselves that distinguishes them from any other mode of punishment; their subserviency to reformation is as their experienced magnitude. It is the infamy attendant on them that gives them those effects which are apt in this respect to distinguish them to their disadvantage.
Infamy, when at an intense pitch, is apt to have this particular bad effect: it tends pretty strongly to force a man to persist in that depraved course of life by which the infamy was produced. When a man falls into any of those offences that the moral sanction is known to treat with extreme rigour, men are apt to suppose that the moral sanction has no hold upon him. His character, they say, is gone. They withdraw from him their confidence and goodwill. He finds himself in a situation in which he has nothing to hope for from men, and for the same reason nothing to fear: he experiences the worst already. If, then, he depend upon his labour for subsistence, and his business is of such sort as requires confidence to be reposed in him, by losing that necessary portion of confidence he loses the means of providing himself with subsistence, his only remaining resources are then mendacity or depredation.
From these observations it follows, that mutilations ought to be reserved as punishments for the most mischievous offenses, and as an accompaniment of perpetual imprisonment. An exception to this rule may perhaps be found in the case of rape, for which analogy most strongly recommends a punishment of this kind.