The record-union., 1893-03-11
of the city be free from the scurrility of
the past two weeks.
FIGHTING THE PAROLE BILL.

fIGHI1NG THE PAROLE BILL.
And now it is the San Francisco En-
dnalneT which comes up to aid in the
senseless assault upon the parole bill,
now in the hands of Governor Markham.
Like its local contemporaries, it appears
to dwell in dense ignorance of the letter
and the spirit of the Williams bill.
The Examiner says: 1.-The trouble with
society to-day is not how to get men out
OF prison. 1t is how to put criminals in
prison and keep them there.' This is
fair sample OF the social economy the Err
dDlineT pleads. Every citizen who is
even half informed knows that the sem
tence quoted should read 1.-THE trouble
with society to-day is not how to get men
into prison and keep them there, but how
to reduce to the minimum of the need for
putting men into prison and keeping
them there"
| Now experience has proved that the
vindictiye keeping of men in prison does
not check the growth of crime. The E.r-
dnni1eer quotes statistics to prove the
enormous increase of crime in the United
States in the last twenty years, and at
tributes it to the delay in and uncertainty
of punishment. Those have been and
are factors in the case; but there are
others, and one is that we have largely
lost sight of the chief purpose of inn
prisonment as punishment, and that is
reformation.
Now then, uncertainty of punishment
and its inequality are largely due to the
fact that punishment as we now apply it
so little operates as a reformatory influ-
ence. To prevent criminal education is
cheaper than to grow criminals to be
punished. Under the parole system the
telon is not, at the end of sentence,
turned adrift to go into the criminal bust
ness again because no other is open to
him. On the contrary, if he earns cred
its, is submissive to discipline, shows
that he appreciates the fact that he can
/ AS9bAoAAi peoSiO1los i4O may III Tic us
cretion of the authorities be told to go out
into the world and live harmlessly toward
society. He is aided to that end by re-
straint of the most powerful character.
Under it he is to eschew bad associa-
tions, keep clear of sinks of vice, refrain
from visiting drinking and gambling re-
Sorta Sava bis aarpinUc aud conduct
himself decently. He is to report his
doings to such officials as are named to
him, and is under constant liability of
being returned to the State Prison at any
time and to lose all his credits, and to
serve out the maximum term of his sem
tence.
Every incentive pushes him in a right
and withholds him from wrong direc-
tions. He has everything to lose and
everything to gain. If the spirit of re-
formation has any foothold in him the
parole system tests it. Such has been ex-
perience wherever the parole system has
been tried; against it we have simply the
NOS unsupported OlCluIIl VI tIlo lodu
Francisco Examiner, as we have had that
of the San Francisco Chronicle, that the
law is one to encourage crime" to fill
the State with "one-year felons," to make
a general Jail delivery" and so on,
! through maundering speculations.
| Against these silly fears and this absurd
dogmatism; against the back number,
antiquated and abandoned idea that the
purpose of the State in sending men to
prison is to wreak vengeance upon them,
and turn them out still more embittered
against society, we put the long expert
ence of such as Warden Brockway of
New York, the facts developed by the
| foremost statistical penologists of the
State, and the opinion of whole army of
devoted men who have given their best
efforts through life to solve the prison
question, and have arrived at parole as
| one of the essentials of prison reform,