The editorial in the A-- is unjust. It speaks of Jack London and others writing about prison conditions. It says that the convicts in the penitentiary "cannot get out," and that "they are locked in at night." Granted that all this is what you want to ridicule it to be, the man that wrote this editorial would be accused of being inhuman if he were to put his dog through what Mr. Osborne went through during his week of imprisonment.
There is one thing I want to emphasize, and it is this. Mr. Osborne has seen with his own eyes, heard with his own ears and felt with his own feelings just what it is to be an outcast, even for so short a time as a week--just what it is to be deprived of your liberty for even so short a period, and your editorial writers and no one else that has not gone through the actual experience are qualified to criticise his efforts.
These papers would not believe a prisoner who came out of prison and told you of these facts; you must believe Mr. Osborne--you can't do otherwise.
I want to say that this self-sacrifice is going to do much to make better men of us criminals, not only now but in the future when we are again thrust upon society; and if there was just a little more Osbornism and a little less Journalism the prisoners would have a greater incentive to reform than they now have.
I speak not only for myself, but for many other old timers with whom I have talked. I claim as an old timer and one who knows what he is talking about, as I have been through the mill since childhood, that one act of kindness will do more toward reforming a criminal than a thousand acts of cruelty and than all the punishment that you can inflict.
Men will err, men will fall, and men will continue to commit crime, and society must be protected. We must have prisons; but I claim that the better way to treat a criminal in order to try and reform him is to use a little more kindness in our prisons and a little less punishment and cruelty.
I don't want to be misunderstood in this matter. I have no favor to ask of anyone. I expect to do my time--all of it. But I want to take exception to the insinuation that Mr. Osborne's stay was made any softer by the fact that the editor of his paper is Warden of Auburn Prison. The fact is that Warden Rattigan was away from the prison during the most of the week of Mr. Osborne's imprisonment, and I know positively and from my own knowledge that his orders were to treat Tom Brown the same as any other convict in this prison; and 1,329 men here can testify that these orders were carried out to the letter.
