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Updated: June 10, 2025
United States prisoners are now confined in more than thirty different State prisons and penitentiaries scattered in every part of the country. They are subjected to nearly as many different modes of treatment and discipline and are far too much removed from the control and regulation of the Government.
When I was a professor in Pisa, eight years ago, I took my students to the penitentiaries and the asylum for the criminal insane in Montelupo, as I always used to do. Dr. Algieri, the director of this asylum, showed us among others a very interesting case. This was a man of about 45, whose history was shortly the following: He was a bricklayer living in one of the cities of Toscana.
Stamp out these two evils, or rather curses of the human race, and the supply that feeds our insane asylums, aye and our penitentiaries, too, will become vastly lessened. Think of it! So many of the inhabitants of our prisons, asylums, and our poor-houses, are composed of men and women who have offended against nature's laws by violating their own sexual nature.
It is likely that as time goes on many alien enemies will be willing to be fed and housed at the expense of the Government in the detention camps, and it would be the purpose of the legislation I have suggested to confine offenders among them in the penitentiaries and other similar institutions where they could be made to work as other criminals do.
I have said nothing of the establishment of hospitals, the first exemplar of which was the Invalides of Paris; nothing of the improved prisons, reformatories, penitentiaries, asylums, the treatment of lunatics, paupers, criminals; nothing of the construction of canals, of sanitary engineering, or of census reports; nothing of the invention of stereotyping, bleaching by chlorine, the cotton-gin, or of the marvelous contrivances with which cotton-mills are filled contrivances which have given us cheap clothing, and therefore added to cleanliness, comfort, health; nothing of the grand advancement of medicine and surgery, or of the discoveries in physiology, the cultivation of the fine arts, the improvement of agriculture and rural economy, the introduction of chemical manures and farm-machinery.
There were no penitentiaries or penalties of imprisonment. Therefore, according to the exigency of the time and place it was a law of God that an eye should be given for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It would not be practicable to enforce this law at the present time—for instance, to blind a man who accidentally blinded you.
Nobody spreads fever in blind alleys and unswept lanes. Nobody leaves towns undrained. Nobody fills gaols, penitentiaries, and convict stations. Nobody makes poachers, thieves, and drunkards. Nobody has a theory too a dreadful theory. It is embodied in two words Laissez faire Let alone. When people are poisoned by plaster of Paris mixed with flour, "Let alone" is the remedy.
"It's no use for such as me to try; better go back to the old life, for there are kinder hearts among the sinners than among the saints, and no one can live without a bit of love. Your Magdalen Asylums are penitentiaries, not homes; I won't go to any of them.
There is no country but what ought to provide for everyone of its citizens a comfortable, if not luxurious, home by humane legislation on the labor question. "The penitentiaries were reconstructed by the female government. One half the time formerly allotted to labor was employed in compulsory education.
"God knows how circumstance has filled our penitentiaries wrongfully," she added bitterly. "And but for circumstance our population of wrongdoers at large would be greater by a thousand per cent.," retorted the officer. "That is supposition," smiled Kate. "Which does not rob it of its possibility in fact." The two sat looking at each other, silently defiant. Kate was smiling.
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