Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/110

94 same reason that demands the forcible confinement of persons affected by violent insanity or contagious disease, whom it is dangerous to the community to have at large; so the protection of the community constitutes the sole motive and justification for putting a convict in prison. Such protection is secured so long as the incarceration continues. But incarceration differs in its effect from quarantine against contagion, for example. When the quarantine has continued long enough, the danger of contagion often becomes extinct. Mere incarceration, however, no matter how long it continues, has no tendency to produce any improvement in the character of the convict; on the contrary, experience shows that its tendency is hardening and demoralizing. Imprisonment without reformative training affords protection to the public only so long as it lasts; and when the convict is discharged, he becomes the source of greater danger to the community than ever before. Reformation alone yields a protection which is both effective and lasting.

All this is rudimentary and not calculated to excite serious discussion. The only difficulty is in a widespread incredulity as to the possibility of reforming a convict by any measure of prison discipline. The reformation of a criminal is popularly regarded as a visionary delusion, a chimera. This skepticism is susceptible of ready explanation; it rests upon the total lack of popular information regarding the reformative methods that have been tested and approved, and regarding the results that have been actually attained. These methods and their supposed operation are generally viewed as a recondite subject, not easy of comprehension, the fabric of fanciful ideals by optimistic and unpractical philanthropists.

In fact, however, the principles underlying reformative measures are quite simple, and the methods used in their application have been developed by experiment and by careful observation of the tangible results. Nothing can be more practical than the modern reformatory system of treating convicts; and the evolution of that system has proceeded along lines strictly scientific scientific in the sense that every step in the development of the system has been tested by the practical effects of actual