The semi-weekly messenger. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1897-1908, 1906-05-18
WILMINGTON, n. c.
D MAY Is. 1906.
NEED OF A ~REFORMATORY.

What more forcible argument in IA
vor of a ~re{ormatOry for youthful
criminals could be made than the spe-
cial dispatch, gwen below, from Con-
cord to the Charlotte Observer? The
idea Of the criminal law of the state
being such hat a judge Is compelled
TO sentence a girl of twelve years OF
age to a term of five years in the pen
itentiary is most repulsive. No white
girl of that age can be so abandoned,
so dbeaseu or 50 STEPPED in crime and
immortality that there Is no hope for
her reformation if the proper steps
are taken to accomplish it. For q
girl of that age, no matter what nave
been her raising and her social envi-
ronment, she is not entirely lost. There
us always a chance of reformation
and the producing of a good and viz
tuous oma from a child of that age
if proper methods are pursued. There
may be found nOw and then an excep-
ton. Once in a while some child Of
tender years may be found who is so
degenerate that there is no chance OF
reformation, but because this may be
so is it any reason for allowing GRIM
inals and brutes to be made OF the
host of others who are amenable to
the influence Of proper treatment and
raising?
When this Concord girl comes out Of
the p~enitentiary at the age of seven
teen years after having spent five
years in hat prison in the compan-
ionship Of vicious and debased women
what will her moral character be, and
who will be responsible for that con-
dition? You say her parents? Per
lhaps so. They were responsible for
what she was the day she entered the
doors of that prison, but how ahOu1
her worse moral condition when she
comes out and is told by the state she
has atoned for her crime, and is now
a free woman to go where she pleaSes
and lead what life she pleases, so she
dos not violate any of the laws of
civil government? Who but the state
is responsible here-the state which
refuses, because it would cost a few
Thousand dollars, to recognize its re-
sponsibility and to assume it toward
this unfortunate class of its citizens?
IN this refusal the state is aiding in
the raising up of a larger criminal
class. 1t is putting dollars and cents
against good citizenship, and in the
end it will find that supposed economy
has cost it more in the prosecuting
and furnishing of these criminals than
would have been the expense of pro-
viding the reform schools for their ref
Ormation and the making of good citi-
zen out Of them.
The Concord dispatch in reference
to the sentencing Of the t~welve-year-
old girl to the penitentiary follows:
When the second weeks term of
Cabarrus superior court convened this
morning at 10 o'clock, Susie Harmon,
the 1~2-year-old white girl who was
found guilty of m~anslaughter last
week, was presented and Judge Bryan
sentenced her to five years in the state
penitentiary. The girl stood before
the court without a culver and receiv-
ed the sentence without signs of much
concern. She was accompanied by the
father. In his talk to the girl in pass
ing sentence, Judge Bryan referred to
the conditions under which she had
been reared and to the influences, ex-
pressing a hope that she might be able
to reform at the states prison, or that
from there she might be able to get
into a reformatory and be given a
nance to grow into a useful and vir-
tuouS woman.