Foreign penologists say to us: “Especially, you make our corrective systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number of recidivists you admit. Please: why so many criminal rounders in and out of your prison houses?” Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient people cannot shunt much longer.
Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the “Golden Rule,” and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.
In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which they are capable to the singularly complex work of reform. Calling false turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social chaos.
“At least,” said Hippocrates, “Father of Medicine,” to his students, “be sure that you do no harm.” So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.
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PRISON DISCIPLINE
Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word “discipline.”
Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.