Funding for the digitization of this title was provided by Farris Cadle.
About The Reason. (Savannah, GA.) 1908-19?? | View Entire Issue (June 27, 1908)
2 the lease system, exist. There’s not 3. man of them but ought to know that the tendency of the system is not to degrade only the prisoner, but also those who administer it. all who witness it, and the entire community as well. The newspaper dispatches disclose the fact that there is strong opposition in some quarters to an immediate abolishment of the lease system on ac count of the revenue which is raised by the selling of the convicts into bondage for the periods of their sentences. The prison commission in its report to the present session of the legislature says that since 1899 a revenue of over $2,000,000 has been paid into the State treasury and that nearly $400,000 will be raised in 1908. The commission sees no reason why a value of $450 per annum should not be placed on each able-bodied male, since, under sub-contracts, they are now being let out at $570 per year. Great and just God! Open the eyes of the people to Ihe true situation and arouse them to a sense of their duty. Thine own image bought and sold — Georgians driven to market and bartered off for so much gold, as if they were no more than cattle! Oh, Holy Light and Liberty, how much longer shall the writhing slaves of their own and our wrong plead vainly for their plundered rights? Shall the agony of their silent prayers be intercepted in its thrilling march to our hearts by reason of our lust for gold ? And we are they who minister and worship at the altar of the God of Right—we who preach and pray, and who claim to be the servants of the merciful Jesus -we- it is us —we plunder and we fetter down for gold the wicked and helpless who, instead of being our slaves ought to be our wards, and the objects of our mercy and Christian charity. We can exercise a spirit of mercy and charity and still do justice byway of inflicting punishment. All will admit that society must be protected, that penitentiaries must be maintained and men confined in them at hard labor. It is because this is not done in Georgia that crime is on the increase and more men every year are being degraded, tortured and brutalized. It is not true that we have any right to do this. We have a right to punish, but that right carries with it a duty to reform the object punished. There can be no reformation in a convict camp. Once there the average prisoner is no longer treated as a human being—the same motive that induced the State to sell him gain controls the lessee in using him and all that can be gotten out of his hands: all that can be gotten out of his body: all the toil, and more than he is able to render, will be exacted under the ceaseless swinging of the slave whip and the roaring of the noisome gun. Nothing is done to improve him. nothing looking to his re form. At night loaded down by ball and chain: under lock and key in a dark room, with no ray of light or hope, his desolation could not be more complete. For years and years he bears up under these con ditions. only to be turned out in the afternoon of life branded as a criminal, shunned by the society of others and denied employment wherever known. The only thing left for him to do is to drift back into the society that his first (“rime placed him in. ■with the result that he is again sent back to the convict camp. ITe feels that his life is a failure and that there is no longer any hope for him, and so resolves to sink to the lowest depths of degradation. THE REASON Is there not some remedy for these unfortunate men ? Whv cannot the State enlarge and improve the Penitentiary at M illedgeville ? Establish industries in connection with the farm, such as cotton mills, shoe factories. Hour mills, etc? Surround these with such influences as would contribute to a wholesome reform of all who entered, at the same time inflict ing such punishment as would be a deterrant to crime in the future. In order that convict labor might not come in competition with free labor, as it does so injuriously under the lease system, arrange to pay each laborer a small salary each day. This could be put aside each week and at interest, and when a man’s time ran out he would have not only money with which to buy a ticket home, but a little capital to rest up on and start a little business with after being re leased. The products might thus be produced at a lesser cost, but their superiority over free-labor prod ucts would not cheapen their market value, and so the labor of free men would not be interfered with in the least. Just think of it, with a population of less than 3.000.000. we have confined in prison 4.996 people. In 1850 the population of the United States was 23,000.000, eight times the present population of Georgia: but wo had only 6.500 prisoners in the whole country at that time. Tn other words, Geor gia has today one prisoner for every 500 people, whereas the Fnited States had only one prisoner in 1850 for every 3.000 people. Are we getting worse? Going backwards instead of forwards? It would seem so. in spite of all the cruelty and inhuman treatment meted out to the criminal class. Does this not prove that our system is wrong; that instead of reforming the vicious and the bad we are only encouraging and helping them to become more so? AVill society find its greatest protection in further cruel attacks on the men in bondage, or find it in a more humane and charitable use of its right to imprison and punish? There is only one lamp to be guided by and that is Patrick Henry's lamp of experience. This lamp shows that there was never so many murderers as when men were drawn and quartered—when they were butchered alive and'tortured in every conceiv able way—when their limbs were torn from their bodies and given to the fury of mobs and their bodies to the madness of flames. These frightful tortures, causing us to shudder and become sick at heart, may pale into insignificance our tortures of the present day. but the crimes for which we prac tice our cruelty will go on apace, just as the crimes of earlier days multi])!ied and increased, unless we reform our system in such away as to cause men who happen to break into our penitentiaries to leave them better men than when they went in. Revenge, imprisonment, torture and cruelty by all the lights of history has proven their impotency to do away with vice. The same light declares that kindness, charity and mercy which insures to every man in bondage all rights consistent with the safety of society, have never failed to bring their reward. The increase in the number of prisoners in United States penitentiaries, the rules of which give the warden less rights in the punishment of the men than a guard of a Georgia convict camp not infre quently enjoys, is less by 100 per cent than the in crease in the penitentiaries of Georgia.
