Society And Prisons. By Thomas Mott Osborne.  Yale University Press, New York, 1916. Pp.  246. Price, $1.35.

This book consists of the William Earl Dodge Yale lectures on the Responsibility of Citizenship, delivered by Mr. Osborne during the current year. Their substance is, in the main, the setting forth of his views on crime and criminals and the function of the prison in society. These views are for the most part already familiar to many who have taken note of what has been going on at Sing Sing Prison, and the reviewer will not discuss them in detail; in fact the book would ordinarily not be reviewed in the pages of the psychoanalytic review because it is not a psychoanalytic subject, nor is it approached from a psychoanalytic point of view, except that it does demonstrate certain principles that are fundamental in the art of living.

Mr. Osborne's big idea is that in order that the prisons may serve to rehabilitate the prisoner and send him back to the community as a useful citizen it must prepare him for his life after discharge from prison by producing conditions within the prison as nearly as possible like those outside with respect more especially to the matter of personal responsibility; in other words, he believes, and has attempted through the medium of his Mutual Welfare League, to throw the responsibility of self-government upon the prisoner. Of course all of this has been gone over before, but the vital error he finds in previous experiments of this sort is that the experiment has only carried out the principle of self-government in form and not in substance — that the prisoners actually must be permitted to establish their own scheme of government, and to carry it out with practically no interference from the warden's office. Only under these circumstances, where authority and responsibility are commensurate, can there be borne home to the soul of the prisoner those distinctions between right and wrong upon which the orderly conduct of society is founded.