The Londonderry sifter. (South Londonderry, Vt.) 1883-19??, 1891-04-23
against society.

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people who go 10 prison go again and
again. Some years ago, OF fifteen hun
bred prisoners who during the year had
been in Sing Sing four hundred had
been there before In a house of cor
rection in the country, where during a
tertain reach of time there had been
five thousand people more than three
thousand had been there before. 30,
in one case the prison and in the other
case the house of correction left them
lust Ms bad as they were before,
The secretary of one of the benevo-
lent societies of New York says a lad
of fifteen years of age had spent three
years of his life in prison, and he said
to the lad, What have they done for
you to make you better" well, re-
piled the lad, 'the first time l was
brought up before the judge he said,
You ought to be ashamed of yourself,
And then committed a crime again,
and was brought up before the same
Judge, and he said, You rascalr And
after while committed some other
crime and l was brought before the
same Judge, and he said, You ought to
be hanged.'" That is all they had
done for him in the way of reformation
and salvation. "Oh," you say, these
people are incorrigible. l suppose
there are hundreds of persons this day
lying in the prison hunks who would
leap up at the prospect of reformation
if society would only allow them way
into decency and responsibility. ''Oh,"
you say, II have no patience with these
rogues." | ask you in reply, how much
better would you have been under the
same circumstances
Suppose your mother had been u
blasphemer and your father a sot, and
you had started life with a body stuffed
with evil proclivities, and you had
spent much of your. time in a cellar
amid obscenities and cursings, and if
at ten years Of age you had been com
PEELED to go out and steal, battered and
banged at night if you came in without
any spoils, and suppose your early man
hood and womanhood had been Gov
cred with rags and filth, and decent So
ciety had turned its back upon you
and left you to consort with vagabonds
and wharf rats i how much better
would you have been9 / have no sym
patty with that executive clemency
which would let crime run loose, or
which would sit in the gallery of a
court room weeping because some hard
hearted wretch is brought to justice;
but l do say that the safety and life of
the community demand more potential
influences in behalf of public offenders.
FoULNEss OF PRISON LIFE.
In some of the city prisons the air is
like that of the Black Hole of Calcutta
l have visited prisons where, as the air
swept through the wicket, it almost
knocked me down. No sunlight.
Young men who had committed their
first crime crowded in among old Of
tenders. | saw in one prison woman,
with child almost blind, who had
been arrested for the crime of poverty,
who was waiting until the slow law
could take her to the almshouse, where
she rightfully belonged; but she was
thrust in there with her child amid the
most abandoned wretches of the town.
Many of the offenders in that prison
slept on the floor, with nothing but
vermin covered blanket over them.
Those people crowded and wan and
wasted and half suffocated and infuri-
ated. said to the men, How do you
stand it here" "God knows" said one
man, 1--WE have to stand it," Oh, they
will pay you when they get out. Where
they burned down one house they will
burn three. They will strike deeper
the assassin's knife. They are this min
! ute plotting worse burglaries
Some of the city jails are the best
places know of to manufacture foot
pads, vagabonds and cutthroats. Yale
college is not so well calculated to
make scholars, nor Harvard so well
calculated to make scientists, nor
Princeton SO well calculated to make
theologians as many of our jails are
calculated to make criminals. All that
those men do not know of crime after
they have been in that dungeon for
some time Satanic Vaccination cannot
teach them. In the insufferable stencil
and sickening surroundings of such
places there is nothing but disease for
the body, idiocy for the mind and
death for the soul. Stifled air and
darkness and vernin never turned a
thief into an honest man.
We want men like John Howard and
Sir William Blackstone and women
like Elizabeth Fry to do for the pris-
ons of the United States what those
people did in other days for the prisons
Of England. I thank God for what
Isaac T. Hopper and DR.. Wines and
Mr.. Harris and scores of Others have
done in the way of prison reform; but
we want something more radical before
will come the blessing of him who said,
II was in prison, and ye came unto
me-"
Again, in your effort to arrest this
plague of crime you need to consider
untrustworthy officials. ''Woe unto
thee, o land, when thy king is child
and thy princes drink in the morning."
1t is a great calamity to a city when
bad men get into public authority.
Why was it that in New York there
was such unparalleled crime between
1866 and 1912 1t was because the
judges of police in that city at that
time, for the most part, were as cor
rupt as the vagabonds that came be-
fore them for trial Those were the
days of high carnival for election frauds,
assassination and forgery. We had all
kinds of rings. There was one man
during those years that got one hun
bred and twenty-eight thousand dollars
in one year for serving the public. In
a few years it was estimated that there
were fifty millions of public treasure
| T.. l.