bourgeois society (offences connected with the family relationships of society; those resulting from romanticist inclinations; those due to alcoholism or to mental degeneration; those due to ignorance, or to a suppression of social instinct, etc.). The proletarian law-court has to deal with offences for which the ground has been prepared by bourgeois society, by the society whose vestiges are still operative. A large number of professional criminals, trained to become such in the old order, survive to give work for the proletarian courts. But these courts are entirely free from the spirit of revenge. They cannot take vengeance upon people simply because these happen to have lived in bourgeois society. This is why our courts manifest a revolutionary change in the character of their decisions. More and more frequently do we find that conditional sentences are imposed, punishments that do not involve any punishment, their chief aim being to prevent a repetition of the offence. Another method is that of social censure, a method that can only be effective in a classless society, one in which a social consciousness and a social sense of responsibility have greatly increased. Imprisonment without any occupation, enforced parasitism, the penal method so frequently employed under the tsarist regime, is replaced by the enforcement of social labour. The aim of the proletarian courts is to ensure that the damage done to society by the criminal shall be made good by him through the performance of an increased amount of social labour. Finally, when the court has to deal with a habitual criminal (one whose liberation after his sentence has been performed will entail danger to the lives of other citizens), isolation of the criminal from society is enforced, but in such a way as to give the offender full opportunities for moral regeneration.
Most of the measures above described, involving a complete transformation of the customary penal methods, have already been recommended by the best bourgeois criminologists. But in bourgeois society they remain a dream. Nothing but the victory of the proletariat can ensure their realisation.