The Arizona sentinel., 1889-01-05
CREATING CRIMINALS.
A Vivid Picture of Existing Evils In the
 Treatment of LawBreakers.

"A NENlO IlCJuE6 OI IAtsAthB AANAAS A-
 Treatment of Law-Breakers.
 The telegraph joyfully announced the other day that a notorious cracks man had been caught in Boston. How did he happen to be at large? He was familiar figure in penitentiaries; he was we'll known to the police; he had a public reputation. It was perfectly wei! known that his business was burg lary (with incidental murder if nec- essary to his safety); that he had no other occupation; that he associated with persons of both sexes whose sole calling is the plunder of society. He was professional criminal, belonging to well-defined criminal class, who never do stroke of honest labor, whom the community support in idle ness and crime. How did he happen to be at large?
 After some weeks or months in a comfortable iail this criminal will be tried. He will have the sharpest, most ingenious criminal lawyer to de- fend him; every advantage will be taken of techuicalities, and allowed; and the ablest effort will be made to clear him of the specific crime for which he was arrested, or to procure for him the shortest possible sentence. As he is so notorious, the chance is that the jury will convict him. He will spend few years in the State prison. He will behave we'll there, will earn time by good conduct, and greatly shorten the term of his sen- tence. He will in time be discharged and go back to his occupation of burg lary. He will rob several houses and a bank or two, he will terrorize the whole community, and some day he will be caught again, and the whole farce will be repeated.
 Society prefers this method; it must prefer it, in a government by the peo- pie. or it would try some other. It Is evidently willing to stand the loss of his repeated robberies, the expense of increased police to watch him, the cost of his successive trials, which make a heavy bill for the State, and finally is willing to support him during the peri ods of his incarceration. There is no common sense in the method; it is the most uneconomical that could be de- vised; but we have 8 notion that it saves us the trouble of any intelligent and vigorous action. Welet the crim- inal class prey upon us, knowing all the time what they are doing. We have gradually learned to act differ ently in other social dangers. If a man has smallpox, we send him to a pest house and keep him there till he is cured; if he is dangerous lunatic, we put him in an asylum and keep him there until he is pronounced sane by competent authority.
 But we are not merely passive sui ferers of this warefare on society. Our method directly increases and repro duces the criminal class. This cracks man is only type of dozen varieties of professional rogues, thieves, swim dlers, lying tramps, vagabonds with no occupation except getting living by dishonesty. Our system of dealing with criminals and those with strong criminal tendencies is calculated to recruit the ranks of the professionals. It is an old story, the life of young of lenders, boys and girls, through the city lockups, the usually foul county jails, the houses of thirty days deten- tion, the reform schools, the peni- tentiaries always with associations tending to destroy self-respect and in- crease a liking for vileness-to the full-blown professional condition. It is needless to repeat the details. From the moment society pays attention to a wrong-doer. its machinery is ever making him worse. Our main effort is to punish crime, not to prevent it. Charles Dudley Warner, us Forum.