In The Scarlet Letterby Nathaniel Hawthorne, why is it important to have a cemetery and a prison, even when building a "Utopia of human virtue and...

This
description comes from chapter one of by . The chapter is titled "The
Prison-Door" and, though it is a very short chapter, sets the tone, attitude, and
expectation for the rest of the novel. 

The narrator says that every group of
people who have founded a new city,

whatever Utopia of
human virtue and happiness they might originally project,

have always found the need, early on, to set aside a plot of land as a cemetery and
build a prison on another plot of land. In that regard, the founders of Boston were no
exception, and they built a prison and a cemetery.

The reason for this, of
course, is that some aspects of humans and human nature never change. Everyone dies--thus the
cemetery--and everyone sins (and in Puritan terms sinning is also breaking the law)--thus the
prison.

The narrator goes on to describe the prison in Boston (the setting
for this story) which, after twenty years, is well used and weather-beaten. 

The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more
antique than any thing else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never
to have known a youthful era.

Again, Hawthorne is
commenting through the narrator that the one consistent element in society is sin/crime; it has
existed from the beginning and it still exists today. His point is that human nature, at least
the negative aspects of it, are unchanging.