They are not in ignorance, for the highest authorities know perfectly well that every year many hundreds of helpless and hopeless degenerates or defectives are committed to prison and tabulated as habitual criminals.

Our authorities even keep a list on which is placed the names of these unfortunates who, after prolonged experience and careful medical examinations, are found to be "unfit for prison discipline." This list is of portentous length, and to it four hundred more names are added every year.

This is of itself an acknowledgment by the State that every year four hundred unfortunate human beings who cannot appreciate the nature and quality of the acts they have committed, are treated, punished and graded as criminals.

Now the State knows perfectly well that these unfortunates need pity, not punishment; the doctor, not the warder; and some place where mild, sensible treatment and permanent restraint can take the place of continual rounds of short imprisonment alternated with equally senseless short spells of freedom.
No! not freedom, but a choice between starvation, prison or workhouse.
Now this list grows, and will continue to grow just so long as the present disastrous methods are persisted in! Why does this list grow?
Because magistrates have no power to order the detention of afflicted youthful offenders in any place other than prison; they cannot commit to reformatory schools only on sufferance and with the approval of the school managers, who demand healthy boys.
So ultimately to prison the weaklings go, and an interminable round of small sentences begins.

But even in prison they are again punished because of their afflictions, for only the sound in mind and body are given the benefit of healthy life and sensible training.
Consequently in prison they learn little that can be of service to them; they only graduate in idleness, and prison having comforts but no terrors, they quickly join the ranks of the habitues.