At last, in the seventh chapter, the author describes the Oaklawn School for Girls; the juvenile female reformatory whose wards might have lived, by his observation, under the credo of “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

“The idea of spanking the bare bottom of a girl sixteen to eighteen years of age, versed in the knowledge of the male sex, and a woman in all of her biological reasonings and demands, was certainly a demeaning procedure,” he says, while the isolation cell, with its barred windows and solid doors, “was the result of too much dormitory intrigue and love-making on the part of the girl.”

When, in 1908, isolation became a necessity for keeping the younger children from “the older girls, whose misdemeanors were of a deeper dye,” the Eastman Cottage was built on the School’s grounds. Later, in 1924, it was here, at a distance from the main building and surrounded by a high fence, that the “Girls’ Colony” was formally opened for a group of inmates who were known to be misfits in the other institutions, and “problem girls” from the Exeter School for the Feeble-Minded.

Between these descriptions, and throughout each chapter, Dr. Jones’ stories go on and on; of the reformed prostitute, disfigured by fire and reduced to destitution when she drunkenly burned down a halfway house while celebrating her release from the House of Correction on the eve of her wedding; or of the prison Warden, a Civil War General, who fired his revolver at a sleeping guard — just missing his head — to wake him to duty; or that of the young kitchen worker, an escaped prisoner, whom the Doctor ran afoul of one morning on Howard Avenue and disarmed him of a butcher’s knife by tricking the fellow into giving up his weapon.