Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/489

 AMERICAN REFORMATORY SYSTEM 475

in current affairs, present in every normal consciousness, the ground principle so long obscured from our educational systems and religious observances by reason of mediaevalism and insti- tutionalism, so blurred in our common life by excess and artifice, so misused in prison labor systems, is now rallied for its appro- priate use in the scheme for reforming prisoners.

Successful legitimate industrial performance involves native or acquired capacity and disposition for useful work. This in turn demands such development of physical energy that exertion is pleasurable or not painful; it requires a degree of mechanical and mental integrity which verges on morality and, indeed, is of the same essential quality; there must be sufficient dexterity for competitions, and stability equivalent to reliability that insures a commercial value to the services. It is the observation of experience that such an effect can be produced by industrial train- ing; and, moreover, the possession of means, produced by exer- cise of the honest qualities made necessary to successful labor, conveys to the workmen a stimulus as of achievement, the ennoblement of proprietorship, and suggests some sense of solidarity of interests which prompts to prudence, thence to proper fraternity of feeling and conduct. After such a course of training and actual achievement, when the prisoner is sent out, on conditional release, to the situation arranged for him, possessed of his self-earned outfit of clothing, tools, and money, having left behind a margin of his savings to be added to from time to time or drawn upon to meet exigencies ; after his sustained test on parole under the common circumstances of free inhab- itancy, is he not, ordinarily, entitled to reasonable confidence that he will live and remain within the requirements of the laws?

The formation of such a new social habitude is an educational, therefore a gradual, process which requires time as well as practice. Whatever of real value may attend the preaching of disinterested benevolence to the outside general inhabitants, it is, as an independent agency, of little use for a community of common convicts. Such of them as might be moved by such an appeal are, usually, scarcely normal, and their responsive benevo-