of society by the removal and reform of the criminal
class, when the public determines upon it, will call into the service a
class of men fitted for the great work. We know this is so because
already, since the discussion of this question has been current, and has
passed into actual experiment, a race of workers and prison
superintendents all over the country have come to the front who are
entirely capable of administering the reform system under the
indeterminate sentence. It is in this respect, and not in the erection of
model prisons, that the great advance in penology has been made in the
last twenty years. Men of scientific attainment are more and more giving
their attention to this problem as the most important in our
civilization. And science is ready to take up this problem when the
public is tired and ashamed of being any longer harried and bullied and
terrorized over by the criminal class.

The note of this reform is discipline, and its success rests upon the law
of habit. We are all creatures of habit, physical and mental. Habit is
formed by repetition of any action. Many of our physical habits have
become automatic. Without entering into a physiological argument, we know
that repetition produces habit, and that, if this is long continued, the
habit becomes inveterate. We know also that there is a habit, physical
and moral, of doing right as well as doing wrong. The criminal has the
habit of doing wrong. We propose to submit him to influences that will
change that habit. We also know that this is not accomplished by
suppressing that habit, but by putting a good one in its place.

It is true in this case that nature does not like a vacuum. The thoughts
of men are not changed by leaving them to themselves, they are changed by
substituting other thoughts.

The whole theory of the Elmira system is to keep men long enough under a
strict discipline to change their habits. This discipline is administered
in three ways. They are put to school; they are put at work; they are
prescribed minute and severe rules of conduct, and in the latter training
is included military drill.

The school and the workshop are both primarily for discipline and the
formation of new habits. Only incidentally are the school and the
workshop intended to fit a man for an occupation outside of the prison.
The whole discipline is to put a man in possession of his faculties, to
give him self-respect, to get him in the way of leading a normal