Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/139

 REVIEWS.

The School of Character in Prison. By PROFESSOR CHARLES R. HENDERSON. An address before the Chaplains at the National Prison Congress held at Louisville, Ky., 1903. Published in the Annual Volume of Proceedings.

THE address of Professor Henderson is encouraging to plodders in pursuit of prison science, because it is a recognition, from this high religious and educational authority, of the natural and rational, not solely the supernatural and miraculous, in moral reformations, because it must serve to jog along the tardy chaplains who too exclu- sively preach introspection, to the neglect of circumspection ; and because it points indexically beyond the ideal of prison schools to what all prisons ought to be: each a school of character good character.

The author's first principle of methods, for such a school of character "a man must be taught to know what he ought to will " implies, as he has already affirmed in the same address, that " many prisoners have not practical moral discrimination." This view is confirmed by this writer's observations of prisoners ; for of the many thousands so carefully examined none revealed a moral sense in connection with the crime, either preceding, perpetrating, or in retrospection. Such absence of moral discrimination should modify the common estimate of crimes and molar wickedness of criminals, and should teach us the probable uselessness of what the chaplains term " the direct appeal " when unsupported by a moral education. Sennonic appeals to the spiritual life must fail to per- suade the multitude to what is virtuous and honorable ; for it is not in the nature of the mass of prisoners to obey a sense of shame, nor to abstain from vicious things because they are disgraceful, since they live according to the dictates of passion and pursue their own pleasures and the means of gratifying them. Of what is honorable and truly pleasant they have no idea, inasmuch as they never had a taste for it. Good taste is essentially a moral quality is sub- jectively good character; so that the school of character may well

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