The mirror. (Stillwater, Minn.) 1894-1925, 1897-08-19
TERMS. Shopper year. in advance
o' Six Months 80 cents.

Workingmen. They had right to de-
mand that this unjust discrimination
against them should be remedied. The
legislature, however, had no right to
grant that demand by taking away
from the inmates of the prisons their
employment and providing nothing to
take its place.
That is just what they did. The state
law prohibits the employment of pris-
oners at any gainful or productive in
dustry except that the state and it's
political divisions are obliged to buy
for their own uses prison-made goods
whenever they have proof that the
prisons are ready to supply them. The
orders received under this section have
been so scanty that less than half the
inmates of the Kings county peniten-
tiary have had any work to do. Out
of seven hundred prisoners confined
there, only three hundred have been
allowed to labor. The other four hun
dred are subject to solitary confne-
ment without work. Already seven
convicts, after examination, have been
declared insane and removed to insane
asylums. Two others are reported as
partially insane, and will soon be in
the same dreadful plight. All those
confined without labor. have deterior-
ated in health, have lost appetite and
flesh, are unable to sleep and are re-
duced to condition of physical debil-
ity and nervous irritability out of
which there are only two paths of es-
cape; one leading to the grave and the
other to the madhouse.
Now, there is no principle of pencil
ogy and none of criminal law, however
primitive and barbarous, that would
support or Justify such an inhuman
policy as this. The reformatories, pen
itentiaries and prisons of the state of
New York contain $500 inmates. The
frightful condition of these, compelled,
as the majority of them are, to endure
practically solitary confinement with
out labor, needs no comment. The
most rigid Interpretation of the power
of the state over the business and lives
of those who have offended against it's
laws does not, in these days, extend to
the right of torture. There is prob
ably no refinement of cruelty that can
inflict keener torment upon a help
less human being than that which those
sentenced to imprisonment are now
suffering in the most pOpulous state
of the Union. We have heard just de-
nunciation of the chain-gang system
in the South, where cOnvicts are herded
in camps, chained together at the most
body-breaking physical tasks, shot
down by armed guards or recaptured
with bloodhOunds whenever they make
an attempt to escape. If it were pro-
posed to introduce that system in the
state of New York, humanity and civ
ilization would raise hands OF horror
against it. Yet the chain gang is
Gods mercy when compared with SOL
itary confinement without labor. The
wreck of body is a tritie when COM
pared with wreck of mind.
What the state of New York is doing
today is not merely to sap the physical
vitality of its convicts as truly as if it
fed them on bread and water only, but
to impair and destroy those mental
forces against which no law of any civ
ilized community has heretofore dared
to lift its hand. There is probably no
man enduring his punishment today
who would not gladly walk to the
whipping post and receive the lash,
which our supposedly humane laws
abolished, to obtain thereby, not his
liberty, but the privilege of saving his
sanity by engaging in wholesome Ia
Dor. The condition of things in the
prisons of New York state is a scandal
and blot upon our laws and upon
the whole nation. The penalty that
this barbaric law enfOrces is worse
than those which liberty has fought
for ages and supposed that it had de-
strOyed. The rack and the thumb
screw have few terrors when set side
by side with the solitary cell, where
body and mind fall together.-St. Paul
Globe.