An Italian named Raeffello Casconea returned to New York for another trial in July, 1906, after having spent thirty-one months and twenty-three days in the death house. During this time he saw twelve men go into the “Room with the Little Door,” who never returned again. Casconea occupied cell No. 1, and as the men passed into the death chamber he was permitted to shake them by the hand and wish them good cheer. At the second trial in this city, Casconea was liberated and since has kept a coffee house on Mulberry street. On August 10th, 1909, he was shot by the seventeen year old brother of the man that he was alleged to have killed. Casconea has since died.
The whole number of persons electrocuted in Sing Sing from January 1st, 1890, till July 1st, 1909, according to the prison records, was between fifty and sixty.
CHAPTER XXXVI
A TRAMP COLONY
Every year our City Magistrates send to the Workhouse on Blackwell’s Island no less than twenty thousand persons. This is entirely independent of the number sent from Kings County by the Magistrates of Brooklyn, Richmond and Queens.
By far the largest number of this contingent are the residuum of dregs of society. As soon as they have their liberty they prey upon society. And when they are in the toils again the ubiquitous gin-mill will account for it. But there are other reasons, and some of the responsibility will have to be laid at the door of our present social conditions, which need considerable re-adjusting.
It is needless to conceal the fact that a large percentage of this class is made up of thieves, drunkards, incorrigibles and homeless tramps. As they cannot find employment readily, they eke out a precarious living for a time as panhandlers and deadbeats and then return to prison, only to continue the same experience several times a year. As their imprisonment does them no good and as they are a great expense to the city and county, it becomes a serious problem what shall be done with them. At the present time the cost of crime in Greater New York is no less than twenty-five per cent. of the entire taxation.
We must therefore consider this subject intelligently with a view to its solution. But whether these social conditions can be explained fully to one’s satisfaction matters very little. We question the right of the authorities to maintain any longer this army of idlers without making them work to pay the cost of their own living.
For some years past we have observed that hundreds—possibly thousands of unskilled laborers, many of whom are in the building trades, reach the dead-line about forty years of age. If they have lived intemperate lives and happen to be single or widowers, when winter sets in and they find themselves out of employment the only thing they can do is to apply to the Magistrate and ask to be committed to the workhouse as vagrants for three or six months. And many of them, after they have finished their time and secured their liberty are no better off, and painfully return to the Police Court for the twentieth time perhaps, to be the city’s ward in the workhouse. What else can they do, or die on the street from sheer starvation?
This raises the question, what shall be done with our army of “tramp rounders” and incorrigibles? To continue to send them back to prison or workhouse for a few months is simply to prolong the evil and their own misery. Criminals are jailed and released in this county every year by the thousand, only to oscillate between prison and a brief season of liberty. When they leave the place of their confinement they seldom bid their keepers good-bye, only “au revoir.” When they come among their fellow men again they are not better. They have spent months or years in prison in idleness, and surrounded by vile companions, and they are no better. But why should they be allowed to endanger the life and liberty of society any longer after the experiences of the past? How long we can maintain such a system it is difficult to say. At any rate, the cost of maintaining our prisons is becoming enormous and the problem of what shall be done with “rounders” and hardened criminals, that prey upon society as soon as they get out of prison should be solved from a business and moral standpoint.