Marked success from a Reformatory point of view has attended this study, and the men enthusiastically enter upon a new and broader life.
The late Prof. S. R. Monks, for twelve years Lecturer at the Reformatory, says:—"But does such education contribute to the reformation of the criminal and the protection of the public?" Unqualifiedly and unhesitating I answer, Yes. Men are found to acquire in this school month by month a growing application of better things, a readier apprehension of truth and a heartier sympathy with virtue, and best of all, a greater capacity for sustained and consistent effort in practical undertakings. These transformations are the successive steps of a real reformation, and every step puts the man at a greater and safer distance from past shiftlessness and viciousness. "The virtues," says Felix Adler, "depend in no small degree on the power of serial and complex thinking," but, continues that practical philosopher, "the ordinary studies of the school exercise and develop this faculty of serial and complex thinking. Any sum in multiplication gives a training of this kind." It is hardly possible to exaggerate the benefit that true education will confer on one who has come under the condemnation of the law. His improved education will counter-balance some of the disgrace of his past criminality; it will with industrial training extricate him from the hopeless mass of ignorant unskilled labour where competition is always hottest and most perilous, it will teach him, better than he could know without it, the relative value of things; it will so elevate his thoughts and refine his tastes that the path of duty in its roughest and steepest places, will yet steadily attract his footsteps.
The charge is sometimes made that the criminal is made more dangerous by education. The assertion begs all it carries. It assumes that education strengthens character but does not transform character which is false for it does both.... No man can use his mind in the careful investigation of moral principles, and become thereby merely a more dangerous cheat. No man who has opened his eyes to see the revelations of eternal wisdom and goodness written in letters of light on all the handiwork of Nature, can be made thereby merely a more dangerous villain. On the contrary, every hour of honest search after reality, of careful industry governed by principles and lined to accuracy, every hour spent in happy contemplation of wisdom and goodness, wherever manifested will make the man forever the better for it.
Physical Culture.—This Department of the Reformatory falls into three divisions—the Gymnastic, the Military and the Manual.
The Gymnastic.—The idea of a gymnasium within a gaol must deliver no small shock to the prejudices of many, but in studying the Elmira system we must endeavour to keep before us the end which the authorities are aiming at, viz., the restoration to society of their criminals in a not only harmless state but in their most useful state, and this can only be made possible by the most careful and thorough training of the mind, body and soul.
Neither is there any cause to think that the prisoners are getting too good a time, and that, being treated better than the industrious worker, a premium is being offered to crime. The investigation of the authorities has revealed no case in which a man has entered the institution on account of advantages offered. To criminals they are not realised as advantages. They understand them only as the rough road leading to their release, and it is about the last thing for men of shiftless, lazy, inconsequent habits of mind and body, to suppose that they are having a good time when sent to a gymnasium every morning for two hours' steady work. Work which brings all the muscles of the body into play and which demands the fixed attention of the mind and its submission to the word of command from the instructor, is many times more distasteful than the "hard labour" of lazily cracking stones.
Until 1900 the whole prison population went through a regular gymnastic course. This is now changed and assignments are made to the gymnasium only upon the certificate of the physician. All new arrivals however spend a period, averaging about five weeks, in the "awkward squad," half of whose morning time is spent in the gymnasium. They come in a very ungainly looking set of men. Many are undersized, underweight, rickety and diseased in body and generally of a slovenly, unmanly appearance. A multitude of causes have been at work to produce this condition. Chiefly, these are a bad ancestry, foul atmosphere of their dwellings, their idle dirty habits, intemperance and sexual abuse.
The course of treatment prescribed for these is one which brings into exercise all their latent muscular power. Special attention is paid to deformities and weaknesses resulting from any cause whatsoever.
Turkish baths, swimming baths and massage also play an important part in their treatment and help to bring the dregs of disease, the results of excessive drink and the use of tobacco, out of their systems.
The effects of such treatment are at the end of a few weeks very apparent. The body is supple, the carriage is erect, the cutaneous, circulatory, muscular and nervous systems are in a healthy state, and the stupid, bewildered or stolid expression has given way to one of manly concern.