Road Work for Convicts.
Criminology, on its humanitarian side, seeks new methods of employment for criminals. It seeks to regenerate convicted criminals morally, as well as care for their physical well-being.
Indoor prison trades have a deadly monotony. In most cases they are carried on without sunlight, and with too little fresh air. Confinement within walls is alone a heavy punishment, but when allied with conditions that breed disease and possibly death, society exacts more than just retribution.
Modern criminology leans toward both moral and physical care in allotting the daily tasks of criminals. It assumes that the state has no right to make the criminal a worse or a weaker member of society than when he entered the prison walls.
This explains why most experts in criminology are strongly in favor of putting criminals to work at road-making. Here is employment in God's sunlight and air, where criminals can do useful work, and still be under watchful guard. They will be giving the state better highways, and at the same time escape the deadly indoor prison grind.
Criminologists are studying a hundred speculative methods of benefiting the criminal. They all agree on one point—namely, that useful work in the open air is beneficial to the average criminal, morally and physically.
If there can be a large benefit to the state, at the same time that the state is benefiting the criminal, there is a double advance along the lines of rational, humane treatment of criminals.
The sordid idea that criminals should pay the cost of their own incarceration is secondary. And yet, in applying convict labor to the solution of the good roads problem in the United States, the public would get back at least a portion of the enormous drain on public revenues for the support of criminals.