Intelligence in Punishing Crime.
A student of prison affairs once said that the prison population consists of two classes—people who never ought to have been sent to prison and people who never ought to be allowed to leave it. It is unfortunate that students interested in either one of these classes are too often apt to forget the importance of the other.
There are many habitual criminals, weak persons readily giving way to temptation, who should not be classified as professionals. The professionals are only those who deliberately set about supporting themselves by crime. These are the ones who are among all criminals most unlikely to change their ways, and it was for their control that Detective Wooldridge suggested some years ago that after several convictions such criminals should be given a special trial to decide whether they were true professionals or not, and if they were, they should be imprisoned for life.
If more attention were given to professional crime and if harsher methods were used in protecting society from it, the result would be merciful in the end—merciful both to the citizens protected from such crime and to the men who, as conditions now are, graduate every year into such careers.
The "Silent System" is a Crime Against Criminals.
The penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, in 1907, was the only prison in America conducted on what is known as the "silent system."
In this grim edifice a man sentenced to twenty years imprisonment might pass all of that time buried from sight in his cell, seeing only his keeper, the chaplain, the doctor and the schoolmaster, and for twenty minutes in every six weeks he would be allowed to talk with a near relative.
This man loses his identity the moment he enters the prison gates. A black cap is drawn over his head and he is led to a cell in one of the many corridors that radiate from the central tower like spokes from the hub of a wheel. He is known thereafter by a number.
The cell in which he eats and sleeps and works is a little larger than the average prison cell, and more completely furnished—as it must hold his bed, his lavatory, his dishes and a place for eating, his work, his every possession, and such books as he may secure from the prison library.