As Superintendent Brockway said many years ago: “Only motivelessness is the seat of incorrigibility. To discover or create a want is to find a motive. Given a motive, you may direct a habit. To form a habit is to create character. Habit is the school of conscience. Conscience and habit reinforce one another.”
Let us have the _habit_ of labor rather than the expensive training in trades, which in countless thousands of great industrial establishments will be of no additional value.
Next to education in labor, I place as the most important factor in prison discipline the development of the mind through the medium of the various agencies that may be employed for that purpose, not forgetting that labor develops the mind as well as the muscle.
An overwhelming majority of the inmates of any prison are densely and grossly ignorant, and mentally deficient. The polished, scholarly, shrewd criminal is a creature of fiction, not of fact, the exception, not the rule. The average convict is a living example of Horace Mann’s aphorism, that “ignorance in this country is a crime.”
The convict’s mental discipline can be accomplished in many ways, one of which should be the prison school. The work here will often have to be of the most elementary character. This work should not be merely perfunctory, but should have the most careful attention and consideration. The eagerness with which even comparatively old men undertake to master the simplest primer is one of the pathetic but encouraging aspects of prison-school life.
As the school will probably have to be an evening school of but few hours’ duration, the course of study will necessarily have to be comparatively brief, in order that all inmates needing its help may have their turn.
But the brief term in school should be supplemented by a course of reading and study in the cells, or elsewhere, which should have the same attention, the same systematic oversight and encouragement that the work in the school had. This serves a twofold purpose: first, to drill and discipline the minds, furnish them with concrete information; and second, to fulfill a vital necessity in proper prison discipline, the continual occupation of the subject in his waking hours, with labor, study or proper recreation.