typical of a class whose technic has been developed and perfected in such institutions.

As a criminal, tucked away in prison, I am delighted to read the declarations of men like Warden Lawes, Warden Hulburt, and Thomas Mott Osborne, who wish to relieve the monotony of my confinement with additional moving-picture shows, with more ball games, with all the alleviatives that can be arranged to deaden the realization that I am in prison. I do very much admire the sincerity of those men, and I respect the intensity of their desire to experiment with means that they hope may aid in bringing about the reformation of their wards. I disagree with their methods only because through those methods they seek to bestow reformation, whereas I am wholly and absolutely convinced that reformation may only be achieved; that it may never be bestowed.

The prison inmate must be carefully and thoughtfully dealt with; he is the meat of our "crime problem" to-day. Unless we are for all time to remove him from society we must devise a method by which he may, at the expiration of his term, be returned to society so equipped as to minimize the possibility of his committing further crimes. If you need proof that he is not now so equipped, you need only talk with your local police officials; they can tell you what a great percentage of all crimes reported to them have been committed by ex-convicts. All the pretty theories of parole and pardon boards, all the sophistries contrived by sentimental reformers must give way before the smashing evidence of a thousand police blotters. That evidence is all in support of my contention that campaigns of crime are conceived and planned in prisons and are executed shortly after the parole boards have lopped off a goodly portion of the prisoner's original sentence, thus enabling him to proceed with the practical details of his profession.

Statistics such as are brought forward by every parole body to prove that seventy per cent of all prisoners released on parole fulfil the terms of their parole and earn a final discharge mean exactly nothing. "Doing a parole," as the seasoned criminal refers to the process, is one of the

functions he has learned to fulfil; he completes the term of his parole by use of the same negative sort of obedience to rules that made of him a "model prisoner," and thus hastened the day of his release on parole. Parole officials, in their anxiety to create justification for their release of the criminal, fix a not uncomfortably extended parole period and do not examine too closely into the daily doings of the paroled man. Parole supervision, as a matter of fact, becomes a routine matter; if the paroled man's monthly reports are received promptly with all the blank lines filled in, no individual inquiry is set up. Here, as with the police, exists the handicap of insufficient workers; in some States two hundred prisoners are assigned to one parole officer!

During the years of my own confinement I have talked with hundreds of prisoners drawn from every stratum of the criminal world. I have listened to exchanges of information on "jobs" of every imaginable kind. I have listened, fascinated, to tales of enormous exploits in which the relator was invariably rewarded for his cleverness with a "swag" of at least "ten grand." I have listened to proudly told stories of confidence built up, betrayed, destroyed. I have observed all the manifestations of that honor popularly believed to exist among thieves. I have, on a thousand nights, given ear to conferences dealing with the criminal's attitude toward the reformers who work for his betterment, his attitude toward the parole system, his philosophy of life. I can offer no more eloquent opinion of my associates than to say that my own state of mind, which I have already described with the word "reformed," is the slowly built-up product of my experiences with these men undergoing "reformation."

I do not like generalities, yet I can think of no better manner of describing the composite criminal mind than to say that its only precept is: "Thou shalt not get caught at it." This is the rule the criminal applies to his "professional" duties; it is the standard by which he regulates his prison conduct; it is the still, small voice that causes him to be wary while on parole. Its presence in his mind breeds a warped series of mental processes that prevent his gaining the state of mind

wherein he might begin to work for the achievement that is the only reform.

Has he been caught and placed in prison? Ah, well, for every one of him so caught and placed there are a thousand uncaught and active; ergo he is not a subject for reform, but an unfortunate lad betrayed by evil chance into capture. Better luck next time.

Has he an excellent record for regular attendance at the prison chapel services? Listen to his reason: "They tell me that this chaplain can git a guy a 'break' and he won't give you a tumble if you don't show up regular for church."

Is he penitent, aware of the seriousness of his crime, anxious to remould his character against the day of his return to society? I give you one example repeated to me within the past week, and it is rather more conservative than the average. "I got the gun, see, when the cops come in the room, and I throws it out into the hall. When they frisks me I ain't got nothing on me, then one of the bulls picks up the 'rod' in the hall and claims it's mine. That's the way they framed me, the blankety blank blanks. Why did I plead guilty? Because I could get a short bit by 'copping a plea' and you can't get by this parole board if you don't admit you're guilty."

I submit that the chances of that man's achievement of "reform" are lamentably few. He is not an exaggerated type, nor an exceptional one; in this institution with its population of nearly two thousand men I doubt if there are one hundred who do not, when expressing their innermost thoughts, display exactly the same mental attitude toward their present plight, the events leading up to it, and their plans for their careers after release. With all our elaborate welfare plans, with all our psychiatrists, with all our enthusiastic pleaders for a better understanding of endocrine disfunction with relation to crime, no one seems to be particularly concerned with the chore of bringing home to the individual criminal his true status, the extent of his wrong-doing, the impossibility of his ever remaining out of conflict with the law until he has started to bring about within himself a realization of his inability to survive unless he is a co-operating member of the community.

The newly received inmate of a penal institution is supplied with printed instructions telling him how to conduct himself in the prison so as to avoid infractions of its rules of discipline; he is told that his release will in large measure depend upon his obedience to those rules. He is cheered by predictions of moving pictures, baseball games, shows, readingmatter, and what-not to come. He is taken in hand by undergraduates who have preceded him into the institution and "tipped off" on the right way to "get by." A perfunctory official asks him which religious service he will attend; he is assigned to work. The rough edges of the shock of prison commitment are tenderly softened. I have listened on many an occasion to the opening remarks of the official who received new prisoners at the first institution in which I was a prisoner and he invariably stated: "Boys, there are men much worse than you running around free because they haven't yet been caught; since you have been caught, make the best of it, and keep your self-respect!" A well-meaning man he was, too, and deeply sincere in his desire to see men keep out of trouble. He did not know, he could not know, I suppose, that just about the most important thing a newly convicted criminal can do is to lose the "self-respect" which is the main factor contributing to the state of mind from which he sympathizes with himself as an unfortunate victim of circumstances.

Don't return, in your prisons, to the brutality of earlier years. Give prisoners clean surroundings, facilities to build up and maintain health in their too often abused bodies (self-abused); give them work in keeping with their capabilities to performance; give them the opportunity to study, to read carefully selected material; pay them, even, for their labor so that they may contribute to the support of their dependents. Such reforms are humane, intelligent, beneficial.

But stop the mental coddling, the tender back-pats, the sympathetic condolences that create self-pity; stick hatpins into their minds, and drive home the fact that no man can carry with him into prison any degree of true self-respect; his very presence there cries aloud the

S far as possible the colored soldiers in the World War introduced a little music into everything they did-be it marching, digging, cooking, travelling, longing for home, recovering from wounds or sickness, unloading ships, or any of the thousand and one jobs enlisted men always have to do. I have here recorded some of the incidental music of the negro soldiers.

Among the white boys of our army it was unusual to find singers. Now and then one would encounter a man who had studied singing-whose profession was song. These men were as rare in the army as they are in civilian life. Then there were the whiskey tenors-and beyond them were the baritones and basses, who could grumble out a few notes of the music-hall ditties. With the exception of certain musical numbers, composed for the army shows, white boys invented very little music. On the other hand, the colored boys not only invented new words (philosophizing on local situations) to fit old tunes, but even invented tunes that, by comparison, have more value than much contemporary writing.

The soldiering negro not only had the mellow, resonant vocal qualities so necessary in singing, but he had abandon and an emotional nature which, with his ability to dramatize trivial situations, sometimes produced the most affecting performances. Many times the singers were uneducated fellows-take the "Chicken Butcher," for example, who had gained his name from a pre-war profession. Here was a colored boy who had used his razor with too lavish a hand, and thereupon had been caused to do time in Black Jack's Jail House at Gièvres. (General John J.

Pershing was known to some of the colored soldiers as "Black Jack.") Life in Black Jack's Jail House had chastened the Chicken Butcher-chastened him more than one would expect. He had even (without knowing it) taken to practising a very efficient modern spiritual belief. He was curing his waywardness by continually affirming his desire to be good. The Chicken Butcher possessed the childish simplicity and naïveté so seldom found in the present cycle of the black man's development. He had set his affirmation of righteousness to music-or perhaps it had set itself to music-if music it may be called.

The tune covered what is known to musicians as a "fifth."

Oh, jail house key, don't you ever lock me in. Oh, jail house key, won't never be bad no more. Oh, chickenfoot grass, you points three ways to heaven,

Oh, chickenfoot grass, won't never be bad no

more.