From the Archives (May 19, 1921): Preventing crime

It is a debatable question how the criminal codes have succeeded in preventing crime in the world. One thing is obvious that criminal law only punishes people after they have committed the offence and the matter of detecting the real culprit is one of no little difficulty. But, even in countries where the whole moral order has been upset by external or internal shocks the remedy, as a writer in the “Science Siftings” says to be sure, does not lie in placing whole communities under virtual martial law in response to hysterical public opinion and shooting down people on suspicion. This is merely bringing about what may well be called police anarchy. “If we arrest wholesale and punish on suspicion, we are going to inflict such punishments upon the innocent, for whom legal procedure has built up — and justly — protective barriers. Men, even those guilty of crime, must be properly tried and duly convicted; and the moment we lower these standards and permit police dragnets to enmesh the innocent with the guilty, then we are reverting to primitive methods which civilisation has long discarded.”