In the first place, no set of men have legal authority to build to corrective procedure that runs counter to the binding predicates of penal law. Secondly, no man has call to conclude that he can devise safer checks upon the marauding criminal than are those written into penal codes, out of the cumulative judgment and experience of mankind. Nevertheless, the single-seeing and idiosyncratic practically have controlled discipline in most of America's prisons during recent decades. Besides, they have specified for overdrawn activities in essence banal and baldly opposed to actual reformative measures, maimed in the process to the point of practical disuse. Time was when managerical members of institutional staffs demanded that "up for parole" prisoners shall have sustained saving trades and scholastic averages. Now, gentlemen mostly have their eyes glued to sporting schedules and conduct records, the one of which commonly cross reformation; and the other of which are at no time reliable guides on which to base the free-life intentions of intelligent prisoners. The result is hodgepodge of cross-matched correction, little of which escapes knowing condemnation, and less of which is strung to the keynote of reformative harmony. The keynote of reformative harmony is struck in a prison régime that ministers meticulously to marketable knowledge and skill. This, unmoved by the counter machinations of the minority of the mass, expressed either individually or collectively; indeed, collective manifestations against the like of insistence upon fairly-won averages throughout the system, should be met at their inception by the State with power so impressive as to make repetition of such opposition highly improbable. Failure thereof to take up disciplinary stitches in time, is what ultimately works mob mischief. As a matter of fact, radical resistance to rational measures seldom issues in a correctional plant that is consistently dedicated to those measures under an all-around square deal. Contrariwise, that institution is always ripe for disciplinary loot, wherein disruptive privileges and perquisites are heaped upon inmates who do not earn them. There is no satisfying such laggards with gratuitous largesse. The more yielded to them, the more they demand. Furthermore, once having yielded to them way beyond that which should have been yielded, it takes years to get back to the normal again--if at all. Basic reformative cogs can be slipped in a second out of purblind vision not, so to put it, within the focus of comprehension: whereas readjustment resolves into a long, hard pull, up hill all of the way. In one of the writer's many talks with Mr. Z. R. Brockway, relative to the capital matter in question, Mr. Brockway let fall this cryptic conclusion: "I've tried it out every known way, and I say: _don't do the first darn-fool thing_."