DEMOCRACY AND MORAL PROGRESS.

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urgent exhortation must be spoken, therefore, to teachers, preachers, authors, guides of public opinion, on whom the fulfillment of this promise depends. They must work hard if they would counteract the downward tendencies of democratic ideas as vulgarly expounded. Theirs is no holiday task. They are put upon their intelligence and their honor. They seem to be few and far apart in space, but their influence is great, and one bond unites them the desire to lift democracy from the dust and answer cavilers by facts. Our cause the cause of a pure democracy or rule of the people is at stake. Our achievement is in the time to come, not in time past or present. Our victory is yet to win, and it is to be won over those who maintain that the rule of the people in their own behalf is an illusion which experience will rudely dispel. It is for true believers in the republic to prove such a prediction untrue. Where there is no government to prescribe opinion, but only public sentiment, which reflects the controlling mind of the many, the influence of the wisest and best is of the greatest importance. If what has been said is true, the question of the moral import of the democratic system is not a matter of years but of direction, and direction is not the same thing as tendency. Tendency represents unassisted impulse. Direction stands for the utmost that can be achieved by effort. Tendency is the bent of the prevailing will. Direction is the turn of that will to noble ends.

O. B. FROTHINGHAM.

NEEDED REFORMS IN PRISON MANAGEMENT.

REFORMS are needed. The jails of to-day are, with here and there an exception, substantially what Howard in the eighteenth century found jails to be. The fault is largely due to construction. Jails on the "Pennsylvania Plan," supplying separate confinement for each prisoner, will provide the needed reforms for jails. Prisons of later date, designed not only for detention but punishment as well, have scarcely been improved, though of prison associations and boards there are many, and prison congresses, State, National and International, have been held, with their valuable discussions and issue of reports. Prisons for reformation are still of later origin, but they do not reform in any such general and efficient way as to perceptibly affect the volume of recorded crimes. Given the number of the population to the square mile, with absence of war, pestilence, famine, or monetary revulsions, it is said the annual aggregate of crimes in a district may be as accurately foretold as the death-rate of a people can be calculated by Carlisle's tables. Then, there is abroad a popular demand for reforms; the communistic sentiment of the time calls for them, hoping for pecuniary benefits, and the politician echoes the cry for partisan effect, while the press and the populace repeat it from motives selfish or sentimental as the case may be. Finally, the thoughtful, the philan thropic and public-spirited, saddened at sight of so much sin and alarmed at the growth of crime, ask for an advance in both the theory and practice of "crime treatment," that crimes may be diminished and criminals reclaimed. With so much room for reforms, the general demand cannot properly be put aside; there must be underneath it all a common source of good impulse that needs only to be rightly directed.

The first great need in this matter is a better sentiment, among prison governors and the public, as to the true pur

pose of prisons and treatment of criminals for crime. There is an almost universal demand for retaliation, or at best a retributing of evil for evil. What the public sense for the time approves is named justice, but that is often a misnomer: for, under the name of justice, injustice is inflicted upon criminals, and through improper release of confirmed criminals, before or after conviction, society is unjustly dealt with. This popular demand, as expressed in our criminal laws and their administration, is the bane of good government, either encourages the criminal or consigns him to degradation, and tends to confirm rather than cure the criminal traits of character. Could this current sentiment be replaced with the passionless demand that every criminal when once fairly convicted shall be reasonably cured of his criminality as the only condition of freedom again, the primary requisite for reformed prison management would be reached. Neither punishment for the sake of it, nor pardon for the pleasure of it, but punishment and pardon, either or both, when promotive of reformation-that is the only real security society can have from known criminals. Suitable laws and systems of prison management based on such a sentiment will supply the second needed reform, namely: A motive operating powerfully upon criminals to cause them to relinquish their practices and return to regular industry with right use of citizenship.

An analysis of human motives brings us always to avoidance of pain or pursuit of pleasure as the active principle in conduct; but since one man's pain is another's pleasure, and by the marvelous instinctive adjustment to environment the pain of to-day sometimes becomes the pleasure of to-morrow, it is simply impossible by any schedule of predetermined penalties to supply for the mass of criminals an adequate deterrent or reformative motive. The history of crimes and punishments throughout the civilized world sustains the statement of Beccaria, that the public mind becomes habituated to penalties, so that in the space of a hundred years the gibbet terrifies no more than fines or imprisonment. No doubt the innate love of liberty and natural repugnance to the privations of imprisonment are facts with all men, and warrant the general application of imprisonment for crime. It is not possible, however, and therefore not properly the province of legislation, to precisely prescribe either the pains or duration of imprisonment. These, within due bounds, should

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THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

be left to the prison governors, to be determined and varied from time to time for reformation, according to the idiosyncrasy and ever-changing subjective state of the criminal in confinement. Prison governors thus charged with the protection of society from fresh crimes by criminals, through their cure or continued restraint, are clothed with great powers, and should be held to strict accountability. They must not be trammeled by the meddlesome interference of partisanship, whether political or religious. Due protection from criminals, involving as it does their reformation or detention in custody, naturally necessitates a systematic if not positively a scientific treatment, which is only practicable when the prisons are on a plane above, beyond, and outside of partisanship or prejudice. Therefore, the third needed reform is here stated to be the removal of prison management entirely out of the sphere of partisan politics and denominationalism.

Coming now to the more practical reforms, which may be wrought at will when the three above-named general conditions exist, the first to be named is a classification of criminals immured. There has sprung up a kind of natural separation of different classes of criminals, but it is imperfect and ineffective. The sexes in prison are uniformly separated; unless there is an exceptional and exceptionable county-jail where the sexes are allowed to mingle, the principle of sex separation in prison is usually accepted. In some of the States where the color line remains, the separation of whites and blacks is necessary or politic; in European or northern prisons it is unnecessary. The separation of youthful from mature criminals is conceded to be serviceable. The very plausible idea that prisoners should be classified "according to the character and circumstances of the crime" is fallacious, if the object is to protect the novice from the contamination of experienced criminals; for it is a common fact that first offenders are guilty of high crimes and habitual criminals commit venial offenses. The technical title of the crime is not a sure index of the offender's character. There are, of course, professional criminals addicted to particular crimes that call for and develop distinctive traits, but comparatively few criminals are "professionals," and even these turn aside sometimes to crimes of another grade; while all grades of crime attract and engage the youthful and inexperienced. The distinctions of the criminal statutes are based mainly on the amount of damage done, which

NEEDED REFORMS IN PRISON MANAGEMENT,

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is often determined by accident. The same hand and intent may govern the harmless thrust and drive home the deadly stiletto; larceny is of one degree or another according to the opportunity to steal; the burglar breaks and enters usually without thought or knowledge of the statutory definitions determining the grade of his crime. For purposes of classification, conduct in prison, as conduct is generally rated by prison officials, is not a satisfactory criterion, but it is possible to make it so. Under a prison system that gives play to the natural impulses of the prisoner when in contact with conditions somewhat analogous to free society, the fitness for free life may be very accurately ascertained. The experienced prison manager must remember surprises when his good man in prison has gone "to the dogs" on his release, while the troublesome customer has turned out well. All these facts of sex, color, age, crime, and conduct may have an influence in classifying criminals; but none of them, separately considered, constitutes the true basis. It is the real diversity of character among them, to be discerned after the wisest scrutiny and fullest opportunity to apply tests from time to time. The scrutiny must include somewhat of the ancestral history, much of the early environment, and a careful personal examination of the criminal himself as to his physical quality and condition, his mental capacity and culture or unculture, and also his moral susceptibility and his sensitiveness or apathy in view of his crime and its consequences.

Classification may be effected by a general separation of prisoners into two divisions immediately on conviction, either by the sentence of the court or the central governing authority of the prisons themselves, the susceptible to one division, the apparently incorrigible to another, subject to transfer afterward by the prison governors from one division to the other to perfect this general classification. The prisoners of a State may thus be separated in different prison establishments or in a single prison. In the division of susceptibles, the ruling aim in administration would naturally be reformation and early restoration to liberty; and for the other, the incorrigibles, a more rigorous régime would be provided, and probably a longer period of detention would be required. The further classification within the two general divisions and in each separate establishment thereof should be into three grades without separation; that is to say, with limited and supervised association,