The question whether prisoners can be reformed is no longer an open one. It is as capable of scientific demonstration as that coal tar, the refuse of the gas works, can be made into saccharin or aniline dyes; that good white paper can be made from unclean rags, and that flowers can be raised from ungainly weeds. The question I have to consider is not the question “Can we reform offenders who come under legal restraint,” but why do we not reform more? One element in the answer may be the character of the prisoner, another the character of the men under whom he is placed, but a third and potential element lies in the defects of our whole legal system. The fact is that a vast number of men who come under the grasp of the law are not reformed because nothing is done to reform them. If you are going to turn rags into paper it is not merely a question of having a good machine at the paper mill and good operators; but you must see that the rags go to the mill and not to the dump.

An engineer was called upon to study the defective water supply of a large city. He found that for years an eight-inch pipe had been diverting water into the sewer which ought to have been filtered and gone into the reservoir. It is so under our legal system. There are streams of life which ought to be filtered and which might be converted, turbulent streams though they are, into light and heat, and power, but which go off into the sewage.