With thousands of convicted felons, as with the ninety-and-nine of habitual criminals, it is essentially different. They are brutal by nature. Many are confined for committing the most ruthless of brutality. Therefore, such as prize fights, put on in a correctional plant, are utterly indefensible. Far from being fed up with bestial exhibitions (?) such lads need above all to be weaned from instinct that demands such form of amusement.
Amusement! Out of seeing a battered lad laced into submission! Could anything be farther from that for which the average taxpayer means his money shall be expended? And what is all the fuss about at the Washington Peace Conference, if not to put international handcuffs on that which is but an enlargement of the doubled fist?
Men who like to see the beast in man exploited, have been primarily chargeable for all of war. When they succeed in passing on the virus of bestiality to American mothers, it is high time to call the turn on them, and to interpose unbendingly where they attempt to prescribe.
Rational discipline is as the spine of any schooling. Juridic prison discipline differs from like free-life practice, in that it must presuppose the integrity of a charge brought against an inmate by a regularly appointed State agent. In such instance, the burden of proof is justly upon the alleged offender to establish his innocence, not upon the State to assume it. This, if for no other reason than that the strongest of motives decides offenders for denial of guilt. Not only does the individual lie naturally come easy when part of a prisoner’s liberty is threatened; but cumulative untruth must be searched out of testimony motivated by a common criminal camaraderie.
Gulfs of criminal practice may separate different grades of prisoners; yet, when it comes down to incriminating evidence of a serious nature against their fellow prisoners, they usually fight shy, and that, on occasion, not ignobly.
As to different offenses that are met with indifferent impositions, an inmate agent will clasp hands in measure with the local authorities; but he usually steers clear of testimony that establishes him a “rat” informer, and very probably marks him for condign reprisal.
A prison population is bound by ties which the hardiest of “trusties” breaks at his grave peril; therefore when it is told that a junta of imprisoned felons is given over inequivocably to support of penal law, reach for the salt.
In the first place, no set of men have legal authority to build to corrective procedure that runs counter to the binding predicates of penal law.
Secondly, no man has call to conclude that he can devise safer checks upon the marauding criminal than are those written into penal codes, out of the cumulative judgment and experience of mankind.
Nevertheless, the single-seeing and idiosyncratic practically have controlled discipline in most of America’s prisons during recent decades. Besides, they have specified for overdrawn activities in essence banal and baldly opposed to actual reformative measures, maimed in the process to the point of practical disuse.