it is unjust when it punishes them for faults which the wants of their
nature, or the constitution of society has rendered necessary to them:
it is unjust, it is irrational, whenever it chastises them for having
followed those propensities, which example, which public opinion, which
the institutions, which society itself conspires to give them. In short,
the law is defective when it does not proportion the punishment to the
real evil which society has sustained. The last degree of injustice, the
acme of folly is, when society is so blinded as to inflict punishment on
those citizens who have served it usefully.

The _penal_ laws, in exhibiting terrifying objects to man, who must be
supposed susceptible of fear, presents him with motives calculated to
have an influence over his will. The idea of pain, the privation of
liberty, the fear of death, are, to a being well constituted, in the
full enjoyment of his faculties, very puissant obstacles, that strongly
oppose themselves to the impulse of his unruly desires: when these do
not coerce his will, when they fail to arrest his progress, he is an
irrational being; a madman; a being badly organized; against whom
society has the right to guarantee itself; against whom it has a right
to take measures for its own security. Madness is, without doubt, an
involuntary, a necessary state; nevertheless, no one feels it unjust to
deprive the insane of their liberty, although their actions can only be
imputed to the derangement of their brain. The wicked are men whose
brain is either constantly or transitorily disturbed; still they must he
punished by reason of the evil they commit; they must always be placed
in the impossibility of injuring society: if no hope remains of bringing
them back to a reasonable conduct--if every prospect of recalling them
to their duty has vanished--if they cannot be made to adopt a mode of
action conformable to the great end of association--they must be for
ever excluded its benefits.