PRISON REFORM LEAGUE OF CALIFORNIA.
Griffith J. Griffith, Secretary of the Prison Reform League of Los Angeles, California, read an interesting paper on “What the Prison Reform League Wants to Do and See Done.”
“Perhaps the question as to what we of the Prison Reform League have in view will be answered best by stating at the outset what we are not seeking. We are not attempting to boost any party ‘ism,’ creed or private interest. We are not endeavoring to inoculate the public with any new philosophy. On the contrary, we conceive ourselves to be severely practical people, who have noted a series of appalling facts and wish to know how they agree with certain principles by which society professes to be guided. We mark the startling difference between theory and fact; we try to bring that difference to the notice of those whom we can reach. All thinking men and women acknowledge, as it appears to us, that punishment can be justified only by the necessity of protecting society and diminishing as far as possible the tendency toward barbarism.
“We submit that every judge who passes what is called an ‘exemplary’ sentence in the hope of checking crime; every warden or jailer who excuses brutality toward prisoners with the plea that they have been sent to jail for punishment; every police officer who conceives it to be his role to terrify malefactors by the display or exercise of force, is making the same false argument as that by which the upholders of things as they are seek to justify capital punishment. All these classes, paid by society to protect it against crime, are in our view victims of an utterly erroneous philosophy and intensify the very evil they are hired to cure.
“We say that it never pays society to wrong the individual. We say the state wrongs him inexpressibly when it professes to seek his reform and debases him; that murder cannot be abolished or diminished in volume by the state turning murderer; that when the state compels a man to toil for it without remuneration it is itself a thief, and that such is not the way to discourage theft; that if the poor, isolated, and therefore helpless, individual has duties toward the all-powerful state, infinitely greater are the duties of that almost omnipotent organization toward the individual. We say that side of the question has been overlooked, and we call attention to it in the very sharpest terms at our command.”
CAUSES OF CRIME.
Under this general heading, Dr. William Healy, Director of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute of Chicago, read a paper on “The Problem of the Causation of Criminality,” and Dr. William Martin Richards, of New York, gave an address on “Physical Defects as a Factor in the Making of Criminals.” No synopsis of these papers can do them justice. They represent the latest investigations along these lines, and when published should be read by all who are interested in the betterment of humanity. Dr. Healy recited numerous specific instances of abnormal children whose lives were directly aimed at defiance of law, because of physical or mental defects or because of trivial circumstances, most of whom could be more or less readily reformed when handled in a rational manner.
Dr. Richards dwelt on such defects as bad eyesight, nasal imperfections, “flat foot,” and various spinal troubles, all of which were responsible for criminal tendencies. He told of some cases where the restoration of correct vision had resulted in changing lives, criminally inclined, into right habits.
Frederick Howard Wines, the only charter member of the Association present, said that in all the sessions he had ever attended he had not heard two such illuminating addresses.