FOR AND AGAINST

Duru sees the doors of the Fresnes prison open before him. He is free. He immediately goes to find his former companion and stabs her. He is behind bars again...
Pinson, a nasty sparrow, having left the Versailles jail in the morning, attacks. In the afternoon, at Orsay, Mlle de C..., and robs her. He is arrested.
These regrettable news items, which relate the detestable exploits of gentlemen and young ladies who were released from prison that very morning, or the day before, are not without food for thought. Sociologists, criminal lawyers and philanthropists could, it seems to me, draw some severe and pessimistic conclusions from them.

First of all, is solitary confinement as painful, as dreadful as people say? We are forced to doubt it when we see citizens who have endured all the torments of the infernal prison, working, as soon as they are released, to get themselves thrown back into hell...
The dizzy person who mistakenly swallowed a little vitriol instead of a little white wine is never wrong again, if he escapes... He has suffered too much.
I am quite sure, on the other hand, that if the guillotined could, after Mr. Deibler's operation, regain possession of their heads and live again, they would do the impossible, subsequently, to avoid deserving the death penalty...

It is therefore not forbidden to think that the inmates of our prisons are not as mistreated as is implied. If they were atrociously unhappy there, they would never want to be. to return there...
Does our penitentiary system at least amend the deplorable temperament of crooks and murderers?... Alas!... That is also very doubtful!... It would be pleasant for us, certainly, to believe in beautiful legends, in the regeneration of evil devils and the reeducation of evil spirits.
Only, the news items, with knife blows, with Browning blows, kill the legends. And we are obliged to realize a very distressing truth: who enters prison a thief, leaves a thief; who enters prison, violent, debauched, lazy, cruel, leaves prison with the same vices and the same defects... It is distressing, but that is how it is... Prison, for the worst faults of men, is nothing other than a tin can...

It would obviously have to be something else: a school of reeducation, for example... Only...

Maurice PRAX.