ABSTRACT
I Mprisonment as a punishment of first instance has developed, as a complete conception, almost within the time of men now living, but legal punishment, in the sense of formal action by society against the lawbreaker, goes to the primitive roots of social history. Banishment and vengeance were the earliest reactions to offence, and they have never wholly ceased to work in penal systems. The first goes back very far: an offender against tribal tabu became a danger to the safety of the tribe, which could be assured only by his complete expulsion. This thread will run through the story as far at least as Devil's Island and Botany Bay. The second has undergone many mutations: social utility enforced some limitation of the right of private vengeance —‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’; then substituted compensation for physical vengeance; and finally required society to take into its own hands the responsibility of securing justice for private wrongs. So came in England the conception of ‘the King's Peace’, under which any offences against private persons likely to lead to reprisals, and therefore disorder, were deemed to be ‘against the Peace of our Sovereign Lord the King’. It is a matter of continuing significance that legal punishment for a crime against a private person is in origin a substitute for that private vengeance which society forbids the victim.
