The cause of all this is found in the criminal and lawless homes and the foolish prejudice that is abroad against the corporal punishment of minors. Every year hundreds of boys from sixteen to twenty years old are locked up in the Tombs for several weeks and afterwards sent to the House of Refuge and Elmira Reformatory where they can be detained all the way from one to twenty years, but they care not for such detention. In fact, when you speak to them of prison life they wear a bravado that is astonishing. But the moment you birch them for their wilful and disobedient conduct these young men quail and promise to do better. There is so much foolish and unreasonable leniency exercised by magistrates and judges when small boys are before them, that many people begin to feel that parole without some kind of corporal punishment is a mockery and a farce. Only recently a city paper took a Special Session Judge to task for paroling some malicious boys who had committed vandalism in Central Park. There was no punishment in the sentence. Nothing to impress them with the majesty of the law. If these boys had been well spanked till they promised never to do the like again, the paroling would be all right, but not otherwise. If it is degrading to punish boys for wrong doing, then the best men now living were punished in their youth. And many of the men now believe that it saved them from criminal lives. Foolish sentimentalists tell us that it is degrading to spank or birch a boy, but what is more degrading and damning than crime? A well known Probation Officer of large experience in the city of Brooklyn, gave me to understand that if he had his way he would erect in every Police Station a whipping post where he would treat to a sound birching, _a la Solomon_, all the young hoodlums, thieves and law breakers that come before the courts. Most of these young men come from bad homes where they had no training whatever, and where their weak-minded or indulgent parents permitted them to violate the laws of God and men daily. If these young ruffians refuse to keep out of crime or be at home at night by 9:30 o’clock, let them have another dose of the strap, says this Probation Officer and keep it up till they come to their senses! As soon as they promised faithfully “Never to do it again” I would give them a chance. A good spanking is far better for an unruly boy that breaks the law than sending him to a prison. If young children are taken from homes and placed in reformative institutions, why should corporal punishment cease when it is vastly more humane than cellular confinement, deprivation of food or what is commonly called “cuffing,” which simply means to be hung up by the wrists to a cell door sometimes for twelve hours at a time. All of which I characterize as extremely brutal. And this is done in many of our reformatories.