" I quote the concluding sentence of that article
because it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that there
was no getting away from its awful arraignment:--
"While we are asking at this end of the line if it would be quite
fair to the burglar to shut him off from social intercourse with
his betters, the State Reformatory, where the final product of our
schools of crime is garnered, supplies the answer year after year,
unheeded. Of the thousands who land there, barely one per cent kept
good company before coming. All the rest were the victims of evil
association, of corrupt environment. They were not thieves by
heredity; they were made. And the manufacture goes on every day.
The street and the jail are the factories."
Upon the lay mind the argument took hold; that of the official
educator resisted it stubbornly for a season. Two years later, when
one of the School Commissioners spoke indulgently of the burglars
and highway robbers in the two prisons as probably guilty merely of
"the theft of a top, or a marble, or maybe a banana," in extenuation
of the continued policy of his department in sending truants there
in flat defiance of the State law that forbade the mingling of
thieves and truants, the police office had once more to be invoked
with its testimony.
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