CONVICT LABOR FOR LOAD WORK. 13 
larly leaves the outdoor laborers unfitted to resume their former 
work after discharge. 
Aside from its deleterious physical effect, the monotony of prison- 
shop labor has a tendency to reduce the mental activity of the inmate 
unused to such life, and upon release many of the members of the 
professional and mercantile classes find themselves no longer able to 
keep pace with their more alert competitors. Work on the roads 
offering, as it does, a variety of employment has no such degenerative 
mental effect, and for this reason is better than shopwork as an occu- 
pation for about three-fourths of the prison population. 
But leaving entirely out of the question the superior mental and 
physical advantages of road work or similar outdoor work, a majority 
of prison officials favor such work for the reason that it removes the 
convict as far as possible from competition with free labor. It is true 
that no matter what form of employment be adopted for prisoners, 
unless it be entirely unproductive, the interests of free laborers will 
be affected to a greater or less extent; but, by reason of the fact 
that it is performed in the interests of the public only, that it enriches 
no private employers of labor to the injury of the free laborer, and 
that its product is not placed on competitive sale with that of free 
labor, road work is certainly no more injurious to the interests of the 
latter than such work as is performed under the State-use system. 
What is more, in many localities the convict is not depriving the free 
laborer of work, since much of the road work performed by convicts 
could not be undertaken at all, for financial reasons, if it were neces- 
sary to employ free labor. 
Another very important consideration in regard to road work is 
that it is extremely productive to the public. No field can be selected 
in which the expenditure of prison labor can be applied with greater 
benefit to the States, for the reason that, as a whole, there is no greater 
public need than the improvement of the highways. It is true that 
the value of such labor can not be measured so readily in dollars and 
cents as the industrial labor within the penitentiaries, but there is every 
reason to believe that, properly conducted, the road work may be 
carried on with as much efficiency as the penitentiary industries, 
while the former has the additional advantage of requiring no sale or 
transfer to place it in public use. At this point let it be noted that, 
although the convict's labor, so applied, may be of very great benefit 
to the State, it also is of benefit to the convict himself in that it 
brings to him the realization he can not grasp in the prison-shop 
grind, that he may be of real importance in life as a producing agent. 
Through the promotion of his self-esteem in the useful works of the 
construction camp, there is created the desire to merit the good 
opinion of his fellows, without which reformation is impossible. 
