The Hartford Herald

EXPERIENCE IN A REFORMATORY

Seems To Have Made This Boy Worse.

SAYS NOBODY CARED FOR HIM

He Now Stands a Chance To Get Forty Years In Sing Sing.

COULDN'T SEE DYING MOTHER

New York, Dec 18.—Why doesn't a reformatory reform? Why does a boy after a year and a half in a reformatory come forth embittered, discouraged and ready to plunge deeper into crime?

These were the questions in my mind as I stood on one side of a stout iron door and looked through the bars at John Gaskins, 21, who is at Brooklyn jail awaiting sentence for a series of robberies to which he pleaded guilty.

Under his plea—'first degree, second offense'—this boy may get forty years in Sing Sing. It seemed hard to realize, as I looked into his clear, blue eyes and followed the straight, youthful lines of his slim figure.

Gaskins was one of a gang which, last spring, looted a car of silverware in a freight yard. They melted down $50,000 worth of silverware, Gaskins testified, and got $9,000 for it. His share was $3,000, and he spent it in two months on Broadway. He had a suite of rooms at a swell hotel, and he opened a good many magnums for the denizens of the "White Way."

When his money was gone Gaskins turned to robbery again. He aided in burglarizing four cigar stores and a jewelry store. He was arrested and escaped from the Tombs. Arrested again, he got away while being transferred from court to prison, and was caught for the third time a few nights ago.

He's in bad now, there's no doubt about that. But it seems as though he might have been saved from the place he stands in to-day if reformatories reformed.

He was the son of a chief engineer on one of the big coast lines. His father died when he was a child. His mother married again, and he didn't get along with his step-father. He ran away from home. He got into bad company, and for some minor offense was sent to the Elmira Reformatory. He stayed there eighteen months.

When Gaskins made his plea of guilty, he told the judge that his experience in Elmira was largely responsible for his subsequent life of crime. I went to ask him his reason for making that statement.

"There was another boy there that knew me," he said, "and he knew that I can play the E flat tuba. I was assigned to play in the band. I had to play every day. I wasn't strong enough to stand it and I got a dilated heart. I asked to be relieved from band duty and to be allowed to do more gymnasium work. My appeal was ignored. It was just because nobody cared.

"The band had a room to itself, where we met for practice, with practically no supervision. In the band were a number of the most degenerate young criminals you can imagine. The conversation after practice was finished was horrible, and there were even worse things. I was in constant touch with the worst vileness anybody can think of.

"One day I got a letter from New York, saying my mother was dying. It was February 17. I had expected to get out on the twentieth. That was when my time was up. I showed the letter to one of the officials and asked him if I couldn't go home to see my mother, under guard. He said he didn't believe my mother was sick; that probably I had got one of the other band boys, who had done his time, to write me a fake letter.

"I was kept an extra month, because my cell floor was not as clean as an inspector thought it should be, and I got out March 25. When I got to New York and went to my mother's home, I learned that she had been dead and buried a month.

"I loved my mother. She was all I had in the world to love!" The boy's eyes filled with tears—very real tears.

"I didn't care much what happened," he said. "I was just sore at everything. I hadn't touched hands with anybody but criminals for eighteen months. I hadn't heard anything but crime and rottenness. I turned back to crime.

"I'm not roasting the men at Elmira. I guess they're all right, in their way. They mean well enough. But they didn't care anything about me. They didn't believe I was worth anything and they didn't bother about me. They just slid me through my term and got rid of me."

This story of John Gaskins' is a criminal's story. It may be the whole truth and nothing but the truth or it may not. But John Gaskin himself, 21 years old, standing behind iron bars with a forty-year sentence hanging over him, is evidence enough that reformatories, in this country, to-day, do not reform!