Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
(6) Establish Houses of Reception for first-offending and circumstantial
felons awaiting trial and transfer, and officer those houses, in so far as
may be as to subordinate positions, with graduates of criminological
schools. The houses should be orderly, systematic, sanitary houses, given
over to practicable work, body-building exercises, the single room system,
classification of inmates by room-blocks as well as at recreation by
character, and to all around discipline sufficiently strict to impress
budding lawbreakers at once with the fact that the cost of lawbreaking
mounts to practical confiscation.
Thusly we should hold off the habitual from the occasional offender, and
afford near neophytes the chance to brush elbows with, and study criminals
in, the making.
Thereafter, prospective officers in the making should be advanced to such
correctional institutions as the quality of them, and their attainment
under preliminary instruction and experience, would warrant. And thusly we
should have prisons of last resort manned, as they should be, with
serious-minded officers equipped to serve the State by serving
obliquely-thinking underdogs.
(7) Create the office of Inspector-General of State Correctional
Institutions. Make the position appointive by the Governor, and the
incumbent of it an ex-officio advisory member of boards and commissions
that are classed under penal and correctional heads.
The appointment should be strictly non-partisan, and the appointee one who
had forged his way up from the ground in the work, won deserved
distinction doing it, and who therefore could not be tricked by
high-sounding vagaries, surface practicability, or subterranean
machinations.
Among other things, such a man would search out conflicting activities;
comparative inactivities; unbalance of parts; overlapping positions;
overemphasized and underemphasized discipline; too much of horse-play
irrationally prescribed; not enough of recreation to a rational end; false
classification of inmates in falsely-appointed apartments; defective
hygiene and sanitation; waste of potential and of material whatsoever,
inclusive of food and its values; and the criminological "faker" who
shifts to line his purse and to partake of a cheap notoriety, while he
blinds the public eye with impish platitudes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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