Various

“ To deprive a drug addict of his drug without giving him definite medical help must inevitably subject him to such suffering, such incredible and indescribable torment, as cannot otherwise be brought upon mankind. It may mean death; it is very likely to mean insanity. The drug addict will steal to get his drug; indeed, he may do murder in order to obtain it.
“Therefore this bill provides for the treatment and relief of those who, rendered unable to procure their drug by the provisions of the legislation, might otherwise be made the victims of a social progression. ”

“ Even as no physician who administers a habit-forming drug to ease his patient’s pain should acquaint that patient with the nature of the drug he gives, lest the patient turn again to it when pain recurs and fasten something worse than pain upon himself, despite the doctor’s wishes, so no medicine offered for general sale and bearing on its label the announcement of its content of a pain-killing, habit-forming drug should by the law be tolerated. ”

“ If it is necessary for us to retain the tuberculosis patients, we place them under the best possible hygienic conditions. We point with pride to our out-of-door cottage tents, where the three essentials for cure are at hand—fresh air, rest and good food.
The House of Correction has a well deserved reputation for its success in the management of drug and alcoholic cases. 10 But no “cure” such as is employed in most institutions is made use of here. The treatment is essentially educational. The offending drug is withdrawn, and the patient convinced that he can get along without it. ”

“ We do not send the brightest and best of our youth to them. In fact, the deliberate purpose of our system of justice is to send them our worst. Undoubtedly, at times, we do send there some of our best—men whom a chance step from the beaten path has tripped into disaster—but our whole machinery of justice 18 is at fault if the rule is not to select our criminals for our prison population. ”

“ Only while imprisonment lasts, and in almost every instance it releases them a more dangerous menace than before their incarceration. And all because we deal with crime by a system childishly futile! As well might we sentence the lunatic to three months in an asylum, or the victim of smallpox to thirty days in the hospital, at the end of these periods to turn them loose, whether mad or sane, cured or still diseased. ”

“ Any mischiefs which may arise will be possible only because the authorities of a prison have the power to punish prisoners behind their grim walls in entire secrecy.
“It is not necessary to charge that the authorities or even the guards are worse than the ordinary run of mortals, to see how the human nature in them may be exasperated by the criminal classes under their charge into taking action which they would not take if the steadying eye of the whole community were on them. It must be remembered that prisons are not young ladies’ boarding schools. ”

“ When questioned the prisoners always blame the traffic on the honest and unpopular guards who are not really concerned with it. I asked a convict to estimate the number of drug takers among the prisoners. He answered:
“‘Counting the habitual users and the “joy riders,” there are probably two hundred in this prison.’”
And while these demoralizing novelties are frequently discovered in the underworld, the hold which habit-forming drugs are getting elsewhere, with the worth while, is admittedly appalling. ”

“ To intelligently discuss the reason for the prevalence of drug addictions in this country would necessitate an exhaustive study of national psychology.
“Patent medicines containing small quantities of habit-forming drugs have wrought great havoc with us, for any medicine, containing any quantity of any habit-forming drug, contains it in habit-forming quantity if the dosage is regular. It is not the quantity, but the regularity of dosage which produces drug habits. ”

“ No man perpetrates a crime with a view to being caught, therefore he rarely weighs the consequences. The professional thief endeavors to provide against detection, not punishment.
“The Delaware whipping post is a relic of the first settlers of the state, and used at that time as a measure of economy instead of jails which were to come later with the increase of crime. The law has been on the statute books for so many years, it has become a matter of state pride to perpetuate it as something reverential, descending from their forefathers. ”

“ And above all, establishing a Federal bureau of criminal research and control, which will study preventive and constructive measures and make crime almost impossible by doing away with poverty, drunkenness and the thousand and one causes of crime. Some day a President will come who will make it the Government’s duty to do something progressive; then there will be less study regarding the accumulation of wealth and more research for ways to benefit humanity. ”

“ Nor would a demand for publicity be unfair to the prison authorities. Their prisoner is sentenced to a fixed punishment for a definite crime. If he commits another crime, he should be sentenced to another punishment for that; but he should have his second trial and sentence as fully safeguarded by public opinion as his first. Refusal to obey prison regulations would be such a second crime; and his public trial for it would not only make it certain that the evidence was convincing and the punishment humane, but would bring the regulations themselves under public review. ”

“ Half the men who come here are men who never had a chance—unfortunates grown to manhood without impulse or direction. Out of their very helplessness they cheated and stole, robbed and killed. Most manifestly, mere weekly religious services will not free society from the menace of these men. They must be taught something to do. A State farm protects the present and guarantees the future. ”

“ The victims of drug habits who have been led into them through the mistaken methods of the doctor, who first administers the drug to ease acute physical suffering, and by the proprietary medicine or drug store preparation passed out as cure-alls with an indifference to or ignorance of consequences which must remain incredible to those who understand, is infinitely more numerous than the growing group of drug takers led into their addictions by the tendency towards dissipation. ”

“ The cost of handling crime is over one billion dollars a year in the United States and there are one hundred and thirteen thousand men in prison there to-day.
Father Creedon: Incredible!
Gordon: And yet, our National Government spends twenty million dollars a year to study and exterminate the animal, insect, and vegetable pests, but not a dollar is appropriated nor an hour of attention given for the study of preventive measures against the human pest—the man gone wrong—the criminal! The greatest menace to humanity is not of such importance as the mould on apple trees ”

“ With the handicaps which have been imposed upon prison labor by legislation such labor is not and cannot be self-supporting. The goods that prisoners make are excluded from the general market. Power machines are forbidden, for the most part, except in wood workings. Take the State farm, where the conditions are such that, if anywhere, the institution could be made self-supporting. With all possible use made of prison labor the average cost for the care of inmates above the proceeds of this work is in the neighborhood of $2.50 per week. ”

“ Relieved by the medicine those who take it read its label carefully, learn what has afforded the relief—it always is a mere relief, it never is a cure—and, unacquainted with the dangers attending substances of the sort, regularly dose themselves, either with increased quantities of the medicine or more probably with the straight drug. ”

“ The druggist has been permitted to import and manufacture as freely as he pleased, and to sell under restrictions which were insufficient to prevent promotion of drug habits; the physician has never been required to make accounting for prescription of or the administration of these dangerous substances, and his medical training, both in college and in hospital, has left him in the dark concerning the danger point in their administration.
“This proposed New York State legislation has been drawn with careful eye to the establishment, here in the Empire State, of a model law for other States. ”

“ Miss Katharine B. Davis, now in the full swing of her duties as Commissioner of Correction, tells me that she finds her problems complicated all along the line by drug addictions among inmates of the city’s prisons and jails, and the Mayor and other members of the city government are looking into the whole subject with deep interest.
In her efforts to discover how the city’s prisoners get drugs, Miss Davis has uncovered strange, almost uncanny methods. A prisoner’s wife or “girl” brings him clean handkerchiefs or shirts, stiffly starched. ”

“ The State has been put to the cost of ferreting out the criminal, arresting, trying, and convicting him. The State must provide for his safe-keeping, clothe him, feed him, shelter him with proper warmth. Under restrictions surrounding prison labor he will not nearly meet the expense to which he has subjected the State. If his family need support while he is imprisoned, let the municipality provide that. With all the work he can do, the criminal is a burden to the Commonwealth. The State is entitled to all he can do towards self-support. ”

“ A drug-tainted patent medicine is absolutely certain to establish a drug habit in any one who, for any length of time, takes it according to directions.
“The proposed law makes such patent medicines, containing any quantity whatever of the habit-forming drugs, illegal. Physicians rarely if ever give prescriptions for them. The public will lose nothing and gain much through their abolishment. ”

“ Free manufacturers are asked to compare their own payroll with that of the contractors at this prison where for healthy male convicts, 75 cents per day was paid, while for a few cripples and the women the figure was only 50 cents per day.
The National Committee on Prison Labor and the unions see that this unfair competition can be overcome by the work for the State, whereby no prison goods reach the open market, but these two groups need the support of all interested either for business or humanitarian reasons to bring about results which shall be effective and lasting. ”

“ We know well that alcohol is responsible for many conditions which are daily called upon to treat, but we do not give due consideration to the fact that the alcohol or drug habit had its beginning in an effort to relieve pain due to sickness, or to obtain solace after unsuccessful attempts to obtain or keep a job, when handicapped by some disease, recognized or not. Disease, alcoholism and crime are very closely interwoven. ”

“ Drugs are even taking hold upon our youth. Within the year many instances have been cited in the newspapers, which have uncovered peddlers of cocaine and heroin to school children. I listened recently to the appalling story of a seventeen-year-old Connecticut boy, brought by his father for treatment in this city, who told how he had been the center of a group of not less than a hundred other boys in his own town who gained the drug through him and were completely at his mercy. ”

“ You have forgotten, Gordon, the most important doctrine of all—Protection.
Travesty: Yes! Society has the right of self-defense. We are justified in imprisoning such people; even if it does them no good, because it protects Society. ”

“ There was a time not very long ago when these cases were taken to the police station, locked up as drunks and died in a cell, when proper medical or surgical assistance would often have saved a life. Over one-half of our ‘no paper’ cases are not able to give any history of themselves; we know absolutely nothing except that the police brought in an unconscious man to us. ”

“ At present, instead of having only one physician, as in former years, who was expected to look after the needs of the entire population in all the different branches of medical science, which is impossible for one man to do, no matter how efficient and interested he might be, we have in addition to Dr. Sceleth, the Medical Superintendent, whose entire time and attention is given to the department, four internes, who are physicians, and two professional and registered nurses, who also reside on the premises, and are instructors for the inmate nurses used in accordance with their capacity. ”

“ There’s nothing in that idea of their being abnormal.
Gordon: They must be! No normal man chooses sickness rather than health, or selects poverty when he might be rich! No one seeks suffering when he could be happy! ”

“ Farming by Texas Prisoners.—Texas is to try the honor system among convicts in one of its prisons, says the Little Rock, Ark., Gazette, and is even going a step further by providing a profit-sharing plan to encourage prisoners in thrift and industry. Fifty white men have been selected for the test, and if the new plan proves feasible, it means that the entire prison system of that State will be revolutionized in the near future. ”

“ The proper care of prisoners and the remedying of bodily defects through such treatment as modern surgery and medicine can give, will decrease the prison population. There is not a day that we do not receive unfortunates who are compelled to beg or steal, because of their inability to earn a living on account of some physical infirmity which is readily cured by proper surgical or medical treatment. ”

“ And this average population of some twenty-five establishments represents not less than 30,000 different persons during the year, whose separation and proper care cannot be provided for in these twenty-five prisons, etc., some of which are always crowded, others usually empty or half filled, and all under a varying, partial, costly and practically useless prison discipline. State control would give all but a few hundred of the 30,000 comers and goers a safe, judicious and to a good extent reformatory discipline, now quite uncertain or impossible as things are. ”