Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are primarily responsible in very appreciable degree--were all of basic truth fully brought out.
At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over the devilish damnation of "screws," otherwise named guards; but he won't tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden reformative fruit.
However, lambasting heartless "bulls," and slashing pig "screws," are but surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities, perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since "bulls" and "screws" are respectively first and second-line social soldiers, instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.
A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't fraternity, cannot be expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this: "Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill," and sweat, while I draw you in caricature--for a price.
The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the self-determining criminal's disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning he employs to express that disloyalty; "shadows forth," mind you, for only the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal's brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to the sneers of the criminal, directed against those placed without the theoretically drawn circle.