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

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Often persons are driven to crime by motives generated in a vicious nature, and as they are too weak to resist they soon lose their liberty, and society to protect itself simply places them behind the bars. Criminality is simply the darkened side of a reckless, sinful life, showing itself in deeds of wickedness and rebellion against God and man. Any one with such an impulse will dare to commit the most atrocious crime on record and will not think of the consequences!

The small army of boys that are committed to prison in this city every year between the ages of sixteen and twenty, for every crime on the calendar, shows the trend of the rising generation toward delinquency. In these figures we leave out of consideration several thousands of boys and girls who are disposed of by the city magistrates, many of whom are sent to the Reform School, Juvenile Asylum and the House of Refuge, while others are discharged on suspended sentences, with a warning to keep out of bad company.

I believe the first and foremost cause of crime in our large cities, as I have intimated, as well as the degradation of the poor man’s home, is the American saloon. Nor will there be any material decrease in the volume of crime till the power of the saloon has been crushed. Our stupid, thick-skulled, short-sighted reformers and state legislators forget that the soul-dishonoring and God-defying gin mill is the great crime generator of the twentieth century. The one primary cause of crime to-day is alcohol, and as a well-known authority says: “The decrease in the use of alcoholic drink must ever remain the great aim of anti-criminal legislation as well as of future moral and social reform.” A mass of absolutely correct statistics could be given in support of this statement, if necessary.