Seventhly.—Good conduct and a capacity for rightly using freedom is constantly rewarded by a greater freedom.
Eighthly.—It is far cheaper than prison. The prisoner keeps himself and his family, and one officer can attend from sixty to eighty prisoners.
The Elmira Reformatory.—"The New York States Reformatory at Elmira" is the official designation of this institution. It was established in 1875 and had for its first superintendent a Mr Z. R. Brockway.
Mr Brockway had from the age of nineteen years been working in an official capacity among prisoners, and his religious beliefs led him to acknowledge that the men committed to his charge had their place in the redemption of the world.
Maconochie's humane method of dealing with the criminals of Norfolk Island attracted his attention, and from Maconochie's mark system he evolved the now famous indeterminate sentence.
When the New York State established a Reformatory at Elmira, Mr Brockway was placed in charge and given practically a free hand in the adoption of such methods as he deemed most likely to effect the permanent reform of the men committed to imprisonment there. A restriction was placed upon the age of the offenders who should be admitted, the law reading thus:—"A male between the ages of 16 and 30, convicted of felony, who has not heretofore been convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment in a State prison, may, in the discretion of the trial court, be sentenced to imprisonment in the New York State Reformatory at Elmira, to be there confined under the provisions of the law relating to that reformatory" (vide section 700 Penal Code).
This by no means implies that all the inmates are first offenders. Many of them have been in juvenile reformatories, penitentiaries, and houses of correction, so that in some cases a considerable advance in the career of crime has been made before they are handed over to the authorities at Elmira. Again, only felons are received, not minor offenders.
The principles upon which the reformatory system is based are practically those set forth in the declaration of the National Prison Congress held in Cincinnati in 1870 as follows:—
1. Punishment is defined to be "suffering inflicted upon the individual for the wrong done by him, with a special view of securing his reformation."
2. "The supreme aim of prison discipline is The Reformation of Criminals, not the infliction of Vindictive suffering."