“You are right,” he said, “those things are all very well but they are not fundamental. None of those things counts a heap towards reformation; the honor system is simply a more sensible, more effective method--it’s a fairer method of preserving discipline, an easier method of running your institutions. It does not touch your real man. It is all a matter of habit. Now take those Dannemora prison fellows with whom I worked in the forests around the prison; they were repeaters, many of them hardened evil doers. And take these fellows here--young fellows--and just hear them talk among themselves, as I had a chance to hear them talk, night after night--nothing but crime. It’s an obsession. Naught else has any interest for them. If it is not their own exploits, then it is the latest from the newspapers (for you don’t suppose all the regulations and punishments on earth can keep the newspapers out of a prison). The only thing they are interested in is crime. Everybody talks crime. How can you reform a fellow whose mental habit is crime? My idea is this: You have got to change their topic of conversation. You’ve got to coax their minds to a higher level. And you can’t just tug at them from above. You have to be taken into their community, into their confidence, you’ve got to be one of them. You must push their thoughts upward from within instead of pulling from above. “My officers are all first class men. They are graduates of schools of agriculture or forestry. And they have all lived in close contact with men. They sleep in the same room, on the same rough bunk in our three-decker, go to bed with the boys, rise with them. Their food is exactly the same--neither different nor more. They do their day’s work just like the boys. Their hardship is no less than that of the boys. And the boys know that and feel it. Now, see, my point is this, I have a right to expect the same thing from the boys that I expect from my men, who are required to undergo the same hardships as the boys. In this way I establish an equality which enables us to get into the community of the boys, and naturally control their conversation and their thoughts. Thus they are really reformed without their knowing it.” The spirit among the boys and the officers was certainly remarkable. They joked, called each other by their first names, and were “kidding” each other at a great rate. I was wondering what would happen when the question of authority arose. I was not disappointed. Alongside the joyous camaraderie, there was a willing recognition of unquestioned authority. “You’ll be up in court, Kid; you went fish’n without permission”, I heard one of them yell to another, and a little later, when one of the recent arrivals wanted to go to the farmhouse to see the incubators, an older member of the colony instructed him in a casual way. “You gotta git p’rmission from Bob first.” “Bob” is Mr. Rosenbluth.