OCR Text |
Show H IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. HI Shame on Massachusetts! That state, according to today's dis- H patches, has a man in solitary confinement who has been excluded H from the ordinary privileges of prison relaxation during thirty-five H years. We arc told that the man was sentenced to solitary confine- H ment over a third of a century ago, when he was 1G years of age H and he has been kept under those abnormal conditions ever since. M 'An aged mother has labored incessantly, during all those long M years, to gain n commutation of sentence and to alleviate her son's H condition, but her every effort has met with failure. M "What has Massachusetts gained by this inhumanity? The old H theory was to inflict mental and bodily punishment on the criminal. ' That practice prevailed when the boy of sixtccen was sentenced in H the Centennial year. Today, there is a weaping, praying mother, H pleading for her boy; inside the prison gates, away from communion H with his fellow men, is a grayhaired man, no doubt embittered by H the world's coldness and mentally weakened by the years of lone- H Does any one think that this debasing treatment has made one H soul in all this world better or that this coarse brutality has de- H terred one criminally-inclined, wayfarer from continuing in crime? H If it is right to hold criminals for years in solitary confinement, H it is right to again resort to the rack and other instruments of tor- H turc, the use of which an enlightened people have seen fit to con- H demn. H If murderers arc fit to live, they are fit to be accorded the trcat- H ment due any human being with a heart that throbs and mind that H thinks and is susceptible of anguish. Brutality will never cure bru- H tality or lift the human race to a plane one degree higher. |