Various

“ How great that evil is in Chicago alone appears from the committee’s sober estimate that the annual loss in lives is 5,000 and the annual profit of those engaged in the trade is $15,000,000, which latter figure has since been raised four-fold. It has often been pointed out in these columns and elsewhere that, if there were any other single drain upon a city that cost it 5,000, or let us say even 2,500, lives a year, the community would be up in arms about it. ”

“ In the work of reform, too little attention has been given to careful diagnosis; too much guessing has prevailed as to the criminal’s mental character, or too much ignoring of mental ability. Criminals, whether mentally normal or subnormal, have all been subjected to the same system, with the hope that the weak-minded and strong-minded alike would be made into good citizens. The reason for this has been, perhaps, that there have appeared to be few if any standards by which it has been thought the mental character of the criminal could be accurately judged. ”

“ These delinquents amid evil surroundings, or in the hands or under the influence of unscrupulous people are most dangerous. Unhesitatingly and almost without knowing it, they become the tool of the vicious. They are like the weather vane, which sways instantly in the direction of the power that is exerted upon it. ”

“ Why should not all prisoners, in all parts of the country, contribute, through state officials, to the support of their hapless families? Wife and children have not broken the law—they should not then be left to starve. ”

“ It provides specifically that when a deserter of a destitute family is sentenced to confinement, he shall be employed at hard labor. This tends to prevent desertion, saves the value of the man’s labor to the community, braces him up and makes him a more useful citizen who is more likely to support his family after release.
It requires the payment of the proceeds of the man’s labor where it most sorely is needed, to his deserted wife and children. Under the present law, the convicted deserter is supported in jail, while his family often become paupers. ”

“ When the pound of flesh has been exacted, he is abruptly turned loose to his own devices without a cent nor any equipment to help him to earn an honest livelihood. In every casual glance he will read suspicion and in his search for friends and sympathy he will be more than apt to search out other discharged convicts in former congenial haunts and from that it is but a short step to a life of habitual crime. ”

“ It is important to study the psychology of the individual girls and women, and also to determine how far vice or criminality may be attributed to innate depravity, low grade mentality or a degenerate inheritance. Psychological and psychopathic experts should be appointed to observe those who come in conflict with the law, not only with a view to providing more intelligently for the individuals, but for the purpose of discovering actual causes and conditions, so as to prevent others from entering on a life of vice and to check the increase of numbers in these classes. ”

“ In other words, it is not a tribunal constituted for vengeance, spite, anger or petulant temperaments, to give vent to their wrath, but rather for the calm, cool and considerate treatment of each individual case in order that the greatest good may be accomplished to those entitled to its consideration and help, and that the basic foundation of the state, to wit, the family unit may be maintained if possible. ”

“ It is useless for the state and city to spend money for these girls in reformatory institutions, as has been done in several of these cases, only to turn them out after one, two, or at most three years, to be preyed upon in the community. In a custodial institution where they could have permanent care, a happy life would be possible and society would be saved from caring for them in prisons and reformatories, and from having the number of degenerates augmented by their offspring. ”

“ The great desideratum should be secrecy and the names of the paroled men should never be made public nor anyone made acquainted with their prison record except the direct head of any firm that might give them employment. Convicts are human and sensitive and they should be given a fair chance with a clean slate and not be handicapped at the start with a lot of notoriety. Give a man a bad name and he will very likely be forced to live up to it, except he has a strong character, and the class we are considering is not noted for strength of character, or they would be in other ranks of life. ”

“ Girls crave some fun and amusement, and it is a very natural, normal thing. They do not seek it in dangerous places, but the truth is that few others are open to them. To an increasing extent vice is being linked with amusement and recreation. The men who procure girls for immoral purposes from city and country, and who send them to the streets to earn money for their own enrichment, are responsible, to a great extent, for the constantly increasing supply of women who enter upon a life of prostitution. ”

“ The Canadian idea is that reformatory should be a large custodial school rather than a penal institution; that it should be removed as far as possible from the thought of felony and the disgrace that attaches to any young man or boy who has violated the law and thus become subject to a reformatory sentence. And in accordance with that idea each Canadian prison has a large farm attached, to which prisoners are sent to work. ”

“ To make the improvident and negligent husband and father, as well as those who are liable for the maintenance of the dependant relatives, namely, the grandparents, parents, children, grand-children and relatives of a poor person of sufficient ability, realize the obligations that the law has cast upon them, to advise and admonish in the first instance as to their duty to their dependants, and to punish if advice be not followed, has been the rule and practice of the court. ”

“ The principal problem of the New York Probation Association, which maintains the House, is the rehabilitation of the young women convicted or arraigned for prostitution. In the second annual report of the association, Miss Maud Miner, the society’s secretary, writes:
“Among the girls who have been received into Waverly House this year, nine per cent have been pronounced deficient when examined by experts as to their mental condition, and a much larger percentage, approximately one-third, can be said to be borderline cases. ”

“ A state labor colony for tramps, vagrants and deserters, a general stiffening of the punitive, reformatory, and other features of the law against desertion of destitute families, the establishment of boards of inebriety, and a commission on the causes of poverty, are, respectively, the specific measures by which the four enumerated evils are to be met. ”

“ First offenders ought, the committee thinks, to be invariably placed under the charge of women probation officers. We note also this suggestion:
To Federal authorities: A Federal bureau of immigration should be established in great distributive centers, such as Chicago, to provide for the safe conduct of immigrants from ports of entry to their destination. Efficient legislation should be enacted and present laws enforced in such a manner, as to the traffic in women within the boundaries of each state, and as thoroughly, as the Federal authorities have dealt with the international traffic. ”

“ The old punitive method of dealing with crime as against the reformative system is still in operation. No attention is paid to the old axiom of an ounce of prevention being better than a pound of cure, as regards those unfortunates who by environment, hereditary tendencies or pure cussedness for the criminal class. ”

“ If the complaint be not dismissed and the accused be found guilty, the court may release the person so convicted under the supervision of a field officer of the board of inebriety for a period of from six months to one year. The court may impose conditions upon the person supervised and upon the violation of any of these conditions further penalties may be imposed. If the accused be sentenced to hard labor in a jail or house of correction, fifty cents for each day’s work shall be paid over for the support of his wife or minor children. ”

“ If convicted upon complaint of members of his own family, the man is very apt “to take it out on them” when released.
It applies to the non-support of illegitimate as well as legitimate children.
A STATE PRISONER ON PRISON REFORM From a state convict at Montgomery, Alabama, comes a criticism of that state’s treatment of the criminal, and a series of recommendations for improving that treatment, which read like an extract from a report of a state board of charities. ”

“ An incurable criminal should not be allowed to imperil the interests of the public. If this law were enacted and enforced throughout the land, the majority of professional criminals and degenerates would soon be under constant surveillance.
The probation law, passed in 1903, has rapidly come into favor. Its operation has told its own story wherever it has had any chance at all. It has proved especially advantageous in the management of delinquent children. ”

“ The working of convicts on the public roads has attracted the attention of the world, and fully demonstrated that it is feasible and highly beneficial to so handle the men. It would have been difficult some few years ago to believe that penitentiary convicts could be placed in camps, in the wild and rugged sections of our state, in the mountains, the most ideal situation for safe ‘get-aways,’ without a guard or gun in camp, and yet not have wholesale escapes. ”

“ Mental deficiency is without question a cause of moral delinquency, and the reform of a large number of delinquents cannot wisely be undertaken until the existence of feeble mindedness is established in each case where it exists. ”

“ Several commutations from the capital penalty to life imprisonment have been secured in years past by being based on the argument that a life convict would be worth so many more thousand dollars than a dead one. ”

“ It is a waste of time to undertake to teach him more than the simplest rudiments of the lower grammar grades. In work he is most successful in that which is purely methodical, in which there is little intelligence and initiative required. He can rise very little above the laborer, and to expect him to be a real mechanic or to try to train him for such will only mean failure, and the reformatory system that recognizes these limitations will certainly be most apt to succeed.
The reformatory needs to be most discriminating in dealing with this class when they are dismissed. ”

“ How far immorality and prostitution are the result of work conditions and the inability to live on the wages paid, how far these are a primary or a secondary cause, we do not definitely know. It is true that nearly all the girls have at some time been employed and that many of them have been working under conditions which were not favorable.
“Girls who have worked in kitchens, restaurants, offices, factories, stores, on the stage and in different workshops have many strange stories to tell, and one realizes that girls going out into the world of work are subject to many temptations. ”

“ Coupled with the parole law, the operation of the indeterminate sentence law promises much. It marks a great innovation. Naturally it must work its way slowly and must demonstrate its true worth to the community by years of experimentation. ”

“ A state campaign of much interest to social workers in general is being waged by the Associated Charities of Duluth, Minnesota, for the enactment by the Minnesota legislature of four laws pertaining to the four related social evils of vagrancy, desertion of family, drunkenness and poverty. ”

“ By ridding society of these three classes of people, or by providing for them in the manner stated, he believes that crime will be so greatly lessened that there will hardly be any use for the police forces, save to gather in the few vagabonds as they develop. He argues that nearly all crime is committed by one or the other of the three classes named, especially by the third class.
Speaking editorially of this report, the Dayton, Ohio, News says:
“Practically every country on earth today has its problems of the unemployed. France is not alone in the matter. ”

“ They fall below the standard because their minds are below it. It is also most apparent that there is need of a special method of treatment of the delinquent who is defective. There should be a separation of him from the normal. His mind is slow. He does not grasp instruction as quickly as the normal, and to subject him to the same standards under the same rules is inhumane. In discipline he is seriously interfered with by those who are bright and yet wilful, and who make him the butt of their jest. He cannot be taught the same subjects that can be taught to the average mind. ”

“ In private conversation, says the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the warden of one of the eastern state penitentiaries expressed his belief that six per cent of the inmates of his institution had tuberculosis in some degree.
“Only twenty-one prisons in fifteen states and territories have provided special places for the treatment of their tuberculosis prisoners and these have accommodations for only 800 patients. ”

“ Handley has returned to New Jersey strongly in favor of this farm idea as an aid in reformatory work. It is not, however, an altogether new idea in the States. In several of our penitentiaries men are allowed to work out of doors even a long distance away, under only a light guard, and very few have attempted to escape. The State homes, too, ordinarily have no high walls around them, and the inmates are allowed many liberties.
“How far farm regulations could be applied to offenders who have been sentenced to state prison is another question, and one not easy to answer. ”

“ Indeed, the welfare of the children has been a deep concern to the committee, which would keep them off the streets at night, forbid the sending of any messenger under twenty-one to a disreputable resort, while it suggests an increase in the number of small parks and recreation centers. It urges dance halls, properly supervised, with the sale of liquor prohibited; it implores the churches to use their facilities for sane entertainments and urges wise instruction in sex hygiene in the public schools. ”