Excerpt from The Treatment of the Offender: The Sixty-Seventh Annual Report of the Prison Association of New York, 1911 Prison farms and farm colonies are being advocated and tried. The relation of feeble-mindedness to crime is one of the most fre quent matters of discussion today among American criminologists and psychiatrists. Prison labor is prominent on the program of national and state conferences. The payment to prisoners and their families of prisoners' wages and prisoners' earnings is urged in many parts of our country. The abolition of the jail is demanded, or its reorganization as a place of detention solely pending trial. Such are some of the fundamental problems discussed in our report. We ask of the legislature careful consideration of our re port; of our members and other friends their interest and their sup port; and of all those concerned with the treatment of the offender an appreciation of the vital seriousness of crime and of the methods of society in seeking to reduce lawlessness.i cannot end this talk without emphasizing what I think is at this moment by far the most pressing of the social tasks in America, namely, the diminution of the distance between the ignorant and the intelligent; the diminution of the distance between the vicious and the just; and the diminu tion of the distance between the economically miserable and the economically opulent. More urgent than any other problem is the diminution ofthe distance between the vicious and the just. The problem of crime has become far more urgent than the problem of poverty, far more urgent than the problem of enlightenment. I fail to see how any careful and thoughtful observer of our American life can be oblivious to the fact that for the last fifteen or twenty years we, as a people, have been suffering serious deterioration in the quality of private and of public conduct. We cannot travel on the ordinary means of convey ance without being irritated by rowdyism and hoodlumism; life and property are not, strictly speaking, safe in the United States to-day. We have a most unhappy notoriety among the nations of the world, as a nation which lets murder go un punished. In the north, as in the south, we burn negroes alive. And these things should most certainly make us pause. We must bestir ourselves to deal with the elimination of the rapidly increasing factor of vice and crime in our life as we must bestir ourselves to relieve misery and to diminish ignorance. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

51st includes "Prison laws of the State of New York" (p. [157]-998)