If he is incapable of reform, he must stay there for his natural life.  He is a free agent.  He can decide to lead an honest life and have his liberty, or he can elect to work for the State all his life in criminal confinement.

When I say that every State prison is to be a reformatory, I except, of course, from its operation, those sentenced for life for murder, or other capital offenses, and those who have proved themselves incorrigible by repeated violations of their parole.

It is necessary now to consider the treatment in the reformatory.  Only a brief outline of it can be given here, with a general statement of the underlying principles.  The practical application of these principles can be studied in the Elmira Reformatory of New York, the only prison for felons where the proposed system is carried out with the needed disciplinary severity.  In studying Elmira, however, it must be borne in mind that the best effects cannot be obtained there, owing to the lack of the indeterminate sentence.  In this institution the convict can only be detained for the maximum term provided in the statute for his offense.  When that is reached, the prisoner is released, whether he is reformed or not.

The system of reform under the indeterminate sentence, which for convenience may be called the Elmira system, is scientific, and it must be administered entirely by trained men and by specialists; the same sort of training for the educational and industrial work as is required in a college or an industrial school, and the special fitness required for an alienist in an insane asylum.  The discipline of the establishment must be equal to that of a military school.

We have so far advanced in civilization that we no longer think of turning the insane, the sick, the feebleminded, over to the care of men without training chosen by the chance of politics.  They are put under specialists for treatment.  It is as necessary that convicts should be under the care of specialists, for they are the most difficult and interesting subjects for scientific treatment.  If not criminals by heredity, they are largely made so by environment; they are either physical degenerates or they are brutalized by vice.  They have lost the power of distinguishing right from wrong; they commonly lack will-power, and so are incapable of changing their habits without external influence.  In short, the ordinary criminal is unsound and diseased in mind and body.

To deal with this sort of human decadent is, therefore, the most interesting problem that can be offered to the psychologist, to the physiologist, to the educator, to the believer in the immortality of the soul.  He is still a man, not altogether a mere animal, and there is always a possibility that he may be made a decent man, and a law-abiding, productive member of society.