Dead-End Justice

Abstract

Sixteen hundred and fifty criminals, many of them desperate characters with records of three or more previous convictions, were turned loose yesterday to take up their war against society. Among them were killers, robbers, burglars, and thieves. You and other decent and law-abiding citizens will be their next victims. They roam the countryside and infest the cities seeking new opportunities for crime. Yesterday's jail-delivery might not seem so menacing if we did not know from past experience that many of these convicts will commit new crimes. Imprisonment has taught them nothing except skill in their trade. Confined for a few months or years in corroding idleness, they have swapped experiences and trained one another in the techniques of the under-world. They were turned loose yesterday. In a short time they will be at it again, robbing, knifing, shooting, making quick get-aways in stolen automobiles. Then states and cities will be put to the expense of finding and arresting them, trying them in the criminal court, locking them up again in prison. Some of their victims will be slugged, some will be killed. You may be one of these. Do you like the prospect? A striking fact about these ex-convicts is the proportion of very young men among them. A great part of yesterday's crop of sixteen hundred and fifty was made up of youngsters between the ages of 16 and 25. These adolescents have already committed every kind of crime. They have done time for it, have paid their debt to society; and now society, having wreaked its vengeance, has set them free to go and to sin again. You may be sure they will take advantage of their opportunity. These twigs have been bent very crooked indeed; they will grow into boughs still more crooked. The weary round of crime, arrest, imprisonment, and release, followed by crime, arrest, imprisonment, and release will be repeated again and again until these young convicts are old convicts or until they die in the electric chair or on the gallows. Meanwhile society will pay, and pay, and pay. But you will not read the above article in your favorite newspaper tomorrow. The facts it states are not news. They are not news because the release of over sixteen hundred convicts yesterday was no exception. The same thing happened day before yesterday, will happen today, and tomorrow, and the next day. These exconvicts form an ever growing indigestible mass of corruption in our body politic, the material of the successive waves of crime that menace our very civilization. The authorities are helpless, for these thousands upon thousands of released convicts are not the product of political upheaval or executive clemency. They are simply the daily turnover of America's prison population, set free because their terms have expired. So it is useless for editors to blame judges or