Gradually society is awakening to the fact that the condition of the criminal ought to be ameliorated, and that there can be no real amelioration which does not make definite efforts for the prisoner's reform. The aim should be to assist every man to recover by his own effort the place in society from which he has fallen. No man is incapable of improvement, and under a wise systematic discipline most men do improve. A remarkable witness is found in the experience of Dr Browning who was engaged as Surgeon-superintendent of convict ships between 1831 and 1848. Of one voyage from Norfolk Island to Tasmania he was in charge of 346 "old hands." These men had agreed to take terrible revenge upon some of their comrades who had been employed as constables over the others. Under Dr Browning's instruction and discipline their purpose was abandoned. He landed the men in Tasmania without having inflicted a single punishment upon the voyage. He remarks:--"The men were given to me in double irons; I debarked them without an iron clanking among them. I am told that this is the first and only instance of convicts removed from Norfolk Island having had their fetters struck off during the voyage, and being landed totally unfettered. They were almost uniformly double-cross-ironed and chained down to the deck, everybody being afraid of them. I was among them at all hours and the prison doors were never once shut during the day. To God be all the glory." Three Governors of Tasmania expressed their high opinion of Dr Browning's system and of its subsequent effects upon their behaviour. (Vide "Christianity amongst Prisoners." Howard Ass.:)
In the famous Dartmoor prison and at Borstal in Kent experiments are being made to secure a greater number of reformations among the younger convicts. It is too early to estimate the value of the systems being tried, but they are being watched with much hope and expectation. In America there is a decided tendency to substitute State reformatories for prisons, especially in the case of the young. The Elmira Reformatory has been established for more than a quarter of a century, and its claims to have reformed 82 per cent. of the men committed to it has been upheld by the special enquiry instituted in 1890.