“I would like to make a statement before it is too late. I feel that this will be my last appearance in any court as a defendant, and I want to make this statement in the hope that there may be something in my experience that will prove valuable to some one, perhaps some one in authority who has to do with the instruction and correction of offenders, particularly of the younger ones. “I would not make this statement if I ever expected to appear in court again as a defendant. As criminal as it is, I will consider it as nothing if it prove of value to any one, if my failure would cause some young man to hesitate before it is too late, before he finds himself charged with crime. “My prison experiences began with a sentence of two years and thirty lashes in a Canadian prison. I could not see that I deserved this flogging, and it seemed when I got it that all the cruelty in the world was visited on me—all the brutality, all the violence. There was a lesson in cruelty I have never forgotten. Fortunately, I had a disposition that hardened with the flogging instead of breaking under it. “I proved an incorrigible prisoner while there. I broke the rules many, many times in a small way—nothing violent, nothing desperate, but I would talk, laugh, whistle and sing, and that outraged the silence of the system then in vogue. “I was punished repeatedly on bread and water, the dark cell. The warden was a hard, stern man. His motto was—‘break them first and make them after.’ “Then came the day for the second installment of my flogging and my discharge from prison. I went out with the skin on my back blistered and broken and my mind bent on revenge. I went out of there with a hatred for law and order, society and justice, discipline and restraint, and everything that was orderly and systematic. I had a hatred for courts, jailers, prison keepers, and wardens. I hated policemen, prosecutors, judges and jurors. “If I had reasoned right, I might have made a better start than I did. But I had no experience to guide me. I planned for revenge and I turned on society to get it, because society furnishes the judges, the jurors, the policemen, the prosecutors. Before I got fairly started on my career of revenge I was back in prison. “When I went back I learned more brutality and violence. I knew the bread-and-water punishment, the dark cell, the strait-jacket and the water cure. I thought violent thoughts, I planned violent plans, and I executed those plans as best I could as soon as I got outside. I suppose a man’s actions are the creatures of his thought, and his thoughts are naturally the products of his environment and the conditions under which he is forced to live.