Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them as a State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence, the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good training and teaching. As to a lad's basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or leave undone. He can't have grasped mentally that which had been kept foreign to his mind; he can't have taken on even a thin veneer of morality while he was being "used" in the vilest of sexual dens; he can't have absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to which he has been subjected, he can't be expected to bank on the helping hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won't sprout and grow to manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply reverses his every conception of individual duty registered on his brain; and he won't blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won't shrive of blame the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly pronounce him an "incorrigible moron," and passes him up to perdition. Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave, sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction, while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he falls plumb backward, so order prison régimes that they do with and for him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or half-baked, just those things they ought to do?