Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

"Why, it's just a picnic for them to come up here. You can't hardly keep 'em away with a club. Of course, the same ones don't work right here long; but when a fellow gets sent up to any of these places, he comes over and over until he gets ambitious to go to Sing Sing and be higher toned."

I thought of the same information given me at the Police and Criminal Courts a little while ago. I wondered if there might not be some flaw somewhere in the whole reformatory and punitive system. From the time a fourteen-year-old boy is taken up for breaking a window; sent to the reform school, where he is herded with older and worse boys, until he passes through the police court again,—let us say at sixteen, as a "ten-day drunk,"—to herd again in a windowless prison van, packed close with fifteen hardened criminals (as I saw a messenger boy of fifteen on my way to the island), and taken where for ten days he enjoys the society of the most abandoned; returns to town the companion of thieves; and goes the next time for three or six months for petit larceny, then for some graver crime, on and up. At last, when he has no more to learn or to teach, he is given a cell or room alone until the State relieves him of the necessity of following the course which has been mapped out for and steadily followed by so many. He knows when he is a three months' man where he is going at last. Has he not helped to dig the trenches for the men who looked so hard and vile to him when he broke that window and stood in the Police Court by their sides?

Perhaps you will ask: "Why did he not take the warning, and follow a better course, turn the other way?"

Perchance it might be asked on the other hand—since court, and morgue, and cemetery officials unite in the assertion that the above record is almost universal, and that our present methods not only do not reform, but actually prevent the reform of offenders—why this system is still followed by the State, and if the warning has not been ample and severe here, also.

Are we to expect greater wisdom, more far-seeing judgment and a loftier aim in these unfortunates of society than is developed in those who control them?

Since it is all such a dismal failure, why not plan a better way? Why not begin at the other end of the line to keep offenders apart? Why herd them—good, bad, and indifferent—together, in the stage of their career when there is hope for some, at least, to reform; and begin to separate them only when the last mile of the road is reached?

Why, if the city must bury its dead in trenches and under the conditions only half described above (because much of it is too sickening to present), why, if cremation or some better mode of burial is not possible—and certainly I think it is—why, at least, need the awful, the ghastly, the inhuman combination be made of burying together medium term criminals, imbeciles, lunatics, and thousands of corpses all on one mere scrap of land? If a seven-foot mass of corruption exhaling through the air and percolating through land and water must be devoted to the dead poor of a great city, why in the name of all that is civilized or humane, permit any living thing to be detained and poisoned on the same bit of earth?

I saw a woman who had come to visit her mother who was one of these poor, insane creatures. "I can't afford to keep her at home," she said, "and then at times she gets 'snags' and acts so that people are afraid of her, so I had to let her come here. It is kind of awful, ain't it?"

I thought it was "kind of awful," for more reasons than the poor woman could realize, for she was so used to foul air and knew so little of sanitary conditions that she was mercifully spared certain thoughts that seem to have escaped the authorities also.

"It is her birthday and I brought her this," she said, showing me a colored cookie. "She will like it. We can visit here one day each month if we have friends."