Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on either in free or former prison life.
Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all; indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd, commonly decides for the initial criminal act.
Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting schedule of a prison is, in itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be found that the examined had never been purged of his “puppy tricks”; that he stands athwart of a great and grave work.
Because judiciously prescribed and executed exercise in free air goes hand in hand with reformative processes, the criminologist will see to it that all-sufficient of it is accorded prisoners. Also, he will make sure that the prison field of recreation is not debased to ground on which such as the “rough-house” disturber and agitator may influence the mass to express the like of his oblique thoughts and acts. And also, he will make it very plain that free-hand recreation in the reformative scheme is out of the good hearts of the management, and is an incidental thing apart, as compared with the social exactions upon prisoners to win cardinal knowledge and skill. The reverse procedure has been quite the vogue in many of America’s houses of correction. Therefore, this paragraph ought to be printed in capitals.
Nothing so offends common sense as does the prison playhouse, in normal times crowded with ignorant, unskilled, criminous young men, who can put their fingers on their sporting dives as chargeable with their plight as prisoners. Burned in the baking by corrosive sports, they need above all else to get quit of it, and to put on the habit of industry, both mental and physical.
The “habit” will not be slipped on. Counter habit, taken on usually from their first conscious thoughts, will motivate them to sip of this and that; to plan for variety of employment without regard for bread-winning results and their social rehabilitation.
Here, at once, the brakes must be set down hard, else their prison days will have been as “rolling stones” that “gather no moss.” Furthermore, a nearly perfect conduct record will not, as a general proposition, alter the case in the least; in fact, the lad who cunningly plays up to conduct, and down to fundamental equipment, is an intrinsic faker, and should not be granted a parole while he fakes.
Nothing short of the prisoner’s consecutive, concentrated endeavor along industrial and associated lines, backed by his will to adjust to the free-life exactions upon him, will serve either the State or him.
Lay gentlemen, and their jockeys within prison confines, have freely prescribed nostrums of reform that are diametrically opposed to the intrinsic meaning of the preceding paragraph.
Result? Ask any chief of police of any city in America. Do not ask the dream-drugged, nor their retainers, who will switch you off for a ballooning after chimeras in the mist-swept clouds. Just recall that the American recidivistic criminal holds the world’s record by a furlong to the mile; that he does so under mundane pressure in the grand majority of instances; and that airplaning with and for him must eventuate in a crash to earth, whereon and whereof he made his anti-social bed, and whereon and whereof he must make it over—piece by piece.