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not being defectives, they certainly do not need an asylum. They need schools, however, and so everywhere we have established schools for the deaf.

Deaf people are just as capable, are just as competent, just as well able to earn an honest living as is the average man who can hear. The "indeterminate sentence " is one of the wisest expedients ever brought to bear in penology. And it is to this generation alone that the honor of first using it must be given. The offender is sentenced for, say from one to eight years. This means that if the prisoner behaves himself, obeying the rules, showing a desire to be useful, he will be paroled and given his freedom at the end of one year. If he misbehaves and does not prove his fitness for freedom he will be kept two or three years, and he may possibly have to serve the whole eight years. How long are you in for?" I asked a convict at Jeffersonville, who was caring for the flowers in front of the walls. ¶ "Me? Oh, I'm in for two years, with the privilege of fourteen," was the man's answer, given with a grin.

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The old plan of "short time," allowing two

or three months off from every year for good behavior was a move in the right direction, but the indeterminate sentence will soon be the rule everywhere for first offenders. The indeterminate sentence throws upon the man himself the responsibility for the length of his confinement and tends to relieve prison life of its horror, by holding out hope. The man has the short time constantly in mind, and usually is very careful not to do anything to imperil it. Insurrection and an attempt to escape may mean that every day of the whole long sentence will have to be served.

So even the dullest of minds and the most calloused realize that it pays to do what is right-the lesson being pressed home upon them in a way it has never been before.

The old-time prejudice of business men against the man who had "done time" was chiefly on account of his incompetence, and not his record. The prison methods that turned out a hateful, depressed and frightened man who had been suppressed by the silent system and deformed by the lock-step, calloused by brutal treatment and the constant thought held over him that he was a criminal, was a bad thing

for the prisoner, for the keeper and for society.

Even an upright man would be undone by such treatment, and in a year be transformed into a sly, secretive and morally sick man. The men just out of prison were unable to do anything-they needed constant supervision and attention, and so of course we did not care to hire them.

The Ex. now is a totally different man from the Ex. just out of his striped suit in the seventies, thanks to that much defamed man, Brockway, and a few others.

We may have to restrain men for the good of themselves and the good of society, but we do not punish. The restraint is punishment enough; we believe men are punished by their sins, not for them.

When men are sent to reform schools now, the endeavor and the hope is to give back to society a better man than we took.

Judge Lindsey sends boys to the reform school without officer or guard. The boys go of their own accord, carrying their own commitment papers. They pound on the gate demanding admittance in the name of the law. The boy believes that Judge Lindsey is his friend, and

that the reason he is sent to the reform school is that he may reap a betterment which his full freedom cannot possibly offer. When he takes his commitment papers he is no longer at war with society and the keepers of the law. He believes that what is being done for him is done for the best, and so he goes to prison, which is really not a prison at the last, for it is a school where the lad is taught to economize both time and money and to make himself useful.

Other people work for us, and we must work for them. This is the supreme lesson that the boy learns. You can only help yourself by helping others.

Now here is a proposition: If a boy or a man takes his commitment papers, goes to prison alone and unattended, is it necessary that he should be there locked up, enclosed in a corral and be looked after by guards armed with death-dealing implements?

Superintendent Whittaker, of the institution at Jeffersonville, Indiana, says, "No." He believes that within ten years' time we will do away with the high wall, and will keep our loaded guns out of sight; to a great degree

also we will take the bars from the windows of the prisons, just as we have taken them away from the windows of the hospitals for the insane.

At the reform school it may be necessary to have a guard-house for some years to come, but the high wall must go, just as we have sent the lock-step and the silent system and the striped suit of disgrace into the ragbag of time-lost in the memory of things that were.

Four men out of five in the reformatory at Jeffersonville need no coercion, they would not run away if the walls were razed and the doors left unlocked One young man I saw there refused the offered parole-he wanted to stay until he learned his trade. He was not the only one with a like mental attitude. The quality of men in the average prison is about the same as that of the men who are in the United States Army. The man who enlists is a prisoner; for him to run away is a very serious offense, and yet he is not locked up at night, nor is he surrounded by a high wall.

The George Junior Republic is simply a farm, unfenced and unpatroled, excepting by the boys who are in the Republic, and yet it

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