object is the prevention of crime, it is clear that this would be but imperfectly effected by any discipline applied after conviction only. Conviction supposes the prior existence of crime, and the discipline that corrects it is punishment; but punishment is only one of the means of attaining the end of preventing crimes to avoid their commission, therefore, we must go one step further back; we must prevent contaminating association before trial, more carefully than we would after it; we must never confound innocence with unconvicted guilt, by imposing any unnecessary restraint upon either. But even accusation is most commonly founded on the evident commission of an offence, although trial is necessary to designate the offenders. We must begin, then, at an earlier stage in our efforts to prevent it; we must relieve that extreme want which is sometimes the cause, and oftener the pretence for crime; and we must find employment for the idleness which generally produces it. And when this is done, our work is not yet complete; religious, moral and scientific instruction must be not only provided but enforced, in order to stamp on the minds of the people that character, that public feeling, and those manners, without which laws are but vain restraints.

The recapitulation of the several institutions embraced by the Code of Reform and Prison Discipline, has been made to show their close connexion, and that each part is so necessary to carry into effect the great objects of the system, that an omission of any one would, in a great measure, defeat the good effect that might be expected from the others. If we mean to guard the community from the inroads of crime, every avenue must be defended. A besieged city, fortified on one side, leaving the others open to hostile attacks, would be a just image of a country in which laws are made to eradicate offences by punishments only, while they invite them by neglect of education, by the toleration of mendicity, idleness, vagrancy, and the corrupting associations of the accused before trial, as well as after conviction. Yet such is the lamentable state of criminal jurisprudence, that all nations are more or less in this state. Here great severity is used to punish offences, but no means are provided to prevent them: there mild punishments and a reformatory discipline are applied after judgment; but severe imprisonment and contaminating associations are indiscriminately inflicted on the innocent and on the guilty before trial. Between some states the contest seems which shall raise the greatest revenue from the labour of the convicts: in others the object is to degrade and make them feel their misery. No where has a system been established consisting of a connected series of institutions founded on the same principle of uniformity, directed to the same end; no where is criminal jurisprudence treated as a science; what goes by that name, consists of a collection of dissimilar, unconnected, sometimes conflicting expedients to punish different offences as they happen to prevail; of experiments directed by no principle to try the effect of different penalties; of permanent laws to repress temporary evils; of discretionary power, sometimes with the blindest confidence vested in the judge, and at others with the most criminal negligence given to an officer of executive justice. All these and other incongruities would cease, were the lawgiver to form correct principles; enounce them for his own guidance and that of his successors; and, with them constantly before his eyes, arrange his system of criminal jurisprudence into its natural divisions, by providing for the poor, employing the idle, educating the ignorant, defining of

fences and designating their correspondent punishment, regulating the mode of procedure for preventing crimes and prosecuting offenders, and giving precise rules for the government and discipline of prisons.

With such a system it may reasonably be expected, not that offences will be eradicated, but that their recurrence will be much less frequent, and that the rare spectacle will be witnessed of a retrograde movement in vice and crime. But the desultory attempts which have been made, and are daily making, to carry some of its detached parts into execution, do but retard the progress and endanger the success of reform; they are troublesome, they are expensive; the false reliance that is placed upon them by their advocates, excites high expectations, which must be disappointed, because a disease pervading the system cannot be cured by topical remedies; and the disappointment produces despair of final success, an abandonment of the plan of reformation, and an inclination to return to the old sanguinary system.

The code now submitted completes the System of Penal Law, which is respectfully offered for consideration.

The task was undertaken with an unfeigned distrust of my own powers, which nothing could have conquered but the conviction that a simple enumeration and development of the principles on which the system is founded, would force a conviction of their truth.

It has been prosecuted with laborious and unremitted application for several years, with a respectful attention to the opinions of others, and a close observation of practical results.

Its conclusion was attended with the gratifying consciousness of having taken every precaution to guard against the pride of opinion, and neglected no means that could be suggested by the deepest sense of its importance, and a religious desire that it might advance private happiness, by establishing the true principles of public justice.

It is now respectfully offered for consideration, in the hope that after legislative wisdom shall have supplied the omissions, and corrected the errors of the work, it may be made the basis of a system, by which instruction may be promoted, idleness and vice repressed, crimes diminished, and the sum of human happiness increased.

EDWARD LIVINGSTON.

A SYSTEM OF PENAL LAW.

INTRODUCTORY TITLE.

CHAPTER I.

Preamble.

• No act of legislation can be, or ought to be immutable. Changes are required by the alteration of circumstances; amendments, by the imperfection of all human institutions; but laws ought never to be changed without great deliberation, and a due consideration as well of the reasons on which they were founded, as of the circumstances under which they were enacted. It is therefore proper, in the formation of new laws, to state clearly the motives for making them, and the principles by which the framers were governed in their enactment. Without a knowledge of these, future legislatures cannot perform the task of amendment, and there can be neither consistency in legislation, nor uniformity in the interpretation of laws.

For these reasons the general assembly of the state of Louisiana declare, that their objects in establishing the following code, are—

To remove doubts relative to the authority of any parts of the penal law of the different nations by which this state, before its independente, was governed.

To embody into one law and to arrange into system such of the various prohibitions enacted by different statutes as are proper to be retained in the penal code.

To include in the class of offences, acts injurious to the state and its inhabitants, which are not now forbidden by law.

To abrogate the reference, which now exits, to a foreign law for the definition of offences and the mode of prosecuting them.

To organize a connected system for the prevention as well as for the prosecution and punishment of offences.

To collect into written codes, and to express in plain language, all the rules which it may be necessary to establish, for the protection of the government of the country, and the person, property, condition, and reputation of individuals; the penalties and punishments attached to a breach of those rules; the legal means of preventing offences, and the forms of prosecuting them when committed; the rules of evidence, by which the truth of accusations are to be tested; and the duties of executive and judicial officers, jurors and individuals, in preventing, prosecuting, and punishing offences: to the end that no one need be ignorant of any branch of criminal jurisprudence, which it concerns all to know.