LITERARY DISCIPLINE
Next to education in labor, I place as the most important factor in prison discipline the development of the mind through the medium of the various agencies that may be employed for that purpose, not forgetting that labor develops the mind as well as the muscle.
An overwhelming majority of the inmates of any prison are densely and grossly ignorant, and mentally deficient. The polished, scholarly, shrewd criminal is a creature of fiction, not of fact, the exception, not the rule. The average convict is a living example of Horace Mann’s aphorism, that “ignorance in this country is a crime.”
THE PRISON SCHOOL
The convict’s mental discipline can be accomplished in many ways, one of which should be the prison school. The work here will often have to be of the most elementary character. This work should not be merely perfunctory, but should have the most careful attention and consideration. The eagerness with which even comparatively old men undertake to master the simplest primer is one of the pathetic but encouraging aspects of prison-school life.
As the school will probably have to be an evening school of but few hours’ duration, the course of study will necessarily have to be comparatively brief, in order that all inmates needing its help may have their turn.
But the brief term in school should be supplemented by a course of reading and study in the cells, or elsewhere, which should have the same attention, the same systematic oversight and encouragement that the work in the school had. This serves a twofold purpose: first, to drill and discipline the minds, furnish them with concrete information; and second, to fulfill a vital necessity in proper prison discipline, the continual occupation of the subject in his waking hours, with labor, study or proper recreation.
The writer recalls reading recently with some curiosity and interest a stricture written some nineteen years ago on the methods of the Elmira Reformatory referring to the study in the cells of “The Prologue of the Canterbury Tales,” “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” Emerson’s “May Day,” Browning’s “Paracelsus,” and similar literature, and the critic stated that if the convicts are to remain in prison for life, there can be no objection to such reading, but otherwise, the time thus occupied is worse than wasted.
But there is where the critic is wofully mistaken. No man can read even such classics as are here named without being substantially and materially benefited and strengthened, and better able to cope with the practical bread-and-butter part of life. This statement may seem far-fetched, but it is true.
But he does not need to be confined to such books. In this intensely practical age, books are as practical as other things. In the institution over which I preside, scores of men are taking courses in the correspondence schools, doing well, and neglecting no prison requirements. Let the library be stocked with practical handbooks that tell men how to do things, such as to mix concrete, lay brick, build houses, construct telephone lines, run machinery, and similar enterprises.