Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! Impossible!
Order reformative régimes so that their reformative processes must yield in practice, suggestion and example, to the sporting schedule, and to inmates who stand accursed of outraged sport! Ridiculous!
Expect a spell of any kind of discipline to make up to men and lads, that of which they had been and are being cheated by grossly overdone sport! Futile!
True, it is, that prison discipline has basically to do with serviceable muscles; but serviceable muscles to be used to social and productive ends, and not to the ends of the sporting thief who dumps ill-gotten gain into palms dirtier than his own.
Another check imposed upon reformation of the kind of lads in question, resides in the State’s “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish” policy of withholding money for working tools germane to the process of their reformation; essentially, for trade tools, and for appointments and materials to match the tools, inclusive of the very best of human material.
A skeletonized trade school can yield but skeletonized results: whereas, exactly the reverse is demanded for unskilled, untaught young felons, if they are to be given a fair chance to make good in free life. There, they take with them the serious handicap of the prison brand; and there, crime-free mechanics grudgingly yield them place and portion. Therefore they must be ready to market commanding skill and knowledge, else almost inevitably have recourse to the crook’s outfit.
The “policy” of the State thereof is “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish,” because it is much cheaper, in the end, to school a lad for social rehabilitation and have done with it, than it is to do it over and over again, and even then leave him less than half-baked industrially, as is commonly the case.
America holds the world’s record for recidivistic criminals. She will continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison chain as you may.
While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do, ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S. J.: “Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don’t care who instructs him after that.”
Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America’s elementary penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must, absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security; then search out and deport such “natural breeders” who have sieved, willy-nilly, into the land.