Deterrence in poor law

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Often appears with: poor law bastilles · malthusian punishment · laissez-faire vs active punishment · justice as a virtue · equity, mercy, and pardon · crime and punishment

Usually: argument (1) · injustice endured (1) · censure (1) · indignation (1)

Quotable

“Good,” said they, “we grant you poor a right to exist, but only to exist; the right to multiply you have not, nor the right to exist as befits human beings.” Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 184 · insight

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 primary

Friedrich Engels · 1844 (as a report/study of conditions; published in Germany 1845)
Act, the Masters' and Servants' Act; and Thomas Duncombe, the representative of the working-men in the House of Commons, was the great man of the session; while the Liberal middle-class with its motion for repealing the Corn Laws, and the Radical middle-class with its resolution for refusing the taxes, played pitiable roles. Even the debates about > Act should express the time from six at night to six in the morning, whereby the prohibition of night-work came to mean the limitation of working-hours to twelve, including free hours, or ten hours of actual work a day. But the ministry did not agree to this. Sir James Graham began to threaten resignation from the Cabinet, and at the next vote on the bill the House rejected by a small majority both ten and twelve hours! Graham and Peel now announced that they should introduce a new bill, and that if this failed to pass they should resign. The new bill was exactly the old Twelve Hours' Bill with some changes of form, and the same House of Commons which had rejected the principal points of this bill in March, now swallowed it whole. The reason of this was that most of the supporters of the Ten Hours' Bill were Tories who let fall the bill rather than the ministry; but be the motives what they may, the (74/89)

Engels criticizes the Malthusian Poor Law’s cruelty, arguing that instead of abolition it creates a system designed to deter relief, letting the poor exist only as a warning while punishing “superfluous” families.

nothing, and not as the Malthusian Commissioners conclude, that poverty is a crime, and, as such, to be visited with heinous penalties which may serve as a warning to others. But these wise Malthusians were so thoroughly convinced of the infallibility of their theory that they did not for one moment hesitate to cast the poor into the Procrustean bed of their economic notions and treat them with the most revolting cr…