A Plea for the Criminal: Being a reply to Dr. Chapple's work: 'The Fertility of the Unfit', and an Attempt to explain the leading principles of Criminological and Reformatory ScienceKayll, James Leslie Allan
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A Plea for the Criminal: Being a reply to Dr. Chapple's work: 'The Fertility of the Unfit', and an Attempt to explain the leading principles of Criminological and Reformatory Science
Kayll, James Leslie Allan
Chapple, William Allan, 1864-1936. The fertility of the unfit; Crime; Criminals; Reformatories
The late Prof. S. R. Monks, for twelve years Lecturer at the
Reformatory, says:--"But does such education contribute to the
reformation of the criminal and the protection of the public?"
Unqualifiedly and unhesitating I answer, Yes. Men are found to acquire
in this school month by month a growing application of better things, a
readier apprehension of truth and a heartier sympathy with virtue, and
best of all, a greater capacity for sustained and consistent effort in
practical undertakings. These transformations are the successive steps
of a real reformation, and every step puts the man at a greater and
safer distance from past shiftlessness and viciousness. "The virtues,"
says Felix Adler, "depend in no small degree on the power of serial and
complex thinking," but, continues that practical philosopher, "the
ordinary studies of the school exercise and develop this faculty of
serial and complex thinking. Any sum in multiplication gives a training
of this kind." It is hardly possible to exaggerate the benefit that true
education will confer on one who has come under the condemnation of the
law. His improved education will counter-balance some of the disgrace of
his past criminality; it will with industrial training extricate him
from the hopeless mass of ignorant unskilled labour where competition is
always hottest and most perilous, it will teach him, better than he
could know without it, the relative value of things; it will so elevate
his thoughts and refine his tastes that the path of duty in its roughest
and steepest places, will yet steadily attract his footsteps.
The charge is sometimes made that the criminal is made more dangerous by
education. The assertion begs all it carries. It assumes that education
strengthens character but does not transform character which is false
for it does both.... No man can use his mind in the careful
investigation of moral principles, and become thereby merely a more
dangerous cheat. No man who has opened his eyes to see the revelations
of eternal wisdom and goodness written in letters of light on all the
handiwork of Nature, can be made thereby merely a more dangerous
villain. On the contrary, every hour of honest search after reality, of
careful industry governed by principles and lined to accuracy, every
hour spent in happy contemplation of wisdom and goodness, wherever
manifested will make the man forever the better for it.
=Physical Culture.=--This Department of the Reformatory falls into three
divisions--the Gymnastic, the Military and the Manual.
=The Gymnastic.=--The idea of a gymnasium within a gaol must deliver no
small shock to the prejudices of many, but in studying the Elmira system
we must endeavour to keep before us the end which the authorities are
aiming at, viz., the restoration to society of their criminals in a not
only harmless state but in their most useful state, and this can only be
made possible by the most careful and thorough training of the mind,
body and soul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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