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Good Heavens, could this little country girl with her artless manner and candid eyes be an ex-convict? Surely she was too young, too simple. Yet the gates of hideous reformatories had clanged shut behind younger and more innocent-appearing delinquents than she.
Orphan schools, institutes, reformatories, cabs, museums, hospitals, prisons all attracted the attention of the two travellers, who are much to be commended for their scrupulous attention to accuracy. But they did not neglect the various aspects of Australian scenery, so far as they came within their purview.
Special reformatories for vagrants, inebriates, and prostitutes. A hospital prison for the criminal insane. County and state penitentiaries for incorrigible, hardened criminals. If any one of these sets of institutions is lacking in a state, it is impossible for the state to deal properly in a remedial way with the problem of crime.
Convent sewing, that of the prisons and reformatories, and the competition of women who had homes and worked simply for pin-money, kept the wage at a minimum; and these conditions still operate toward that end, precisely as they do for all countries where the needle is a means of support, the evil being felt most severely in our cities.
For them the State reformatories must be established, regardless of their physical condition. To these reformatories magistrates must have the power of committal as certainly as they have the power of committal to prison. There must be no "by your leave," no calling in a doctor to examine the offender.
The terrible consequence of this procedure may also be gathered from the Report of the Prison Commissioners for England and Wales 1910, from which it appears that during the year 157 persons were certified insane among the prisoners in the local and convict prisons, Borstal institutions and of State reformatories, during the year ending March 31, 1910.
Very frequently, even in the midst of her multifarious engagements, her thoughts wandered off to the little grave in Barking burying-ground, where rested the remains of the dear child, and, perchance, a tenderer tone crept into her voice as she dealt with the outcast children of prisons and reformatories.
For years I have been drumming this fact into the ears of the public, and at length the authorities acknowledged it, for in 1907 the Home Office Inspector issued a report on inebriate reformatories, and gave the following account of those who had been in such institutions: 2,277 had been treated in reformatories; of these he says 51 were insane and sent to lunatic asylums, 315 others were pronounced defectives or imbeciles.
I am not partial to American humorists generally, but the delicate and subtle humour of Dudley Warner I always appreciated. In our talk I saw his serious side, for he was keen on introducing the indeterminate sentence into his own State, on the lines of the Elmira and Concord Reformatories.
That hospitals and asylums, homes for the aged, and even reformatories for the vicious, should be thus undertaken by the State is doubtless right and good, especially as every facility is given for ministers of religion to visit the inmates. The case stands differently with the care of the young and the rescue of the tempted and the fallen. Here the spiritual atmosphere is all-important.
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