John Black - Speech at the annual dinner of the Civitas Club lyrics

The corrective system in prisons in this country is wrong. Instead of spending 30 or 40 millions of dollars in a prison program, efforts should be made to eliminate the system now existing. Criminals are not sorted out--they are thrown together regardless of age or former records. All they need to do is reduce the time under which a man is eligible for parole, give the prisoner some reward for good conduct and a great deal of the problem will be solved. Figures prove that 84 percent of the men on parole have made good. Jails breaks have always occurred at the instigation of men who have had no hope of ever leaving prison. To my mind, by the execution of desperate criminals society is merely getting a reproach out of the way. When society is confronted with a disease it drags out the causes and eliminates them, but it does not fight ignorance, poverty, and lack of opportunity by the same methods. These are the primary causes of crime. (Black stated that from his personal experience crime has its inception in the children of the slums who early in life learn to fight to survive, steal to eat and gamble to get something for nothing. Eventually these children find themselves in reformatories and thus obtain a jail atmosphere.) Here for the first time the youthful offender has a chance to sit down and think. The police and the jail become objects of hatred because his environment has given him bad mental habits and his reasoning has become warped. (Mr. Black cited several notorious criminals in confirming his statements that the professional criminal is different from the man who commits an impulsive act and a**erted that they were all undersized, undernourished and suffering from an inferiority complex.)