• Author: Unknown
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 5
• Page Number:
• Date: 2 9 1916
• Tags:
• advice

CONSCIENCE AND THE MAN Not long ago an inmate of Sing Sing prison who was implicitly trusted, managed to elude detection and make his escape. This man had friends in "the big city" (N. Y.) who furnished him with money, clothes and an automobile to make good his "get-away" from the State. He was told that all he had to do was to jump aboard and make the best time possible to a distant city in the West, where he could take on a new birth of freedom. At this point of his adventure something happened. His conscience began to prick him. I reminded him that his escape would have a serious reflection on those who were still behind the stone walls, and especially the Mutual Welfare League, who would be mistrusted because of his action. Nor would it stop there; it would include the entire number of prisoners which he had left behind in his selfish disregard of their interests and privileges. Finally the "heart burning" became so strong that Tony Mareno passed up the chance and apparent prospect of liberty in a distant city, and returned to the prison, giving himself up to the authorities who had trusted him in the past. One of the most encouraging circumstances in connection with this affair lack of peculiarity. was its apparent The prison from which he escaped undoubtedly holds many other men, who under similar circumstances would do the same thing he did. This opens the way for us to point out the fact that it is a serious error to assume that because a man is lodged in jail, that he has forfeited all that is good or honorable. from it. Far Because his normally good resolutions were broken down, or that a host of heart trying circumstances had temporarily warped his mentality from its normal trend of thought and sense of reason and propriety, it does not by any means follow that his integrity also died, and that his sense of shame was forever paralyzed. The time for such reasoning has past, as has the days of the "strong arm," the. club and silence. Modern thought has advanced a theory that a prison is for regeneration as well as for incarceration. Iron bars and stone walls do not a prison make—at least they do not bar the mind and heart from high aim and noble impulse. The era is now at hand where the enlightened administrator of a penal institution believes it to be his duty to send forth better men into the world, where they may rehabilitate themselves.