27 - Lenience in punishing

Summary

But my thoughts have carried me away from my topic, which I must now waste no time in returning to. One of the most effective brakes on crime is not the harshness of its punishment, but the unerringness of punishment. This calls for vigilance in the magistrates, and that kind of unswerving judicial severity which, to be useful to the cause of virtue, must be accompanied by a lenient code of laws. The certainty of even a mild punishment will make a bigger impression than the fear of a more awful one which is united to a hope of not being punished at all. For, even the smallest harms, when they are certain, always frighten human souls, whereas hope, that heavenly gift which often displaces every other sentiment, holds at bay the idea of larger harms, especially when it is reinforced by frequent examples of the impunity accorded by weak and corrupt judges. The harsher the punishment and the worse the evil he faces, the more anxious the criminal is to avoid it, and it makes him commit other crimes to escape the punishment of the first. The times and places in which the penalties have been fiercest have been those of the bloodiest and most inhuman actions. Because the same brutal spirit which guided the hand of the lawgiver, also moved the parricide's and the assassin's.