Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated
to assure evenly-progressive skill.
(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last
unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive
deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme
of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively
abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted
for their care and repair.
(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with
all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental
research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one
thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so
harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety
of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying
buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break
him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He
"gathered no moss" because he was "a rolling stone." Get that into his
head from his initial institutional pace.
(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last
straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in
legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic compulsion, is the only
weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed,
self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in
mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from
citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison
lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly
admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of
means do it so; but don't commonize the mentoring in the face of
repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else
he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the
mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as
one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out
of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the
Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.
The point is that much too much of "sob-sister" stuff has been written and
spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social
wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will
probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to
disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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