period, feeding them liberally, giving them a period of enforced steady
habits and steady work, and after a while taking off this straight
jacket of compulsory morality, and turning them loose again with
improved criminal skill and sharpened appetites to prey upon society in
the old way.

The actual result of this crowding of more or less confirmed vice into
one concentrated aggregation, is simply to intensify the evil it was
intended to remedy. The convict who enters a prison cell for the first
time--perhaps as the result of some sudden and overpowering
temptation--a man who at heart is no better and no worse than his
neighbors, and who, if by any chance he had escaped conviction, would
have finished his life as an average citizen, as a friend and advocate
of the law--finds himself here in an entirely new environment.
Self-respect is gone. The old motive for honesty is gone. He enters the
new and stifling atmosphere of concentrated crime, and with it comes the
feeling that the world is all against him. It is his first offence, but
it is by no means likely to be his last. Every man he sees, save the
grim rifle-carrying guard who growls and swears at him, is a convicted
criminal. Every object that his eyes fall upon intensifies the lesson
that he is henceforth to be counted among the enemies of his race. Every
breath that he breathes reeks with the malaria of crime. He is now an
enlisted soldier in a warfare against right and law and social order.
He is in the devil's own training school. The seven other "spirits more
wicked than himself" are all around him. Whatever prison rules may say,
there are certain to be clandestine meetings, secret conferences, in
which the novice is initiated into the higher degrees of the freemasonry
of crime. Schemes of profitable law-breaking swarm in the teeming brains
of these wearers of the stripes, to be turned into actual deeds in "the
good time coming," when these apt pupils of the high school of depravity
shall be free again to make war upon the peace and welfare of the world.
Is it any wonder that this first offender comes out of prison a
confirmed criminal, and that "the last state of that man is worse than
the first"?

If the same business sense were used in this matter which is ordinarily
given to the management of great human concerns, we should soon find
some way of improving upon this discouraging condition of affairs. No
merchant in his senses would discharge a dishonest cl