read suspicion and in his search for friends and sympathy he will be more than apt to search out other discharged convicts in former congenial haunts and from that it is but a short step to a life of habitual crime.
“Would it not be better to sentence every offender under an indeterminate sentence law, so that when the experts who have him in charge are convinced that he is thoroughly reformed, that on their recommendation and with the pardon board’s approval, he could be paroled and turned over to a prisoners’ aid society? This society should be a branch of the state convict department and it should retain control of paroled prisoners and sustain them until they could be placed at work. The great desideratum should be secrecy and the names of the paroled men should never be made public nor anyone made acquainted with their prison record except the direct head of any firm that might give them employment. Convicts are human and sensitive and they should be given a fair chance with a clean slate and not be handicapped at the start with a lot of notoriety. Give a man a bad name and he will very likely be forced to live up to it, except he has a strong character, and the class we are considering is not noted for strength of character, or they would be in other ranks of life. To the contrary, those who have slipped and fallen are entitled to special assistance and every manly man should feel in his heart a desire to help the under dog and to give him a chance to regain his manhood and self-respect.
“I do not ask you to receive a paroled convict as your personal friend, nor to put him up at your club, but I do ask you to aid the enactment of such legislation as will give him a fair chance in life. It will cost you nothing although the fees of the sheriffs and jailers may be reduced. We need an indeterminate sentence law, a parole system based on merit, a trade school for youthful offenders, and a state aid and employment bureau for paroled convicts. The whole convict department should be taken out of politics and higher salaries would attract a better class of men as officers.
“Corporal punishment is a relic of the
middle ages and in substituting a better and more humane system of maintaining discipline the morale of the wardens will be elevated. The writer, who has served seven years as a state convict, knows by personal experience and observation that this method of punishment is degratory to the administrator as well as to the recipient.
“My heartfelt desire and my object in writing this article is the hope that it may inspire somebody to befriend the prisoners. We can’t maintain a lobby at the capitol. The idea of a delegation in stripes soliciting votes is ludicrous. I do hope, however, that some broad-minded member of the legislature will advocate our cause.”
IN THE PRISONERS’ AID FIELD
PROGRESS IN CONNECTICUT
The retiring president of the Connecticut Prison Association recently wrote:
The past nine years have been years of progress. Five important steps have been taken, which bear directly upon the treatment of the criminal. Not one of these originated in Connecticut. We are not roadmakers. We slowly adopt courses which have been to some extent tried and proved efficient by others.