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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Before we leave the subject it would be well to say that naturally the criminal is the product of anomalous conditions of long standing that have worked themselves into the moral fibre of his being. After many years the criminal has come to bear the distinguishing peculiarities of crime which mark him as a man among men. So that to-day with all our advanced civilization, the criminal stands midway, as Lombroso remarks, “Between the savage and the lunatic.”

It has therefore become a perplexing question what is to be done with him, for during the four hundred years of white civilization on the American Continent his condition remains almost the same.

After many years of failure to improve him, would it not be well to adjust the penal treatment to his nature as a man and eliminate from his life the temptations that overcame him? For example, thousands of people are arrested yearly in New York for drunkenness, a temptation which they cannot resist. Why not close the saloons and thus take even this one temptation out of the way of such weaklings? At any rate, if our prison populations are to be reduced, society must pass a law to prevent crime, or invent something that shall defeat the conditions that make men criminals.