What? Make prison life for such men dully automatic, comparatively, under an industrial drive? Precisely. Make life in prison onerous enough to them so that they will turn to honest toil, rather than endure it.
Reinstate the mechanism and the spirit of the “hell holes of Egypt”? Not at all; but reinstate respect for law and authority in the minds of such as death-dealing parasites; let them know, baldly, that “comin’ a shootin’” for hard-earned gelt, does not entitle them to browse, else buck in prison.
First of all, have done with the “Welfare League” fraud. Have done with the idea that instinctive, habitual felons, amenable both to the menace and machinations of many other instinctive, habitual felons, whom they must sooner or later face in free life, can be trusted to preside over the destinies of a prison population. That throw is precarious, even for colleges, where, if those in the know are to be believed, it is touted as doing exactly that which it does not do.
At any rate, go to the subterranean, perversely sex-charged, murderous record for evidence on which to condemn the prison Welfare League; but doing it, insist upon examination of all of the books, of the submerged tenth of prisoners who are cheated by specious crooks, and of the entire after-parole record of the latter.
Then use the eyes of your mind, clamp down the lid on banal counterfeits of reformative processes, break active agents who bungle with those counterfeits for a price, and you will help make secondary prisons what they should, nay, must be made, viz: industrial bee hives, wherein would-be social wolves go bang up against compelling contrast.
“Never again!” said an ex-prisoner, as an English turnkey “good-lucked” him into free air from one of England’s convict prisons. When American criminals so exclaim on being released from American prisons, we shall cease to have falsely-alleged “waves” of crime, and not before.
Rational prison discipline involves no less a chore than to change the point of view of men become habitually a law unto themselves. The view point will vary in accordance with the amount and kind of adverse influence unloaded upon the subject, inclusive of his congenital scars. There will be parallels that apply to nearly all, and sharply-defined tangents that mark the few. Comparative insensibility to pain, borne or inflicted, examples in the first instance. The oversexed, undersexed, and sexually perverted declare in the second case.
A prison population is never of one mind, nor of the same clay, save only for a common criminal camaraderie, ever alertly expressed to take advantage of those who think criminologically in single numbers.
Therefore, the man who rushes behind bars with a cock-sure cure-all for criminality, is at once to be pitied and shunned; and less than reformatively useless is the individual who does not understand that the particular reasons for the manner in which a given criminal was grooved for crime, predicate the means by which he may best be weaned from crime.
In other words, while all must be held closely to catholic schooling, such as trades and occupational teaching, the emphasis belongs where Nature and unnatural acquirement place it.