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Show Treatment Of Criminals IT IS a sad spftacle to visit the Utah penitentiary. peni-tentiary. It r ist be the same to visit any penitentiary. In our prison are three hundred hun-dred less five or six, perhaps stalwart men, undergoing un-dergoing punishment for crime. They cost the state a large sum annually. Each one originally cost a large sum in arresting arrest-ing and trying him. In the pen they have absolutely abso-lutely humane treatment, plenty of good food, comfortable clothing, good beds, every sanitary requirement looked after; but while there their lives are, as it were, dropped out of ths world; they know they are under a man, and this knowledge has the effect to embitter them, and we suspect that the great majority of them leave the place, when their sentences expire, more hardened than when they enter, so much so that the public is filled with apprehension when they read that one of them has served out his sentence sent-ence and has been turned loose again on the community. We suspect that the Utah prison is conducted con-ducted along as enlightened lines as is any other prison in the land. That prison then represents all that, has been discovered of value in the treatment of criminals. And it is more than nineteen hundred years since the Master died to save sinners! And this is in our free country, where those men, had they chosen another life, might be in the aggregate laying up $100,000 a year, might be free men, might each have his own little home, blessed with absolute freedom and the benediction of home ties. "Who is to blame for this condition of things? The matter of fact man says: "They chose their own path; they made their own bed. It is right that they should He in it. How does he know? That they are criminals unsafe to mingle with their fellow men is true enough, but the cause of their perversity, who can explain that? How many of them had loving parents? How many were welcome when they came into the world? How many had sheltering arms to steady their footsteps throughout childhood? How many had kind but firm discipline in their childhood? child-hood? How many of them were early impressed with a sense of the duties they owed to their homes, society and the state? How many of their parents were ever fit to be parents? Each knows the date of his birth: how many of them know the date of the infirmity in their brains which when matured made them outlaws? out-laws? When a man Is found with a deformed body ho excites the sympathy and pity of all generous gener-ous people who see him. When the deformity Is In the brain, who can diagnose such a case, or prescribe the needed remedy? A learned surgeon came hero three or four years ago, whose specialty was to' correct prenatal pre-natal deformities of children. Where is the surgeon who can correct the pre-natal deformi- H ties of the human mind? Men and women should be more careful H whom they marry. An unloving marriage is a crime. An incompetent and unsympathetic H teacher of children should be an Impossibility. I But one fact the experience of the years has H demonstrated, is that the world has not yet dis- H covered how as a rule to reform hardened H criminals. H Another fact has been established, that aftc H a real criminal has suffered infamous punish- H ment, it is a cruelty to turn him out again upon H an unprotected community. H The penal colony is the place for such men. H They should be consigned to a colony and given I the means to work, to earn their living; to I cease to be a menace to innocent people, to pro- H tect less hardened criminals from their society, H example and sinister education. How many ex- H convicts have committed feariul crimes in this I little city alone, in the past three years? H |