858 THE CRIMINAL GROUP 



ities, his tastes, his notions, his sentiments, his habits. They note 

 the effect upon him of every detail of the discipline to which he is 

 subjected , and the changes in their attitude to him correspond to the 

 keener insight and more accurate judgment gained by a large and 

 long experience in prison administration. The outside world has a 

 different standard of comparison. It judges by results as shown on 

 the ledgers of the state, the dockets of the criminal courts, and else- 

 where. It asks itself, Does the prison accomplish what the people 

 expect and demand of it? Does punishment really punish? Does 

 intimidation intimidate? Does reformation reform? Is there any 

 appreciable diminution in the volume of crime in the community? 



In the development of popular ideals and continually higher 

 standards of excellence, prison societies and prison congresses play 

 the leading part. The medieval prison societies were relief-giving 

 societies, in an age when prisoners, if they did not supply their own 

 food, got none; when imprisonment for debt was common, and poor 

 debtors would have starved but for the generosity of the public. 

 The modern prison society formulates theories of prison discipline, 

 promulgates them, and endeavors to find employment for discharged 

 convicts. In the prison congress the official and non-official elements, 

 the expert and amateur, meet and exchange views, to their mutual 

 advantage; and thus, step by step, slowly but surely, the cause of 

 prison reform advances with the onward march of intelligence. 

 Science ministers to it, and so does religion. Science endows 

 it with its own rich gains in the knowledge of nature and of 

 human nature and in the applications of science to the mechanic 

 arts. Religion contributes the altruistic motive and the sentiment 

 of moral obligation and of hope, giving to the reformer strength 

 to persevere in the face of repeated and persistent discouragement. 

 It supplies, in the prison, a specific element of personal touch, 

 without which all routine treatment is powerless for good. 



Nevertheless, or perhaps as a necessary consequence of this 

 minute, critical study of results, the belief gains ground that the 

 penitentiary system, like all the abandoned devices for the suppres- 

 sion of crime, will ultimately prove a disappointment. It accom- 

 plishes none of its avowed aims. As punishment, term imprisonment 

 is inequitable and unjust. As a deterrent, its influence is inappre- 

 ciable. As a reformatory agent, conducted as most prisons have been 

 and still are, it is on the whole a failure. The minor prisons, in which 

 men and women are incarcerated for short periods in association, 

 unemployed, are pestilential centres of moral infection. The central 

 prisons benefit a certain percentage of their inmates by the change of 

 environment, the regular hours, the enforced abstinence, the indus- 

 trial occupation, and the very partial educational and religious 

 influence which incarceration in them implies. But the life led in 



