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Show A LITTLE CELL DOOR. .j . More Love Needed in Our Treatment of Our Erring Brothers. There are men sent to prisons who Jhould have been sent to sanitaria; who commit 'crimes so strange that these indicate an .unbalanced mental make-up, writes the Rev. A. D. Malley." iu a sympathetic sym-pathetic article on "Crime and Criminal," published pub-lished in the Boston Republic. Then undoubtedly God does visit the sins of parents sometimes to the third and fourth generations, and you have the degenerates. de-generates. Others always had a pool brain, and are really defective; but by far the greater part are men who have gone through a course like this. The home has. of course, a powerful influence on the mind of a child. Yet there are men in prison pris-on who have had excellent homes and training. In these men there is always an inner something that can be touched, no matter how bad the outer life has been. There are others who do not know what that word means. ' But the great cradle of crime in most eases, and in ordinary men, is the pool room and cheap club. A boy has left school at 13 or 11 years of age. a boy that promises to have a strong body, and whoso brain is lazy to mentaldis-cipline. mentaldis-cipline. Fasy going parents let him go; and perhaps per-haps his $4 a week pay .is an incentive He works for a while, feels he is somewhat, of a -'man. and is legitimately entitled to the pleasures of a man. He eschews the pleasures of a ' ''kid." ;': He aspires to game, and to go around with the girls. The pool room affords him the first pleasure, the cheap dance hall is the second. In the pool room he bets and obtains money by chance, the fatal poison enters into his soul that one can, after a 1L obtain money by not working 'like a slave. -for it. lie sees the young sports around, well dressed, n t working, plenty of money at times, with a girt who often supports them. He hears gibes made : r. those who have to workv hard for a few' poor dollars. His pleasures become more extended, or the women more exacting. His luck may . fail in gaming and some day or night you may see him in close, guarded guard-ed conversation with one -more 'experienced as to vother methods of obtaining nx'neii Py ho astore near at hand whose " owner vs nui.e'arenu at night. Or there may be a peddler who is in the habit of going, home through dark , and lonesome places, lie may. shirk at first. from these suggestions, sugges-tions, but a look of contempt, or sore need, may convince him. The deed is done., and perhaps several sev-eral in succession.'. Suddenly this method o? like breaks down and he finds himself in prison. What is the matter with him? His real, true self ceased to develop when he was little more than a boy. He has a boy's mental capacity, with the body and strong passions of a man. This is nearly the whole difficulty. The moral nature is a sort of unweeded garden. The calamity of prison wakes him up, and he views his former career as a thing . apart, wonders how he could have been such a f ool or if it were really he who went through it all. When his time is up he has generally such a change that he is tired of the whole thing, and really wants to live a decent life. This is a case of a fairly decent fellow, who has been wild, but wants to get over it. There are other cases of mental men-tal make-ups so twisted and distorted that few would care to advocate their cause. Well, a man of this type seeks work, a young man, for a second or third term man in prison can have few friends interested, when he gets out. He seeks, and here the world is hostile. The hand of theP?ison is on him, he is refused, or if he does obt.fn a place, some one tells the proprietor and he i) dismissed. This may happen time and again, he loaf.es courage and nerve, the old companions wait jir him and extend friendship to him. he may 't fnow up his hands and take a plunge back into tl i old waters again. What was needed to save him? t Only some strong man who was willing to give civork. and let him live. There was no such allure ii jcrime itself that it could hold this sort of a mai I He wants to get away from it, and the general a ude of the world is to throw him back again into There are always some men in the world who a willing to help a poor devil ; but there are a grea nany more afrajd. There is nothing in the man Pu frCe that makes him non-human. In fact hegj10 J j ,iv too pathetically pa-thetically human. Homes for disf EpfJed prisoners prison-ers pay be, and are, very good instnd as. but no institution however good can takejronop; place of a strong human brother who can anthe su belp, and the cheery invitation "of some lu where the man is not forced to consider hiy : a pariah-There pariah-There is the pathos of his conditi. tnc tileries til-eries of scientists' in regard to thies a h are all so much matter for boys in collegesKreets rite upon; here is a condition, private, indivfPra ; S'mce the man has neglected to think seriou . ?uer( ipon life in the past, the ' prison forces thoug , on him by its silence. He at least does 110 i Tt upon life with the same eyes.' He. has ehai f Jie is not a criminal, nor criminaloid, nor nj Kd, nor par-anoiaac par-anoiaac nor defective, nor deneg nor brain-, stormed, nor cyclonic in his cerek t nor primitive, primi-tive, but just a man who wishes to militate himself. him-self. This is the story of a great . .y, from his subjective side, the moral prisoner s T jhere yet remains re-mains the side of the professional sna iskj the police world a formidable array. her 9 |