Government on a Neighboring Planet

72:10.1The meth­ods of this peo­ple in deal­ing with crime, in­san­ity, and de­gen­er­acy, while in some ways pleas­ing, will, no doubt, in oth­ers prove shock­ing to most Uran­tians. Or­di­nary crim­i­nals and the de­fec­tives are placed, by sexes, in dif­fer­ent ag­ri­cul­tural colonies and are more than self-sup­port­ing. The more se­ri­ous ha­bit­ual crim­i­nals and the in­cur­ably in­sane are sen­tenced to death in the lethal gas cham­bers by the courts. Nu­mer­ous crimes aside from mur­der, in­clud­ing be­trayal of gov­ern­men­tal trust, also carry the death penalty, and the vis­i­ta­tion of jus­tice is sure and swift.

72:10.2These peo­ple are pass­ing out of the neg­a­tive into the pos­i­tive era of law. Re­cently they have gone so far as to at­tempt the pre­ven­tion of crime by sen­tenc­ing those who are be­lieved to be po­ten­tial mur­der­ers and ma­jor crim­i­nals to life ser­vice in the de­ten­tion colonies. If such con­victs sub­se­quently demon­strate that they have be­come more nor­mal, they may be ei­ther paroled or par­doned. The homi­cide rate on this con­ti­nent is only one per cent of that among the other na­tions.

72:10.3Ef­forts to pre­vent the breed­ing of crim­i­nals and de­fec­tives were be­gun over one hun­dred years ago and have al­ready yielded grat­i­fy­ing re­sults. There are no pris­ons or hos­pi­tals for the in­sane. For one rea­son, there are only about ten per cent as many of these groups as are found on Uran­tia.