866 THE CRIMINAL GROUP 



as fear, obedience insisted upon and enforced, and above all the good 

 will and cooperation of the patient enlisted for his recovery. Difficult 

 as the task may be, it is not impossible, but time is essential for its 

 accomplishment. How long a time is uncertain and cannot ever 

 be foretold in advance. Hence the necessity for an indeterminate 

 sentence. No surer method can be devised by which to insure the 

 desired cooperation on the part of the prisoner than to make the 

 date of his liberation depend upon his own submission and exertions. 

 The tendency of the indeterminate sentence is to change the atmo- 

 sphere of the prison. The convict, when his opposition to a reform- 

 atory discipline has once been overcome, comes to regard it as the 

 abode of hope, not of despair. Sooner or later he recognizes in the 

 warden a friend, whose strongest wish is to lift him out of the degra- 

 dation into which he has fallen. When he begins to perceive that it 

 is himself who has made war upon society, and that society is not his 

 enemy, as he had blindly imagined, his reformation is begun. When 

 he learns the meaning and intention of law, and becomes reconciled 

 to it, like a wild animal tamed, his reformation is achieved. Affirm- 

 atively, therefore, as well as negatively, the indeterminate sentence 

 is shown to have a rational basis. The indeterminate sentence and 

 a reformatory discipline presuppose each the other as its essential 

 complement. The maintenance of any reformatory system of treat- 

 ment which shall prove in the highest degree effective, without the aid 

 of the indeterminate sentence, is impossible. The imposition of an 

 indeterminate sentence to a prison in which skillful and curative 

 treatment is not supplied is a judicial wrong. 



Let no one think that these assertions are the language of a senti- 

 mentalist or a visionary. Their truth has been verified by experi- 

 ence. If the American reformatory prisons have not yet fully met 

 the reasonable expectations of their authors and supporters, this is 

 because the new codes under which they are operated have been 

 faultily drawn, or because the courts are not all of them in sympathy 

 with the new legislation, or because the right men have not been 

 assigned to the charge of these prisons, or because sufficient time has 

 not yet been allowed for the realization of the higher and true ideals 

 set forth in this address. The positions taken, the views advanced, 

 are essentially correct; and their general, if not their universal, 

 acceptance may be safely predicted, so soon as they are compre- 

 hended by that portion of the community which at all concerns itself 

 with the prison question. 



To prevent misconception and misrepresentation it only remains to 

 add that, while the new criminology regards the antiquated and 

 obsolescent discipline of the prison of the past as worthy of reproba- 

 tion on account of its excessive hardness and severity, it does not 

 deny the necessity for the employment of force in the repression of 



