Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions

by George S. Boutwell

"D. F., aged about fourteen. Mother dead several years; father a drunkard, and deserted him about three years ago. Has since lived as he best could,—sometimes going errands, sometimes begging and thieving. Slept in lodging-houses when he had money; but very often walked the streets at night, or lay under arches or door-steps. Has only one brother; he lives by thieving. Does not know where he is; has no other friend that he knows; never learnt to read; was badly off; picked a handkerchief out of a gentleman's pocket, and was caught by a policeman; sent to Giltspur-street Prison; was fed on bread and water; instructed every day by chaplain and schoolmaster; much impressed with what the chaplain said; felt anxious to do better; behaved well in prison; was well flogged the morning he left; back bruised, but not quite bleeding; was then turned into the street, ragged, barefooted, friendless, homeless, penniless; walked about the streets till afternoon, when he received a penny from a gentleman to buy a loaf; met, next day, some expert thieves in the Minories; went along with them, and continues in a course of vagrancy and crime."

And what else could have been expected? The government, having sown tares, had no right to gather wheat. Yet, had this boy been provided with a home, either in a family or a reform school, with sufficient labor, and proper moral and intellectual culture, he might have been saved. Of the three thousand persons annually in prison at Newgate, four hundred are less than sixteen years of age; and twenty thousand children and youth under seventeen years of age yearly pass through the prisons of England. "Many of the juvenile prisoners," it is said, "have been frequently in prison, and are very hardened. Some, from nine to eleven, have been in prison repeatedly, and have very little fear of it."

The officers of the Liverpool Borough Jail are united in the opinion that, when a boy comes once, he is almost certain to come again and again, until he is transported. And, of every one hundred young persons discharged from the principal prisons of Paris, seventy-five are in the custody of the law within the next three months. A professed thief said to the Rev. Mr. Clay, of England, "I am convinced of this, having too bitterly experienced it, that communication in a prison has brought thousands to ruin. I speak not of boys only, but of men and women also." And Mr. Hill, Recorder of Birmingham, says of the sentences imposed in his court, "We are compelled to carry into operation an ignorant and vengeful system, which augments to a fearful extent the very evils it was framed to correct." A few years ago, there was a lad in a New England prison whose experience is a pertinent illustration of the evil we are now considering. His father, a resident of a city, died while the boy was in infancy. He, however, soon passed beyond the control of his mother, and at an early age was selected by a brace of thieves, who petted, caressed, and humored him, until he was completely subject to their will. He was then made useful to them in their profession; but at last they were all arrested while engaged in robbing a store,—the boy being within the building, and the men stationed as sentinels without. In this case, the discretion of the court, which distinguished in the sentence between the hardened villains and the youth, was inadequate to the emergency. The child, unfit for the prison, and sure to be contaminated by it, ought to have been sent to a house of reformation, a reform school, or, perhaps better than either, to the custody of a well-regulated, industrious family. Now, in such cases, the distinction which the law, judicially administered, does not make, and cannot make, must be made by the executive in the wise exercise of the pardoning power. But this power, in the nature of things, has its limits; and on one side it is limited to those who have been convicted of crime.

At this point, we may see how faulty, and yet how constantly improving, has been the administration of the criminal law. First, we have the prison without the pardoning power, except in cases of mal-administration of the law,—a receptacle of the bad and good, where the former are not improved, and the latter are hurried rapidly on in the path of degradation and crime. Then we have the prison under the influence of the pardoning power, more or less wisely administered, but, in its best form, able only to arrest and counteract partially the tendencies to evil. Next, from the imperfections of this system an advancing civilization has evoked the Reform School, which gathers in the young criminals and viciously inclined youth, and prepares them, by labor, and culture of the mind and heart, to resist the temptations of life. But this institution seems to wait, though it may not always in reality do so, until the candidate is actually a criminal.

Hence the necessity which calls us to-day to consider the means adopted elsewhere, and the means now to be employed here, to save the young and exposed from the dangers which surround them.

Passing, then, in review, ladies and gentlemen, the thoughts which have been presented, I deduce from them for your assent and support, if so it please you, the following propositions as the basis of what I have yet to say:

I. Government, in the prevention and punishment of crime, should be paternal.

II. The object of punishment should be reformation, and not revenge.

III. The law of reformation in the state, as in the family, is the law of kindness.

IV. As criminals vary in age and in experience as criminals, so should their treatment vary.