This radical reform of principles carries with it a radical
transformation of details. Given an indeterminate segregation, there
should be organs of guardianship for persons so secluded, for instance
permanent committees for the periodical revision of sentences. In the
future, the criminal judge will always secure ample evidence to prove
whether a defendant is really guilty, for this is the fundamental point.
If it is certain that he has committed the crime, he should either be
excluded from social intercourse or sentenced to mate good the damage,
provided the criminal is not dangerous and the crime not grave. It is
absurd to sentence a man to five or six days imprisonment for some
insignificant misdemeanor. You lower him in the eyes of the public,
subject him to surveillance by the police, and send him to prison from
whence he will go out more corrupted than he was on entering it. It is
absurd to impose segregation in prison for small errors. Compensation
for injuries is enough. For the segregation of the graver criminals, the
management must be as scientific as it is now in insane asylums. It is
absurd to place an old pensioned soldier or a hardened bureaucrat at the
head of a penal institution. It is enough to visit one of those
compulsory human beehives and to see how a military discipline carries a
brutal hypocrisy into it. The management of such institutions must be
scientific, and the care of their inmates must be scientific, since a
grave crime is always a manifestation of the pathological condition of
the individual. In America there are already institutions, such as the
Elmira Reformatory, where the application of the methods of the positive
school of criminology has been solemnly promised. The director of the
institution is a psychologist, a physician. When a criminal under age is
brought in, he is studied from the point of view of physiology and
psychology. The treatment serves to regenerate the plants who, being
young, may still be straightened up. Scientific therapeutics can do