The record-union., 1899-01-15
PRESENT DAY THOUGHTS.
BY q. Grosvenor Dave.

| A Prison Prophecy.-Some people are
born criminals-alas! for the law that
makes children suffer for the sins of
parents-and with these society of the
future will deal as it now does with
the sick and the lunatic, shut them up
until we'll or until death, if never likely
to recover. People with inherited GRIM
inal tendencies never understand their
| relation to society. They always have
a little bee buzzing in their bonnets
that confuses their ideas and makes
them violent and burglarious without
the slightest intention of doing evil.
Their natures are SO warped, in fact,
that good and evil are not understood
in their full meaning, good being rather
interpreted as the doing without detec-
tion, evil as a discovery of wrong after
it has been done. Such characters
learn nothing from being shut up nor
do they learn anything from being free,
and for them the twentieth century will
provide houses of detention where as
pleasantly as possible and more profit
ably than if free, the days and years
shall pass, giving some measure of
physical happiness and comfort; and at
the same time protecting society from
attacks that are mere impulse, and
from the deferred but insidious danger
that comes from permitting people of
decided criminal bent to reproduce
their kind at will. The moral imbecile
of the future will be considered filter
subject for the verdict of a committee
of skilled physicians, than the verdict
of twelve unskilled jurymen, who are
called on to decide merely whether the
deed of evil was committed or not and
are not at all equal to understanding
why the wretched human creature be-
fore them had the impulse and yielded
to it. The new century will see much
more discrimination in relation to
wrong doing and the whole tendency
will be to set apart by themselves those
who are filled with accursed impulses
from the womb. They will be regard
ed more as objects of pity than sub
jects of punishment and their proper
treatment will, like every good deed,
react upon society in a hundred ways,
lessening the number of criminals, re-
ducing the constant legal cost of look
ing after their descendants, and at the
same time throwing around these pit
liable creatures some of the comfort and
regularity and self repression that be-
long to those who have no heritage of
Woe to carry.
Some people fall under the ban of
the law and become criminals by hap
penings that are almost accidents
pinch of the pocket, crowding by
obligations, a favorable opportunity
and the hitherto respectable member of
society is arraigned and sentenced and
confined.
A little quarrel, harmless enough at
the outset-and liable to occur with the
best of us-fires uncomfortable passion
and bodily injury is done to the oppo-
nent. Then the culprit possibly less
guilty or at any rate less annoying
than the one he knocks down is put
where he can do no further harm.
Or perhaps the complaining voices of
hungry children and the wistful woe
of suffering wife make man lend
ear to the tempter who urges him to
take from those who well can spare
to give to those who need; and soci-
ety's organized protectors descend up
on the unhappy, needy, bewildered be-
ing and he is put where the immediate
result is to reduce his family to still
greater need.
Society of the century yet to come
will be found more willing to set free
such as these than to shut them up.
The system of suspending a sentence
over a first offender and enforcing it
only after the commission of a second