eginning, but which experience would more or less perfectly
supply, the various classes of first offenders should be separated into
distinct and non-communicating families. Hard labor should here mean
hard labor. Rigid discipline coupled with coarse but wholesome food
should emphasize the fact that this was a place, not of comfortable
leisure, but of reformatory punishment. At the same time such
educational and moral influences as enlightened experience could supply
should be brought continuously to bear, to give new aims, inspire new
motives, and impart health, strength, and soundness to morally weak but
not necessarily hopelessly criminal natures.

Under enlightened management, commitment to such reformatories might be
made for an indefinite period, with the same limited discretion that the
law now gives to courts of justice, to be dependent largely upon the
behavior of the criminal, and to be determined not before, but after his
term of imprisonment began. The superintendent and board of managers
should, in that case, be clothed with large discretionary powers to
dismiss, to detain, to place in higher or lower classes, as their best
judgments should dictate, and as the actual and tried needs and progress
of reform in each individual case might demand. The vast, costly, and
architecturally imposing structures which are now denominated
"reformatories," and which in many cases might be much more
appropriately labelled "failures," if not discarded altogether, could be
supplemented by simple and inexpensive structures, giving abundant room
and light and air. With such conditions and surroundings, and under such
a system intelligently administered, it is reasonable to believe that no
small proportion of first offenders, who, under our present method,
drift into the hopelessly, and it might in many cases be added,
helplessly, criminal classes, would be restored to moral soundness and
self-respecting citizenship.

But with the most efficient system of reformation which human wisdom
could devise, there would still be a large contingent of incorrigible
offenders, who, from hereditary taint, bad environment, or other causes,
have cut themselves off from all retreat, burned the bridges behind
them, and enlisted in a life warfare against human society and law. Most
second offenders and those whose brutal past points to an irredeemable
future should properly be classed as life criminals, and with these,
society, while not forgett