Not until the present generation of criminals has passed away can adequate results of the widespreading change in prison management be expected; for a large percentage of our convicts to-day are the product of crime-breeding jails, reformatories, and prisons. The "incorrigibles" are all men who have been subjected to demoralizing and brutalizing influences. In the blood-curdling outbreaks of gunmen and train-holdups society is but reaping the harvest of evils it has allowed. Not until police stations, jails, workhouses, reformatories, and prisons _are all radically changed_ can any fair estimate be made of the value of the recent humane methods.
The basic principle of reform in those who prey upon society is the changing of energies destructive into energies constructive. It is the opening of fresh channels for human forces. Change of environment, the breaking of every association connected with criminal pursuits, life in the open in contrast with the tainted atmosphere of crowded tenements and dance halls--all this has a healthful, liberating influence on the mind; abnormal obsessions are relaxed, different brain-cells become active, and the moral fibre of the man as well as his physical being absorbs vital elements. That the laborer is entitled to a share in the fruits of his labor is true the world over, and industry and efficiency are stimulated by recognition of the relation of achievement to reward.
Strict repressive discipline applied to organized enslavement of labor is in direct violation of all these principles. The penal colony seems a rational method of dealing with those whose permanent removal from our midst is deemed necessary. Time and again have penal colonies given satisfactory solution to the criminal problem. Virginia and Maryland absorbed the human exports from English courts, and their descendants joined in the building of a great nation; while the penal colony in Australia resulted in a civilization of the first rank. While the deportation of our criminals to-day may be neither practicable nor desirable, the establishment of industrial penal communities in every State, on a profit-sharing basis, is both practicable and desirable, and would unquestionably result in the permanent reform of many who are now a menace to public safety.