language of its guardians. Yet crimes are rapidly multiplying, and
society is paying the price. On the other hand, it is an open secret
that when the unfortunate citizen has been given the full "mercy" of
the law, and for the sake of safety is hidden in the worst of hells,
his real Calvary begins. Robbed of his rights as a human being,
degraded to a mere automaton without will or feeling, dependent
entirely upon the mercy of brutal keepers, he daily goes through a
process of dehumanization, compared with which savage revenge was
mere child's play.

There is not a single penal institution or reformatory in the United
States where men are not tortured "to be made good," by means of the
blackjack, the club, the straightjacket, the water-cure, the "humming
bird" (an electrical contrivance run along the human body), the
solitary, the bullring, and starvation diet. In these institutions
his will is broken, his soul degraded, his spirit subdued by the
deadly monotony and routine of prison life. In Ohio, Illinois,
Pennsylvania, Missouri, and in the South, these horrors have become
so flagrant as to reach the outside world, while in most other
prisons the same Christian methods still prevail. But prison walls
rarely allow the agonized shrieks of the victims to escape--prison
walls are thick, they dull the sound. Society might with greater
immunity abolish all prisons at once, than to hope for protection
from these twentieth century chambers of horrors.

Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an
emaciated, deformed, willless, ship-wrecked crew of humanity, with
the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their
natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and
inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as
the only possibility of existence. It is not at all an unusual thing
to find men and women who have spent half their lives--nay, almost
their entire existence--in prison. I know a woman on Blackwell's
Island, who had been in and out thirty-eight times; and through a
friend I learn that a young boy of seventeen, whom he had nursed and
cared for in the Pittsburg penitentiary, had never known the meaning
of liberty. From the reformatory to the penitentiary had been the
path of this boy's life, until, broken in body, he died a victim of
social revenge. These personal experiences are substantiated by
extensive data giving overwhelming proof of the utte