The third method by which Society professes to attempt the reclamation of the lost is by the rough,rude surgery of the Gaol.Upon this a whole treatise might be written,but when it was finished it would be nothing more than a demonstration that our Prison system has practically missed aiming at that which should be the first essential of every system of punishment.It is not Reformatory,it is not worked as if it were intended to be Reformatory.It is punitive,and only punitive.The whole administration needs to be reformed from top to bottom in accordance with this fundamental principle,viz.,that while every prisoner should be subjected to that measure of punishment which shall mark a due sense of his crime both to himself and society,the main object should be to rouse in his mind the desire to lead an honest life;and to effect that change in his disposition and character which will send him forth to put that desire into practice.At present,every Prison is more or less a Training School for Crime,an introduction to the society of criminals,the petrifaction of any lingering human feeling and a very Bastille of Despair.The prison brand is stamped upon those who go in,and that so deeply,that it seems as if it clung to them for life.To enter Prison once,means in many cases an almost certain return there at an early date.All this has to be changed,and will be,when once the work of Prison Reform is taken in hand by men who understand the subject,who believe in the reformation of human nature in every form which its depravity can assume,and who are in full sympathy with the class for whose benefit they labour;and when those charged directly with the care of criminals seek to work out their regeneration in the same spirit.
The question of Prison Reform is all the more important because it is only by the agency of the Gaol that Society attempts to deal with its hopeless cases.If a woman,driven mad with shame,flings herself into the river,and is fished out alive,we clap her into Prison on a charge of attempted suicide.If a man,despairing of work and gaunt with hunger,helps himself to food,it is to the same reformatory agency that he is forthwith subjected.The rough and ready surgery with which we deal with our social patients recalls the simple method of the early physicians.The tradition still lingers among old people of doctors who prescribed bleeding for every ailment,and of keepers of asylums whose one idea of ministering to a mind diseased was to put the body into a strait waistcoat.Modern science laughs to scorn these simple "remedies"of an unscientific age,and declares that they were,in most cases,the most efficacious means of aggravating the disease they professed to cure.But in social maladies we are still in the age of the blood-letter and the strait waistcoat.The Gaol is our specific for Despair.When all else fails Society will always undertake to feed,clothe,warm,and house a man,if only he will commit a crime.