THE RELATIONS OF EDUCATION TO CRIME IN NEW ENGLAND, AND THE FACILITIES FOR EDUCATION IN HER PENAL INSTITUTIONS.

Criminal statistics, even in our oldest States, are yet in a very unsatisfactory condi tion. The facts of main importance to any valuable study of the conditions of crime are often entirely neglected. There is no tabulation for the municipal prisons and police stations in the State reports. As between different States, no uniformity exists as to methods or objects of tabulation. An inquirer, seeking to learn the extraction of criminals, whether native or foreign, will find the facts in the tables of one State, or one prison, while in those of another he will find merely the places of nativity. In seeking to learn the average grade of their intellectual development he will find sometimes the number of those who cannot read; sometimes of those who can neither read nor write, and often nothing at all on the subject; and never anything like a careful statement of amount of education received. If he seeks to know the number of the prison population who had learned a trade, or mastered some skilled labor, he finds nowhere any exhibit of the facts. Much more value is to be attached to the estimates of experienced and thoughtful men than to any figures which can be collated at present on either of these points, or on many others that might be named. Special and valuable studies in the conditions and sources of crime wait for their material in a uniform and thorough system of statistical presentation of facts in the case. Massachusetts, through her State board of charities, has begun an excellent work in this direction. Even here is the very great defect, among others-that they present no report of the police work in the State, nor of the municipal places of confinement. The figures of the board cover only State and county institutions, which is more than can be said of the reports of any other New England State.

Every student of the conditions of crime is immediately and always in the presence of five commanding facts. Concerning their exact proportions there may be slight variations of opinion.

MAJORITY OF CRIMINALS ILLITERATE.

1. The first of these facts is, that at least 80 per cent. of the crime of New England is committed by those who have no education, or none sufficient to serve them a valuable purpose in life.

All tables are fallacious here, in two respects. Firstly, every man, not expecting to be put to the test, will overstate his educational advancement. Secondly, the mere ability to read and write with difficulty gives a man no considerable advantage, either as to character, powers, or chance in life. To be advantaged by the power to read, he must read with pleasure; must be interested in, and have the habit of, gaining knowl edge by reading. Much of culture must be added to the mere power to read before that becomes of any practical advantage.

The Massachusetts figures for her State and county penal institutions are as follows: Of all those incarcerated the past year-a total of 14,315-31 per cent. could not read and write, and 8 per cent. more are registered as only able to read and write; making a total of 39 per cent. uneducated beyond this point. Twenty-three persons only are reported as having had any higher education than that of the common schools; the remainder, about 60 per cent., as having a common-school education. Of this 60 per cent., doubtless but a few came from the more advanced studies. Fully two-thirds of our common-school pupils who have learned to read are not yet advanced so far as to have mastered the rudiments of written arithmetic. The Massachusetts tables, then, appear to substantiate the fact as announced.

Careful and extensive inquiry of wardens, jailers, superintendents of houses of indus try, of correction, and of reformation, and of teachers and other officers of the same, have fully convinced the writer that 80 per cent. of the criminal population of New England have never mastered the fundamental rules of written arithmetic, nor entered on the study of geography or grammar. The great majority of our juvenile delin quents begin in reform schools, lower than this, and the same is true of the pupils in the evening schools of our adult prisons. Having reached such conclusions concerning New England, it is found that 28 per cent. of all the State prisoners of the country in 1868 were unable to read or write; that 32 per cent. of the adult prisoners of New York State were equally untanght; that 27 per cent. of those in her reformateries could not read, and that of 2,120 prisoners in Ohio 14 per cent. did not know their letters, and 67 per cent. more could not read and write-a total of 81 per cent. practically altogether without education.

If, now, the fact that the utterly-unlettered 6 per cent. of the population of Masschusetts commits 31 per cent. of all her crime be set over against the fact that of all her 14,315 criminals but 23 had enjoyed educational opportunities beyond the com

mon school, have we not a striking illustration of the fact that ignorance is the mother of crime, and that thorough education is a very perfect safeguard against it? And this fact for Massachusetts is only a specimen of what is true of every New England State. From 3 to 7 per cent. of our population, the wholly uneducated, in New England and the United States, cominit at least 30 per cent. of all our crime, and less than one-fifth of one per cent. is committed by those who are educated beyond the common school. The entirely uneducated man is nine times as likely to be a criminal as the average of the men who have been taught, and more than one hundred times as likely to become a criminal as he who has been thoroughly educated.

MAJORITY OF CRIMINALS ARE IGNORANT OF TRADES.

2. The second grand fact is, that, as through all the country so through New England, from 80 to 90 per cent. of criminals have never learned any trade, or mastered any skilled labor. Here again the "statistics" are almost entirely deficient. But the deliberate answers of every one of a large number of prison officers, in four of our six States, accord with the statement here made. The New England prisons and jails are filled with mere day-laborers, artisans, mechanics; skilled laborers are there only in very small percentage. Education in labor bears the same ratio of freedom from crime as education in schools. Ignorance of the methods of skilled labor is just such a danger as ignorance of letters,

CRIMINALS OF FOREIGN BIRTH.

3. The third grand fact is, that not far from 75 per cent. of New England crime is committed by persons of foreign extraction-that is, by persons who were born abroad, or one or both of whose parents were. Here, still, the statistics are at fault, giving, in very many instances, only the place of nativity, and not the extraction of the criminals. In this particular, as in others, the Massachusetts reports give our most reliable data. Of the 14,315 inmates of her State and county institutions, 11,382, or a fraction less than 80 per cent., are of foreign extraction. Of the juvenile delinquents at the Boston Reformatory, on Deer Island, numbering 280, only 35 were foreign born; and yet 90 per cent. were estimated by the superintendent to be of foreign extraction. At Westborough, but seven out of ninety-seven received the past year were of foreign birth; while 85 per cent. were of foreign extraction. In the Connectient State Prison are 165 American born, to 46 born abroad-extraction not given. Of the inmates of the Connecticut Reform School, for its whole nineteen years, 63 per cent. have been of foreign parentage. Considering the very great relative increase of our foreign population in the last decade, there is no reason to doubt that these figures indicate a figure for the last year at least as high as seventy-five in the hundred.

Rhode Island's State institutions (and county so far as known) record 55 per cent. of foreign born, which fully justifies our estimate of 75 per cent. foreign extraction. In New Hampshire, though the tables are only of nativity, the estimates of officers in charge place the percentage as high as 70. The Maine and Vermont institutions, with their comparatively small numbers of inmates, show a slightly lower per cent.; but these figures of the State, and, so far as they can be found, of the county prisons, completely justify the estimate of 75 per cent. as the proportion of criminals of foreign extraction. But it is to be considered that the far more numerous inmates of our municipal prisons and police stations came from city and manufacturing populations, where the percentage of foreign population is greatly in excess of that of the State at large. Did the facts of these institutions appear in the tables, the writer has no doubt the percentage would be swelled to a much higher figure than 75. Say, therefore, that 20 per cent. of our population furnish 75 per cent. of our criminals.

INTEMPERANCE MAKES CRIMINALS.

4. The fourth fact is, that from 80 to 90 per cent. of our criminals connect their courses of crime with intemperance. Of the 14,315 inmates of the Massachusetts prisons, 12,396 are reported to have been intemperate, or 84 per cent. At the Deer Island House of Industry, (Boston,) not included in the above State figures, of 3,514 committals, 3,097, or 88 per cent., were for drunkenness; fifty-four more as idle and disorderly, which commonly means under the influence of drink; seventy-seven for assault and battery, which means the same thing; and forty-eight as common night-walkers, every one of whom is also a common drinker. We have, therefore, of this prison a full 93 per cent. whose confinement is connected with the use of drink, and this may be taken as a not exaggerated sample of many municipal prisons. In the New Hampshire State prison sixty-five out of ninety-one admit themselves to have been intemperate. Reports were asked from every State, county, and municipal prison of Connecticut in the spring of 1871, in reference to the statistics of drinking habits among the inmates, and it was found that more than 90 per cent. had been in habits of drink, by their

own admission.

The warden of the Rhode Island State Prison and county jailer estimates 90 per cent. of the residents of his cells as drinkers.

From Vermont and Maine no reports on this point have been secured; but they could not, if their prisoners were all temperate, bring the estimate below 80 per cent. It will still be remembered that those figures do not cover the mere tempora arrests for drunken disorder, nor the facts of the municipal places of detention, where the percentage of drunken committals will be the most striking.

IGNORANCE BREEDS CRIME.

5. The fifth fact is, that, according to the unanimous judgment of all officers of juvenile reformatories, 95 per cent. of these offenders came from idle, ignorant, vicions, and drunken homes. Oftenest the answer comes, quick and clear, from these officers. when asked, "How many of your boys or girls come from, in any wise, decent houses?" "Not one in a hundred!" The answer will then be modified a little, and settle close to the figure named above. Almost all children are truant from school at the time of their committal; almost all of them have been habitually idle upon the streets; far the greater part of them have been long in petty vices and crimes, and almost the entire number are children of ignorant and besotted parents.

In the face of these facts, what can be said but this: "Ignorance breeds crime; elcation is the remedy for the crimes that imperil us?"

Grouping them together, this is their one impression; the two first link together the two perils of ignorance of letters and ignorance of skilled labor. The one, as the other, gives employment, occupies time, prevents idleness; the one, as the other, develops the intellect, masses knowledge and puts it to use; the one, as the other, elevates the taste, and advantages character itself; the one, as the other, advances its possessor to a new grade in society, makes him self-respecting, and wins for him the respect of his fellows; the one, as the other, opens to him new avenues for steady and compensated employment; holds out to him the certainty of an ultimate rise in life; puts in him new hope and impulse and inspiration; lifts him above temptation. Nay, these two classes are, in fact, the same class. No decently-taught person proposes to himself the mere unskilled day's working life; he uniformly, and he alone, as the general law, seeks to master some skilled labor, learn some trade or mechanic art, and so, by special skill and value, means to come to something better.

Close to these two facts, and of the same force precisely, follows the third. The man of foreign-extraction birth is of no poorer fiber, no meaner material, that he figures so terribly in the tables of crime. The immigrant, coming hither with education, either in schools or skilled industry, does not betake himself to crime. The foreigner, untanght, by no fault of his, in books or in any trade, is thrown in almost complete destitution on strange shores, in great cities, where the worst classes congregate and receive him. He brings to the labor market no special skill, brings just what everybody else has, simple muscle-awkward and unavailable. He has come, too, to a land of "liberty,” where he dreamed he should find ease and plenty, and necessity to do only what he liked. He finds his kind of work poorly paid and in poor demand. He, of all men, is weakest; suffers soonest in any pinch; goes to the wall first, and is able to recover last; anybody can fill his place and do his work. He, therefore, is most of all exposed to vice and crime, and he least of all is defended by culture, or character, or circumstances against evil ways. It is inevitable that he should figure very largely in our lesser crimes and disorders, and in our more brutal breaches of the public peace. But the reason is, solely, that he is educated neither in the schools nor by the analogous training to skilla labor.

The fourth fact follows close in the same line. The man who is untrained in brain and in hands will have a mate like himself; will have a comfortless, unclean, and naked home; will have few enjoyments, and they will be sensual. No pleasure be caa buy will seem so cheap, so convenient to procure, or so agreeable, as the pleasures of drink. So he can forget his cares, his weariness, his poverty, the wants of himself and family, and be, for the time, rich and full and happy. The classes most widely debauched by drink are the classes least taught in letters and least skilled in labor; and now, by their habits of drink, reduced to deeper wretchedness of poverty, want, degra dation, and helplessness, shall they not betake themselves to lives of vice and lives of crime? Will they not become, as the figures prove them, the disturbers of the paħdi » order, the vast peril of the public weal? And when all this is true, what must be trea of their children? Must they not be the 95 per cent. of our juvenile offenders? Must they not grow up to fill our jails and prisons to glut the sword of public justice! The crime of New England is the direct and the inevitable outgrowth of the ignorance that still degrades so great a multitude among us.

WHERE IS THE REMEDY?

Nothing can abate it but thorough and universal education under the band of the State. That will do it. There is but a single class of crimes in which intelligence fig

ures to any great extent: the getting of money under false pretenses, by forgeries, swindles, and the like-crimes that require a certain culture.

It is not true, indeed, that education will change a bad heart; but education means intelligence which will keep clear of the clutches of the law; means a certain prudence and self-control which will keep a man from the things society punishes; that is, from "crimes;" and, more than that, education, either in schools or trades, means a wide opening of all ways to respect, honor, afluence; means removal from the sharpest temptations to crime, and from all plea of necessity to sin; means ten thousand comforts, tastes-possessions which give man a stake in the public order and welfare, and make him a bulwark of society instead of a freebooter upon it; means the possession of capital, which is more sensitive than life itself to violations of law and order; means a diguity and worth in character which is the hope and glory of the race.

WHAT "THE STATE" SEEMS TO CRIMINALS.

The facts which constitute the basis of this paper prove that the criminal classes are those who have never had any fair chance to be anything else but criminal. They have never received anything, so far as they can see, from society, or the State. They cannot see that they owe anything to the State. Law seems little to them but the rule of the strongest, and they are the natural, inevitable enemies of any body or thing which represents the restraining power of society. They have had no chance to reach an intelligence which could see more truly; no chance to attain a morality which should be for them a nobler law. These criminal classes, reared in ignorance and vice, and trained from infancy, as multitudes of them are, to crime-taught or led to it-are foredoomed from their birth to police courts, and prisons, and the gallows. We have thousands in our penal establishments whose criminal careers were made as certain, by their surroundings, as darkness is certain to follow the withdrawal of the light. And New England is yet bringing up, in this dread certainty, a great throng of future crimi nals, simply because she does not take them out of these conditions by universal and thorough education.

THE IMPERATIVE DUTY OF THE STATE.

It is needless to say that this can only be done by compulsory laws. The schools are open, and free, and ample. But the parents will not of themselves, or cannot, send their children to them. The prime duty of the State to herself, to these parents, to these children, is to ordain it that every one growing up within her borders shall be educated to such a degree as to provide him amply for a worthy, reputable, and com fortable life, and to guard him against the temptations which so ensnare the untaught into crime.

In regard to the opportunities for education in our penal institutions, there is not very much to be said. In the State prisons there are, commonly, evening schools, sometimes taught by the chaplains, sometimes by other officers of the prisons, and sometimes by volunteer teachers. Up to the present year no State has made any appropriation for secular instruction. Massachusetts has now made a beginning. These schools are ordinarily eagerly attended, and the progress made in them is good. In the New Hampshire prison the only secular instruction allowed is that of the chaplain at the cell-door of the prisoner. There is a fair library connected with each of the prisons Why exclude all newspapers from prisons? Newspapers are everywhere interdicted. On what ground a paper which is fit to enter our virtuous and Christian families should be excluded from our prisons, it is exceedingly difficult to see. It would seem to be the very, most powerful imaginable reformatory force. Let the prisoner share all the great human interests, so far as with safety to society he can. Let him catch the inspirations of progress. Let him enter into the great tides of human feeling and sympathy. How shall it hurt him, or us? Can it fail to do him good? Each prison has its chaplain, its Sabbath religious service, its Sabbath-school, and most of them an evening prayermeeting; and moral and religious influences are not used in vain. The great and salutary education of regular productive industry is in constant progress.

JUVENILE REFORM SCHOOLS.

In the juvenile reformatories the schools are admirable and successful. All the inmates, with the exception of a few who are employed in outside labor, are in school from three to five hours in a day, and pursue all the branches ordinarily pursned in our common schools. The children are bright and active, and their alternate hours of labor and of study invigorate and refresh, rather than exhaust. In all the reformatories, without a single exception, the schools are cared for with pride and enthusiasm, and are relied on in connection with regular labor as a main reformatory power. A great number of children are here getting what they could never else have secured, a good and thorough common-school education. It is, in the main, the result of this fact,

that 75 per cent. of the boys of our reform schools go out of those institutions to lives of integrity and usefulness. Conjoined with this system of intellectual culture in al these institutions is a careful, faithful, but undenominational system of religions and moral care. The Sabbath is held in strict observance, and occupied in the ordinary religious services. Sabbath-schools nowhere receive greater attention, while the training in truth and honor and purity and manliness and courtesy is nowhere in the

world more careful and constant.

TRADES SHOULD BE TAUGHT.

It seems greatly to be regretted that the labor of these reformatories should not be directed to the acquirement of trades, by which an honest livelihood might be assured to every well-disposed boy on his discharge. To turn him out upon the world with nothing but common day-labor to depend on, is to subject him, as we have seen, to the strain of very sharp temptation. Could the writer have his way about it, the terms of sentence should be longer than they are, and all children as old as thirteen should perform their tasks in the acquisition of the practical knowledge of soine skilled labor or handicraft. The system of indenture meets, to a certain extent, this requirement, outside the reformatory; but inside of it, as at present conducted, the industry is in caning chairs, or some such work, which is of money value to the State, of value to the child as a training to industry, but has no relation whatever to any means curing an honest and comfortable living after he leaves the establishment. This seems a pecuniary economy, secured at cost of a great peril-a saving of money, rather than of the boys. This subject, however, can only be alluded to, not discussed, here. Of these institutions of juvenile reform we cannot speak with too much enthusiasm, whether we think of them as the best advance yet in the line of penal discipline and reform; as institutions for prevention more than cure; as educational establishments, or as homes better than their inmates ever knew before; whether we think of the noble views of their founders, the new civilization they indicate, or the new promise they give for the future; whether we think of their perfect interior arrangements, of the kindness, fidelity, and Christian zeal of the officers who conduct them.

A. S. FISKE, A. M.