Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1915-04-21
CASTING THE FIRST STONE

"OFF with his head" was the favorte
" remedy of the White Queen in "Alice
in Wonderland" In this she was not fan
tastic person at all, but very consistent
prototype of our own modern theory of
punishment. Nero and the Vestal Virgins
turned their thumbs up or down, according
to the whim of the moment. Gradually,
through the centuries, mems lives have be-
come more secure, and beheadinG prisoners
of all degrees less popular. But the old
revengeCul attitude of taking it out of the
criminal in proportion to his offense persists
almost mistaken.
One great handicap in dealing with prisons
has been their absolute detachment from the
rest of life. Under our rigid antique stand
ards Of right and wrong, any one who forgot
himself so far as to get into Jail auto
maticaly disqualified himself from reporting
on prison conditions and suggesting i'm
provements when he got out. No one would
believe n Jail bird. And what coull the rest
of us who had never been in Jail know about
the subject? Intelligent interest in criminals
and offenders first attracted public attention
with the work of Judge Lindsey's Juvenile
Court in Denver, and with the very
cessful experiments of some wardens in the
Middle West who tried paroling their men in
large numbers on prison farms, under little
or no surveillance, and with the most en-
couraging results
In Hearsts Magazine QD, A. Brisbane
puts it up to" our modern society very
frankly for its responsibility in making
criminals:
The criminals playground is part of the side
walk and all OF the gutter. He cannot run
freely. the trucks would crush him. He must
not throw a ball or play games; the police would
arrest him. lie must find his amusement in
vice in some form of gambling. He must
pick his course in life in the filth of the gutter,
in the moral filth of the low slums in which
this country has put him,
1t is a straight, well-managed road that leads
from the miserable tenement house bed in which
he was born through the gutter nursery and
the sidewalk playground to the club in the dive.
And the road Is straight ahead that leads him
to the station-house cell, and before the honor
able Judge, who has paid his assessment to
the blaclmailing organization and on to the
political boss of the penitentary. You see the
criminal walk from the deathhouse toward the
electric chair. You watch him with his low
forehead and his white face, mumbng the
prayers that whispered in his ears. You
wonder that he does not then strike blow
however hopeless for liberty, or at least blow
of vengeance at those who represent the society
responsible for his end.
Every time that criminal is hanged society
admits itself guilty of two crimes: First, the
manufacture of the criminal, and second, the
murder of the criminal. Society permits condi-
tions to make the criminal inevitable, and then
ayenges itself upon the miserable victim for its
own crime by committing official murder.
William Dean Howels, writing in last
months Harper's (9), takes for his text the
incident of the IL men sentenced to death in
Arizona, and the efforts of the Governor of
the State to abolish capital punishment In
time to save them, and also Thomas Mott
Osborne's effort to reform Sing Sing by ac-
cepting the position of warden:
What appears beyond question Is the failure
of the old system OF penology The captiyes
of the state are apparently made worse by the
hardshlps accumulated upon them not for their
reformation, but for their suffering. The wise
old world knows, thinks II knows that
prisons were meant for the punishment of pris-
oners, and not as the warden supposes, for their
reformation.
II knows that when a is sent to Sing
Sing II is to make him sadder, but not better.
1t is TO subject him to a slavery under condi-
tlons which seem often fixed not by the law, but
by the will of his immediate masters. 1t is to
take him from his family his wife and children
or father and mother, who trusted him, however
mistakenly, for their support. IL is to put him
TO hard labor for or 10 or 20 years, not for the
behoof OF these dependents OF his but for the
profit OF such contractors as buy his services
from the State. and at the end, to chase him
back upon the world empty-handed, dlshonored
hopeless, helpless
Death as Lesser Evil
However mistaken it may seem for a man
TO defy the police in attempting to help on
a strike, at least It does not disqualify him
as a reporter on prison conditions, after a
year in Auburn. b, ]. Legere. who was inn
prisoned after the Little Falls strike, writes
of Auburn in the New Republic (S):
The mental terror OF the cell life Is more
subtle and dlfneult for one who has never ex-
perieaced L 10 comprehend. But Il Is, never
thsless. intensely real and destructive - -