People are sentenced to a term in prison on account of crime committed. There are two systems of punishment. One is called punitive or retributive system, the other the corrective or reformative. Until within the last few years the punitive system was almost the exclusive one. However, our humane officers, prison officials, lawmakers and statesmen are not only learning better ways of bringing men and women thus incarcerated into subjection, but in many places are making and enforcing laws which require that prisoners be more humanely treated and receive better care and accommodations. Men have resorted to almost every possible device in order to make bad men good and raise them from ignorance to intelligence, and in so doing have inflicted the most severe punishment, causing the prisoners to pass through severest ordeals and most terrible sufferings imaginable. When we say there has been a radical change in many of our prisons in the land in discarding the severe corporal punishment, we do not wish to convey the idea that all prisons have yet accepted the more humane ways of governing the prisoners under their charge. When we say some of these punishments have been and are yet severe it does not fully express the facts of the case. The word “severe” is not a strong enough word. There have been and are yet punishments that are brutal—brutal to the extreme. Many prisoners who are within the prison walls carry the deep lash marks of the whip; the unjointed and deformed thumbs resulting from the punishment of being hanged by the thumbs; and there are other deformities. Many of us can no doubt remember the time of our early days in the country school when the schoolmaster was almost constantly with a beach or birch whip in his hand, something equal to an ox goad. This instrument for correcting the youths of our land and bringing them into subjection, when not in the schoolmaster’s hand was in the corner near by and was generally freely used. There have been, however, such a radical change and better modes of government brought about, that many schools are taught without once using such an instrument of punishment. If such a successful change has been made in our public schools, surely as radical a change can be made in our prisons, to take the place of the brutality of the past. Concerning the easy government of the prisoners there is much that depends upon those in charge of the prisoners. The warden, chaplain, and prison guards who have direct care of the prisoners should be good, whole-souled men, kind and benevolent, and who are capable of appreciating the good traits of a man even though they may be covered by many dark ones. They should be good readers of human nature and understand the dispositions of those under their charge. They should be firm and unyielding to their trust, yet loving and tender.