Bridewell Revisited.

After holding the position of superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women for seventeen years, Van Walter is now charged with malfeasance and misfeasance in office. In a letter sent to Van Waters by Elliott E. McDowell, Commissioner of Corrections for Massachusetts, twenty-six instances of wrongdoing are cited. In today's thinking anti-social behavior is considered to be the product of unique economic, social and psychological factors existing in each offender's past history. The basic question in the Van Waters case is whether, at the threshold of a-new era in the rehabilitation of offenders, people are prepared to scrap all recent scientific knowledge of the causes of crime and revert to the dark days.