Common-sense disciplinary measures visited at once upon such lads, then followed up consecutively to the logical end, would have mended matters for the most of them; and by common sense we refer mainly to natural impositions and deprivations, with the right kind of individual effort for them strongly marked. But no; they were rated as just unthinking boys who were blowing off surplus steam. There was no question about the blowing off of surplus steam, albeit they were not blowing it off unthinkingly. To the contrary, they were calculatingly transferring the ways and means of the thuggish gangster to reformative domain, and scoring with it; scoring with it individually not only, but by "gang" expression in strongholds of the State's social defense. Hence, incipient riot essential in mass manifestations that occur in certain juvenile schools of reform. Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they had been groomed to despise discipline and the State's disciplinary agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it would seem. Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the initial care of the State. By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social, wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay for the spurious stuff of ex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of injured innocence.