"I record it as my own conviction, after nearly a lifetime spent with and for criminals, that alike for all, corrigible and incorrigible, the aim to accomplish reformation is a true one. It most surely supplies all possible repression upon the criminal classes in society.... The aim of reformations is absolutely essential to any good degree of public protection from crimes.... Mr F. Ammetybock, Director of the Penitentiary of Vridsloselille, Denmark, added:—I would not dare charge as incorrigible one of the 3,000 criminals who have been confided to my care.... During my career as a prison officer, I have seen many criminals who offered, humanly speaking, characteristic signs of incorrigibility and who now and for a long time had led respectable lives.... I believe that other prison officers as well as philanthropists, can confirm the truth of my experience, and I hope that many will protest against the theory of incorrigibility and place in the balance their experience against purely abstract ideas."
On the other hand, it must be admitted that several criminologists emphatically declare that the "instinctive" criminal (or "born" criminal to use Lombroso's term) is incorrigible. Garofalo takes such a hopeless view of the matter as to demand his elimination by death, but none of these men, eminent criminologists as they may be, have studied reformatory science experimentally. Mr Brockway's testimony should be taken as final seeing that of the 12,000 felons who have passed through the Elmira Reformatory, 82 per cent. have reformed, i.e., have not returned to criminal practices. The statistics for the year 1903 are as follows:—
It will be seen that while the Reformatory claims only 86 per cent. of reforms, there were only 9 persons (or 2 per cent. of the whole) who were KNOWN to have certainly returned to crime.
This exhibit is conclusive. Reformatory Science, which is yet but in its infancy, can already deal successfully with by far the greatest proportion of criminals, and this success at this stage guarantees a much larger measure in the future. It is clear then upon the statements of the highest authorities that the criminal is not incorrigible, and that the prison (penal) system compares so unfavourably with the reformatory system that it ought to be abolished in favour of it. The system in vogue at the Elmira Reformatory will be described in a later chapter, and there it will be shown that the methods employed are upon a most scientific basis and that the results obtained cannot fail to satisfy the most exacting. It will be seen that by a "reformed" man is meant a man who can and will adapt himself to the conditions of society; a man sound in mind, healthy in body, industrious and honest in habit. Concerning this man's progeny, what have we to fear? It is in this way that we may dispose of the proportion of 75 per cent. of criminal children descended from criminal ancestry. It should here be again observed that the majority of criminals commence their career in crime at a very early age, and that therefore the reform of almost all criminals may be undertaken before they are likely to become parents. Again, true reformatory science forbids the release of any criminal from custody who has not given satisfactory evidence of reform.
Thus reformatory science effectually guarantees society against the evil that Dr Chapple has proposed to eradicate, and it does it by a method compared with which tubo-ligature is most crude.
The criminal is either set free as a reformed man or is to be kept in captivity because his resistance to reformatory discipline has shown him to be unfit to rightly use his liberty.
Not only are the chances of his becoming the parent of criminally disposed children effectually removed but he is himself transformed from having a negative to having a positive social value.
Dr Chapple's study convinces him that the cause of the startling increase of crime, insanity, and pauperism is to be found "deep down in biological truth. Society is breeding from defective stock." Dr Waddell, who writes the preface of the "Fertility of the Unfit," is so alarmed as to declare that "our civilization is in imminent peril of being swamped by the increasingly disproportionate progeny of the criminal." The most superficial observation of the life of the criminal would have shown both these writers that criminal habits militated substantially against the probability of a natural increase.
To repeat what Féré and Havelock Ellis both emphatically declare that the criminal and the pauper do not reproduce their kind is but to show that the cause of the natural increase of the criminal is NOT to be found in biological truth, neither is our society in any danger of being swamped by an increasingly disproportionate progeny of the criminal. In short, society has no enemy in Nature.