CONVICTS AND ATHLETICS

Evening Star, Issue 16198, 21 August 1916, Page 7

CONVICTS AND ATHLETICS

One of the latest reforms instituted in New York's famous prison of Sing-Sing is to help to redeem the prisoners, thereby making athletes of them. Through the agency -of a group of women reformers, physical instructors from the west side Y.M.C.A. of New York City have been training 30 men, selected from the prison population, to teach their fellow-convicts. These men are said to have been "put through a strenuous course of ' settinjj-up' exercises, and have just graduated." They are to start at once training ether inmates of the prison, and within a short fcirno it is expected that there will be all sorts of physical " stunts" boing indulged in by men who are sentenced to confinement and hard labor. For the present only volunteers will take tho exercises, but the prison authorities expect in a short time that each convict will be compelled to go through a course of physical training. The benefits of this innovation are thus set forth by Dr AYelzinillcr, the physical director of the Y.M.C-A. institutions, as quoted by the 'Christian Work': The men sit inactive in their cells for long periods. It makes them morose and bilious, and tho moro likely to become sullen and desperate. A great many of them, too, have_ a tendency to consumption. These will be given exercises to develop tho chest and iungs, and all will bo given tho largest possible muscular development, so that those, having lost ambition, arising mainly from phvsical inaction, will be put on the way of mental as well as physical recuperation.