Note 2 — Chapter XI · THE LAW A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

Our very proper anxiety to avoid every possible chance of committing and punishing the innocent doubtless enables many guilty persons to escape every year; and probably quite half the prisoners acquitted at every assize are really guilty in some degree. The jurisprudence of a hundred years hence will certainly have been so much improved that innocent persons will rarely be accused at all, and that guilty ones will not be able to escape on technical grounds: and with improved detective methods the chances of escape in any given case will be greatly diminished. What punishments are inflicted will be of a reformatory character, and no doubt provisional release, freed from the many crying scandals of the ticket-of-leave system, will play a great part in scientific penology. Recidivism will, of course, be the subject of much sharper punishment. In the meantime, the study of mental science in its relation to crime will have made great strides, and if the views of our own age in regard to heredity should be maintained, a very great source of crime will probably be got rid of altogether, because men and women with just that mental twist which leads to crime will, by one device or another, be absolutely prevented from propagating their race.2