The Brookhaven leader., 1891-04-23


grudgc against society.
They are harder in heart and more
infuriate when they come out of Jail
than when they went in. Many of the
people who go to prison go again and
again and again. Some years ago of
fifteen hundred prisoners who during
the year had been in Sing Sing, four
hundred had been there before. In a
house of correction in the country,
where during certain reich of time
there had been five thousand people,
more than three thousand had been
there before. SO, in one case the
prison, and in the other case the house
of correction, left them just as bad as
they were before. The secretary of
one of the benevolent societies of New
York saw a lad fifteen years of age
who 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, 1.-The first time l was
brought up before the judge he said:
You ought to be ashamed of yourself
And then | committed crime again,
and l was brought up before the same
Judge, and he said: You rascal And
after awhile ] committed some other
crime, and | was brought before the
same Judge, and he said: You ought
to be hanged" This is all they had
done for him in the way of reformation
and salvation. oh" you say, these
people are incorrigible." | suppose
l. 6 l.. do,
lying in prison hunks who would leap up
at the prospect of reformation, if society
would only allow them a way into de-
ccncy and respectability. oh" you
say: Il have no patients with these
rogues." ] ask you in reply, how much
better would you have been under
the same circumstances? Suppose your
mother had been blasphemer and your
father sot, and you had started life
with body stuffed with evil proclivi-
ties, and you had spent much of your
time in cellar amid obscenitics and
cursing, and if at ten years of
age you had been compelled 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 covered
with rags and filth, and decent society
had turned its back upon you, AND left
you to consort with vagabonds and
wharf-rats-how much better would
you have been? / have no sympathy
with that executive clemency which
would let crime run loose, or which
would sit in the gallery of a courtroom
weeping because some hard-hearted
wretch is brought to justice; but l do
say that the safety and life of the COM
munity demand more potential infu-
enccs in behalf of public offenders.
In some of the city prisons the air is
like that of the Black Hole of Calcutta.
have visited prisons where, as the air
swept through the wicket, it almost
knocked we down. No sunlight.
Young men who had committed their
first crime crowded in among old
offenders. ! saw in one prison a
woman, with a child almost blind,
who had been arrested for the crime
of poverty, who was waiting until the
slow law could take her to the aims
house, where she rightfully belonged
but she was thrust in there with her
child amid the most abandoned wretches
of the town. Many of the off enders in
that prison sleeping on the floor, with
nothing but vermin-covered blanket
over them. These people crowded and
wan and wasted and half-suffocated
and infuriated. / 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 as
sassin's knife. They are this minute
plotting worse burglaries. Some of
the city jails are the best places | know
of to manufacture foot-pads, vagabonds
and cut-throats. Yale college is not so
well calculated to make scholars, nor
Harvard so well calculated to make
scientists, nor Princeton SO well cal
culated to make theolegians 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
Vaccinations can not 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 vermin never turned thief into an
honest man.
We want men like John Howard and
Sir William Blackstone, and women
like Elizabeth Fry, to do for the prison
ers of the United States what those
people did in other days for the prison
ers of England. l 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 We came
unto me-"
Again, in your effort to arrest this
plague of crime you need TO consider
Enthusiastically officials. "Woe unto
thee, o land, when thy king is a 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 1871? 1t was because the
Judges of police in that city at that
time, for the most part, were as corrupt
as the vagabond that came before them
for trial, Those were the days of high
carnival for election frauds, assassina-
t;op and forperv. We had all kinds of