Indeterminate Sentence | Page 6

can
be studied in the Elmira Reformatory of New York, the only prison for
felons where the proposed system is carried out with the needed
disciplinary severity. In studying Elmira, however, it must be borne in
mind that the best effects cannot be obtained there, owing to the lack of
the indeterminate sentence. In this institution the convict can only be
detained for the maximum term provided in the statute for his offense.
When that is reached, the prisoner is released, whether he is reformed

or not.
The system of reform under the indeterminate sentence, which for
convenience may be called the Elmira system, is scientific, and it must
be administered entirely by trained men and by specialists; the same
sort of training for the educational and industrial work as is required in
a college or an industrial school, and the special fitness required for an
alienist in an insane asylum. The discipline of the establishment must
be equal to that of a military school.
We have so far advanced in civilization that we no longer think of
turning the insane, the sick, the feebleminded, over to the care of men
without training chosen by the chance of politics. They are put under
specialists for treatment. It is as necessary that convicts should be under
the care of specialists, for they are the most difficult and interesting
subjects for scientific treatment. If not criminals by heredity, they are
largely made so by environment; they are either physical degenerates or
they are brutalized by vice. They have lost the power of distinguishing
right from wrong; they commonly lack will-power, and so are
incapable of changing their habits without external influence. In short,
the ordinary criminal is unsound and diseased in mind and body.
To deal with this sort of human decadent is, therefore, the most
interesting problem that can be offered to the psychologist, to the
physiologist, to the educator, to the believer in the immortality of the
soul. He is still a man, not altogether a mere animal, and there is always
a possibility that he may be made a decent man, and a law-abiding,
productive member of society.
Here, indeed, is a problem worthy of the application of all our
knowledge of mind and of matter, of our highest scientific attainments.
But it is the same problem that we have in all our education, be it the
training of the mind, the development of the body, or the use of both to
good ends. And it goes without saying that its successful solution, in a
reformatory for criminals, depends upon the character of the man who
administers the institution. There must be at the head of it a man of
character, of intellectual force, of administrative ability, and all his
subordinate officers must be fitted for their special task, exactly as they

should be for a hospital, or a military establishment, for a college, or
for a school of practical industries. And when such men are demanded,
they will be forthcoming, just as they are in any department in life,
when a business is to be developed, a great engineering project to be
undertaken, or an army to be organized and disciplined.
The development of our railroad system produced a race of great
railroad men. The protection 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