a, due to the Modern
Penal School. As long as, in the eyes of the world, the criminal was a
normal individual, who voluntarily and consciously violated the laws,
there could be no thought of a cure, but rather of a punishment
sufficiently severe to prevent his recidivation and to inspire others
with a salutary fear of offending the law.

The penalties excogitated in past centuries were varied: flogging, hard
labour, imprisonment, and exile. During the last century they have been
crystallised in the form of imprisonment, as being the most humane,
although in reality it is the most illogical form, since it serves
neither to intimidate the offender nor to reform him. In fact, although
prison with its forced separation from home and family is a terrible
penalty for those honest persons, who sometimes suffer with the guilty,
it is a haven of rest for ordinary criminals, or at the worst, in no
wise inferior to their usual haunts. There is a certain amount of
privation of air, light, and food, but these disadvantages are fully
counterbalanced by the enjoyment of complete leisure and the company of
men of their own stamp.

If imprisonment does not serve to intimidate instinctive criminals,
still less is it a means of rehabilitation. In virtue of what law,
should any man, even if he be normal, become reformed after a varying
period of detention in a gloomy cell, where he is isolated from the
better elements of society and deprived of every elevating
influence--art, science, and high ideals; where he loses regular habits
of work, the disciplining struggle with circumstances, and the sense of
responsibility natural to free citizens and is tainted by constant
contact with the worst types of humanity?

The autobiographies of criminals show us that far from reforming
evil-doers, prison is in reality a criminal university which houses all
grades of offenders during varying periods; that far from being a means
of redemption, it is a hot-bed of depravity, where are prepared and
developed the germs which are later to infect society, yet it is to this
incubator of crime that society looks for defence against those very
elements of lawlessness which it is actively fostering.

In his book _Prison Palimpsests_ my father has made a collection of all
the inscriptions, drawings, and allegories scratched or written by
criminals while in prison, on walls, utensils, and books. Of
lamentations, despair, and repentance, scarcely a trace, but inn