“I am not losing sight of the purpose of imprisonment both to stamp crime as crime and to protect society from the criminal. I am only advocating the thought of reform for which this Association stands. If a man is a murderer condemned to die, then there is the overwhelming duty and responsibility of bringing him to repentance, that he may die forgiven. If he is serving a sentence indeterminate or for a fixed time, then surely the influence and effort of prison discipline must be not to harden him into sullen hatred of law and of all that the law stands for, not in a harbored purpose to revenge himself in some way, when once he is free, upon the society which has condemned him; but to waken in him such a sense of shame as shall force him back to the possibility of self-respect, and bring him to that point of realized wrong by means of which he shall ‘come to himself.’ That is the Master’s own description of the prodigal son. Far as he had strayed from his father’s house, he had strayed farther from his real self, the self of his innocent childhood, the self of his home and surroundings, the self of his true nature, and it was when the true man wakened in him that, coming first to himself, he came next to his father’s house. “In this recognition of the criminal’s sin there must be enforced the discipline of penalty, and of penalty as punishment, but it must be carefully dealt with, so as in no sense to convey the thought of retribution or of vindictive retaliation. The strides of progress which have been made in the last century and a half under the methods of such real reformers as Howard and Wines (whom, as a boy, I remember very well), and Elizabeth Fry and Dorothy Dix, have, among other things, set the stamp of this idea in the fact that capital punishment, which used to be inflicted for many crimes, is reserved to the one for which it was divinely ordered, and from which, I trust, it will never be taken away, namely, the sin of shedding another’s blood. Meanwhile, more and more, in the selection of wardens, in the appointment of chaplains, in the abolition of the fearful cruelties of physical torture, in the decent sanitation of prisons, we have grown more and more to realize that the condemned criminal is to be treated as a man who needs protection, systematic discipline, the training of the prison, to protect him from himself, to put into him the purpose and set before him the possibility of a better life, rather than to humiliate and crush him into desperation and despair. It is quite true that no amount of legislation and no method of enforcing laws can make a man moral, but it is also true that the law which defines and punishes sin deters men from the commission of crime, and when the criminal is condemned and sentenced and his punishment begins, only the power of religion can reach him to convince him of his sin, to convert him from his habits, to reach the motives of his life, to change the tendency of his will,