PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT COMPARED.

Our criminals last year cost this city, in the City Prisons and
Penitentiaries, about one hundred and one thousand dollars for
maintenance alone. Our police cost apparently over six hundred thousand
dollars.

The amount of property lost or taken by thieves, burglars, and others
last year, in New York city, and which came under the knowledge of the
police, was one million five hundred and twenty-one thousand nine
hundred and forty dollars; but how many sums are never brought to their
notice!

The expenses of the arrest and trial of two criminals, Real and Van
Echten, are stated, on good authority, to have been sixteen thousand
dollars for the first, and twenty thousand dollars for the second.

If the expenses of a great "preventive" institution--such as the
Children's Aid Society--be examined, it will be found that the two
thousand and odd homeless children, boys and girls, placed in country
homes, cost the public only some fifteen dollars a head; the three
thousand and odd destitute little girls educated and partly fed and
clothed in the "Industrial Schools," only cost some fifteen dollars for
each child each year; and the street lads and girls sheltered and
instructed in the "Lodging-houses," to the number of some twelve
thousand different subjects, or an average of, say, four hundred each
night, have been an expense of only some fifty dollars per head through
the year to the public. It may, perhaps, be urged in reply to this by
the doubting, that all this may be true. "We admit the cheapness of
prevention, but we do not see the diminution of crime. If you can show
us that fewer young thieves, or vagabonds, or prostitutes, are breeding,
we shall admit that your children's charities are doing something, and
that the cost of prevention is the most paying outlay in the
administration of New York city."

To this we might answer that New York is an exceptional city--a sink
into which pour the crime and poverty of all countries, and that all we
could expect to accomplish would be what is attempted in European
cities--to keep the increase of juvenile crime down equal with the
increase of population; that the laws of crime are shown in European
cities to be constant, and that we must expect just about so many petty
thieves each year, so many pickpockets, so many burglars, so many female
vagrants or prostitutes, to so many thousand inhabitants.

We might urge that it is the dut