Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 17, 2025
If we have no such institutions, as of course we have not, then the State must provide them. And the magistrates must have the power to commit boys and girls who are charged before them to suitable industrial schools or reformatories as freely, as certainly, as unquestioned, and as definitely as they now commit them to prison.
Prisons, rescue homes, workhouses, inebriate reformatories, all have failed to reclaim her, and she lives to spread moral corruption. I hope that, in some of my chapters, I have made it clear that a large proportion of the underworld people are industrious and persevering. I want in this chapter to show that many of them have also ability and brains, gifts and graces.
The difficulties to be faced by the woman whose only way of self-support is limited to the needle, whether in machine or handwork, are fourfold: first, her own incompetency must very often head the list, and prevent her from securing first-class work; second, middlemen or sweaters lower the price to starvation point; third, contract work done in prisons or reformatories brings about the same result; and fourth, she is underbid from still another quarter, that of the countrywoman living at home, who takes the work at any price offered.
Reformation of the criminal by and during his imprisonment should be one chief object of his punishment, but a just sentence for the offence is not to be prolonged either for education or reformation, unless expressly sanctioned by law, as in the case of reformatories.
When he has completed about five years and three months he will be liberated again, if he is alive, and again he will return to crime; and it is almost impossible that such a man can do otherwise; and as long as our prison authorities regard convicts as mere living automatons, all modelled after the same fashion in iniquity, our convict and county prisons, viewed as reformatories, will remain quite inoperative for good, but very potent for evil.
The struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other States, is the one encouraging sign of the awakening of some communities to the suicidal results of this policy. It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens.
It is too early to estimate the value of the systems being tried, but they are being watched with much hope and expectation. In America there is a decided tendency to substitute State reformatories for prisons, especially in the case of the young.
The striking record of our industrial schools and reformatories in the war shows what young criminals and dunces can do when they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of the chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for a new spirit and outlook in our national education from the elementary school to the University.
In this way each congregation cares for the poor and neglected living near at hand. There are Bible and tract distributors, free day schools, Sunday schools, work schools, technical schools, rescue homes, reformatories, orphanages and young men's and young women's Christian associations.
From every point of view the indeterminate sentence in the case of those sent to reformatories appears the most reasonable. The business of the trial court is concluded as soon as the question of guilt is determined. The judge has not imposed on him the impossible task of measuring out a punishment which in its severity shall exactly accord with the degree of crime committed.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking