Читать книгу The New York Tombs Inside and Out!. Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present. A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America's Most Famous Prison онлайн

36 страница из 82

The dipsomaniac, kleptomaniac, morphine, cocaine, cigarette users, and high livers, generally all belong to this class, many of whom are on the way to the madhouse!

It has been ascertained by long study of the subject that those who possess criminal instincts have little or no resistive power when tempted to commit crime. If the judge on the bench, before passing sentence on a convicted felon, had the insight or perception to see the moral deformities and lack of will power existing in the individual before him, we are inclined to believe that he would send the prisoner to a sanitarium for treatment rather than to prison for punishment. And it is our candid opinion that there are hundreds of moral defectives in all the penal institutions of this and other States who ought to be under the care of a physician rather than a jailer.

Sometimes the police disguise themselves, then induce gamblers to play roulette and other games of chance for the purpose of securing evidence, after which they arrest them for violating the law. This may be good ethics from the police standpoint, but we question it. It is absurd to think that we have any moral right to tempt a person to commit a crime against the laws of God or man.