the state is responsible

for every crime committed by one of its subjects, because the causes of crime go no further than these: poverty, disease, and ignorance. And since the state collects taxes from its citizens to combat these three scourges, and since no state in the world can or ever will be able to remove these causes from its society, it is only fitting that it treat these scourges and finish them off once and for all when the criminals come into its keeping.

The men of public security and their officers, to whom the guarding of the prisons is entrusted, must fight poverty through industry, by establishing workshops and factories within the prisons to teach trades and put an end to idleness and vagrancy, so that every prisoner may master a craft that will spare him the burden of poverty and ward off from him the pain of want. He will then leave prison with a trade or more in his hands, and in his pocket some money he has saved inside the prison from his labors, and he will return to society a good citizen and never come back to our dark abodes again — for the dignity he has recovered, after having once lost it, will not allow him to give it up anew, and the liberty whose taste he has known with honor and dignity will be too dear to him to sell for corruption.

Positive Reform

Here the essential purpose of the prison and of imprisonment stands revealed, and here the aim of correction and reform appears in its clearest form. Duty likewise requires those responsible for subjects whose liberties are confined to watch over their lives as human beings, and as citizens, sons of society: continuous health supervision must be kept over their bodies, and all the diseases and germs that gnaw at their frames, or share their food, or lodge in their clothing and bedding, must be fought, with unremitting effort to treat them for all the ailments to which they are exposed.

Duty also requires those responsible for national education and instruction — who have not been able, and will not be able, to teach and educate all citizens — to set about teaching and guiding the prisoners by opening schools within the prisons, for these unfortunates are more in need of reading and writing than any others.

And we, the men of public security, who have so long stood in enmity to these men and pursued them, and whom they have so often wished to destroy — these men are, after all, citizens... of the same clay as all mankind, possessed of all the qualities we ourselves possess. Once they understand that we labor to raise their level, watch over their comfort, and do all in our power to lighten the pains that come of confining their liberty, the evil in these very men will melt away, or its edge at least will be dulled, and they will turn — unbidden — onto the straight path.

After today we shall not mock any who alight, against their will, as our guests, nor shall we despise any of our inmates; our clientele are not all criminals by heredity, for every human being is liable to slip and go astray — every thoroughbred stumbles some-time. The best we can do is to reform and to teach, to educate and to correct, to guide and to counsel, and to remember from time to time that "the blue tent has not pitched its ropes over a single head alone"...