reful medical examinations, are found
to be "unfit for prison discipline."

This list is of portentous length, and to it four hundred more names are
added every year. This is of itself an acknowledgment by the State that
every year four hundred unfortunate human beings who cannot appreciate
the nature and quality of the acts they have committed, are treated,
punished and graded as criminals. Now the State knows perfectly well
that these unfortunates need pity, not punishment; the doctor, not the
warder; and some place where mild, sensible treatment and permanent
restraint can take the place of continual rounds of short imprisonment
alternated with equally senseless short spells of freedom.

No! not freedom, but a choice between starvation, prison or workhouse.
Now this list grows, and will continue to grow just so long as the
present disastrous methods are persisted in!

Why does this list grow? Because magistrates have no power to order
the detention of afflicted youthful offenders in any place other than
prison; they cannot commit to reformatory schools only on sufferance and
with the approval of the school managers, who demand healthy boys.

So ultimately to prison the weaklings go, and an interminable round
of small sentences begins. But even in prison they are again punished
because of their afflictions, for only the sound in mind and body are
given the benefit of healthy life and sensible training.

Consequently in prison they learn little that can be of service to
them; they only graduate in idleness, and prison having comforts but
no terrors, they quickly join the ranks of the habitues. When it is too
late they are "listed" as not suitable for prison treatment. Year by
year in a country of presumably sane people this deplorable condition
of things continues, and I am bold enough to say that there will be no
reduction in the number of our prison population till proper treatment,
training, and, if need be, detention, is provided in places other than
prison for our afflicted youthful population when they become offenders
against the law.

But reformatory and industrial schools have not only power to refuse
youthful delinquents who are unsound in mind or body; they have also the
power to discharge as "unfit for training" any who have managed to
pass the doctor's examination, whose defects become apparent when under
detention.

From the last Official Report of Reformatory Schools in England and
Wales I take t