Excerpt from The Female Offender Why are our penal methods so helpless and dis comfited in face of the criminal population? Why do the combined efforts of legislators, judges, police, and prisons produce so few practical results? Is it because the social disease with which these agencies are grappling is beyond the reach of human skill, and will continue to rage with unabated virulence so long as social life exists? This deduction is hardly warranted by the facts. The failure of existing methods of criminal legislation and administration is not to be accepted as a proof that the organised forces of society are face to face with an incurable disease in the body politic. All that the failure of our present methods succeeds in establishing is the immediate and imperative necessity of placing our whole penal system upon a more rational foundation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.