The prevention and cure of crime, the best methods for this, says Frank
B. Sanborn, the political economist of Massachusetts--why “Prison
science is in its infancy, so far as the world at large is concerned.”
Pathetic and humiliating is the tardy advance made in this direction.
Very provoking to the enlightened are the dull indifferences and
frequent hallucination of the community in regard to the treatment of
criminals.
Gradually, however, there has grown up in regard to a large class of
criminals, the so-called “first offenders,” most rapidly in these
United States, and chiefly in the past thirty years, something that may
justly be turned “prison science.”
Its best examples are in the men’s prison at Elmira, which is the
outgrowth of Mr. Brockway’s half century of experience in controlling
and instructing convicts, and in the woman’s prison at Sherborn, Mass.,
lately under the inspiring government of Mr. Johnson.
As yet the criminals of longer habituation in guilt have come but
little under this new development of prison science, except that in
some States they now receive an added sentence when proved to be an
old offender. But the tendency is where crime is best understood,
to establish a small class of “incorrigibles,” for whom perpetual
imprisonment shall be the sentence.
This is on the theory that such can never be safely returned to the
community, upon which they are found perpetually preying, with a
reasonable hope that they can be cured of evil habits. From these,
should be distinguished a much greater class of criminals, who are
temporarily incorrigible, but will yield to the methods, somewhat
prolonged.