Its Twenty-fourth Annual Report, which we recently received, is a very interesting and comprehensive document. Accompanying it is a circular in which we are told that the association desires "that the public attention may be directed to this question, and the public sentiment in relation to it enlightened and invigorated, so that our prison systems and our administration of criminal justice may everywhere be improved and brought into harmony with the advancing civilization of the age."
We shall, therefore, offer a few suggestions on this subject.
A criminal is a man morally diseased. As such he should be considered--as such be treated. In a right prison system, the punishment of past offences should be but the secondary object; the prevention of future offences, the main one. No permanent outward change can be effected till an inward reformation has been wrought; and that reformation must come through mental but especially through moral development.
We learn from this report, with much pleasure, that, in the prisons of the chief States, libraries have been established; and that, in many of them, instruction is regularly imparted to the inmates, through classes and lectures. Ignorance is a fruitful source of vice. The Catholic Church, which alone raised the world from the intellectual darkness into which, at the fall of the Roman empire, the inpouring of northern barbarians had plunged her, stands to-day the foremost champion of enlightened Christian education. She regards knowledge as an aid to virtue. She courts the light of science, that in its beams the truth of her dogmas may appear with brighter resplendence.
But experience has clearly shown that virtue is not a necessary consequence of education--that moral does not always follow mental development. To prove this, we need not go outside of this report, in which, page 373, we read the following words of Amos Pilsbury, "the Nestor of jailers on this continent; an officer whose name is almost as well known in Europe as it is in America":
"Experience has, unhappily, demonstrated that the possession of education is not incompatible with the commission of crimes of every kind; and we have seen many melancholy examples of very highly educated men falling victims to drunkenness and other degrading vices." Daniel Webster therefore truthfully said: "Man is not only an intellectual, but he is also a moral being; and his religious feelings and habits require cultivation. Let the religious element in man's nature be neglected; let him be influenced by no higher motive than low self-interest, and subjected to no stronger restraints than the limits of civil authority, and he becomes the creature of selfish passions and blind fanaticism. The cultivation of the religious sentiment represses licentiousness, incites to general benevolence and the practical acknowledgment of the brotherhood of men; inspires respect for law and order, and gives strength to the whole social fabric; at the same time it conducts the human soul upward to the Author of its being."