“It is not a theory and it is not an experiment”, said Chief Justice Olson. “It is a practical department. This work is very successful in Germany. Every day almost, subnormal boys and feeble minded tramps appear in the municipal court. All that the boys need is a chance to breathe some real air and get out among the pigs, horses and cows, where they can do chores.
“Many of those boys can be transformed into material for respectable citizens. They need assistance, and we start wrong by sending them to jail and cutting off most of the chances they ever had. The new laboratory will save persons who have something actually the matter with them. They will not be packed off to Joilet when there is a belief that their criminal tendency is caused by epilepsy or other defect.”
Coroner Hoffman several months ago established a psychopathic laboratory in connection with his office. Its mission is to ascertain causes of mysterious deaths. The Juvenile court also has a psychopathic laboratory.
_Five Escaping Convicts Killed._--On April 4th, a carefully planned prison delivery was frustrated at the State penitentiary in Folsom, when five convicts were shot down. Four were killed instantly and one mortally wounded by prison guards who had been stationed at vantage points where they could rake the entire corridor of the incorrigible ward with rifle fire at the least sign of a disturbance.
Only a dozen prisoners were connected with the plot out of the thousand or more convicts in the prison. Previous warning received by the prison officials that a break was to be attempted prevented what might have been a general prison delivery. The most desperate convicts in the State are confined in the Folsom prison.
Folsom, or Repressa, as it is known officially, is a prison without surrounding walls, the convicts being employed largely in the stone quarry and prison farm during the day, returning to the prison buildings at night, but always under guard.
The fact that the prison is without walls has impressed the convicts that it would be comparatively easy to escape at night and several fatal attempts have been made.
_Flogging Convicts._--According to the Chronicle of Charlotte, N. C.:
“The North Carolina supreme court has handed down a decision written by Chief Justice Walter Clark saying that corporal punishment by flogging is not reasonable and cannot be sustained. It is true that this decision refers to whipping convicts by guards, but it is only a little stretch to make the application cover all cases except where used by parents as a corrective method for children, and it is not too big an undertaking to even reach that form. The court now takes judicial notice when the parent becomes too severe with the child.