And the woman expressed a great verity. This little episode I relate to show you that society has two obligations: one to the man shut up within the prison, and perhaps an even greater obligation to the poor woman and children dependent upon the man shut up within the prison. It is necessary to lock up a certain class of men that society may be protected, and that these men may be improved; but when we do that are we going to put their families in a position in which they will be impelled into either vice or crime? I think it is Milton who asks the pertinent question:
“What boots it, by one gate to make defense And at another to let in the foe?”
In dealing with the wives and children, as well as with the prison inmates over in our place, we find an immense help from the Salvation Army. We have a prisoner’s aid association and they work harmoniously together; but the Army has one or two advantages in this work that no other organization possesses. In the first place, they are not sentimentalists. They detail one man to give his time to it. He is as free to go into our prison as I am, and I think he spends as much time there as I do. He is there at night, on Sundays, on holidays, at noon hours, and he is going from cell to cell--he becomes thoroughly acquainted with every inmate. That gives that man an immense advantage in dealing with those men when their terms expire. The prison worker that expects to meet the discharged prisoner at the prison gate the morning he comes out, is much more apt to be worked by the prisoner than he is to work the prisoner. In three cases out of five he is clay in the hands of a designing man. One of our governors some years ago said that Canada was a land of magnificent distances. The same remark applies to your republic; but we get prisoners thirteen hundred miles from our prison. The Army, learning the condition of the families dependent on the man within the prison, writes to the corps, the Salvation Army corps in the town or the city where the man came from, and they are able by their very extensive and highly perfected organization, to make a study of each family, in addition to having arrangements made there for the employment of that man when his term has expired. We try, just as far as possible, to get all of our ex-prisoners out of the city. We do not wish them to colonize; we try to get them back to their homes where they came from, for unless a man is willing to go back and face society and live it down, the chances are that he will be driven into what is wrong sometimes through fear.