The Price of Bread: A Judicial Question
After two boys were sentenced to the reformatory for stealing food, an Everett editor questions whether the legal system truly serves justice or merely punishes the desperate.
Two young boys were sentenced to the reformatory by Judge Black Monday for breaking into the American bakery and stealing a supply of eatables. And the question arises if anything has been gained to society in the sentence imposed. The majesty of the law has been upheld, of course, but we wonder if a judicial lecture and a suspended sentence might not have worked as much real reformation as a sentence to incarceration with several hundred men and boys, some of whom have prison records behind them.
“We wonder if a judicial lecture and a suspended sentence might not have worked as much real reformation as a sentence to incarceration.”
Everett’s struggle with juvenile delinquency and the efficacy of punitive versus rehabilitative justice remains a central theme in modern civic debate. This 1911 editorial reflects a remarkably early questioning of the school-to-prison pipeline.
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