The colony is situated in the midst of a vast stretch of land in the Province of Buenos Ayres, on which fruit and vegetables are grown by a number of the patients. Others are occupied in raising fowls and pigs, which supply the colony with eggs and meat and yield a large profit when sold outside.
Professor Cabred wisely prefers agriculture of this kind to the raising of large crops of wheat or maize, because it simplifies the task of supervision necessary in any colony, and gives the colonists, whose toil is compulsory, a continual and regular occupation of an almost unvarying character. (This applies equally to the case of a penal colony.) Workmen, foremen, engineers, builders, mechanics, gardeners,--all are patients, with the exception of the Director, the doctor, and about a hundred mounted warders, who pass rapidly from one part to another and are able to intervene in suicidal or homicidal outbreaks.
A colony on these lines would be suitable for the large mass of habitual criminals, who, although unable to resist the temptations of ordinary life, are capable of useful work under supervision, and under such conditions may prove beneficial to themselves and to the community.
INSTITUTIONS FOR BORN CRIMINALS AND THE MORALLY INSANE
_Asylums for Criminal Insane._ We have still to consider born criminals, epileptics, and the morally insane, whose crimes spring from inherited perverse instincts. These unfortunate beings cannot be consigned to ordinary prisons, since, owing to their state of mental alienation, they do not possess even the modesty of the vicious--hypocrisy--and they never fail to pervert those criminaloids with whom they come in contact. Malcontents by nature, they distrust everybody and everything, and as they see an enemy in every warder and official, they are the centres of constant mutinies.
To confine them in common asylums would be still more injurious, for they preach sodomy, flight, and revolt and incite the others to robbery, and their indecent and savage ways, as well as the terrible reputation which often precedes them, make them objects of terror and repulsion to the quieter patients and their relatives, who dread to see their kin in such company.