Above all, as things are now, the prison inmate has no chance to learn to conform unless hope is constantly kept before him.  He should be like the convalescing invalid, able from time to time to note his gradual progress in the ability to make the adjustments that are necessary to social beings.  No patient in a hospital could be cured if he were constantly told that he could not get well and should not get well.  His imagination should be enlarged by every means that science can bring to the teaching of man.

First of all there must be individual treatment.  No one would think of putting hundreds or thousands of the ill or insane into a pen, giving them numbers, leaving them so that no capable person knows their names, their histories, their families, their possibilities, their strength or their weaknesses.  Every intelligent person must know that this would inevitably lead to misery and death.  The treatment of men in prison is a much more difficult problem than the care of the physically diseased.  It requires a knowledge of biology, of psychology, of hygiene, of teaching and of life; it needs infinite patience and sympathy; it needs thorough acquaintance and constant attention.  It is a harder task than the one that confronts the physician in the hospital, because the material is poorer, the make is more defective, and the process of cure or development much slower and not so easily seen.

No person is entirely without the sympathetic, idealistic and altruistic impulses, which after all are the mainsprings of social adaptation.  Probably these innate feelings can be found in prisoners as generally as in other men.  It is the lack of these qualities that often keeps men outside the jail.  They “get by” where kindly and impulsive men fail.  A large part of the crime, especially of the young, comes from the desire to do something for someone else and from the ease with which persons are led or yield to solicitation.

The criminal has always been met by coldness and hatred that have made him lose his finer feelings, have blunted his sensibilities, and have taught him to regard all others as his enemies and not his friends.  The ideal society is one where the individuals move harmoniously in their various orbits without outside control.  The governing power of a perfect order in its last analysis must be within the individual.  A perfect system probably will never come.  Men are too imperfect, too weak, too ignorant and too selfish to accomplish it.  Still, if we wish to go toward perfection, there is no other road.

One of the favorite occupations of legislatures is changing punishments in obedience to the clamor of the public.  In times of ordinary tranquility a penalty may even be modified or reduced, but let the newspapers awaken public opinion to crime by the judicious use of headlines and a hot campaign, let the members feel that there is a popular clamor and that votes may be won or lost, and the legislature responds.  This is generally done without reference to the experience of the world, without regard to the nature of man, with no thought of the victim, and with no clear conception of how the legislation will really affect the public.