Jack Woodford

It has been said that youngsters go to jail to learn crime as others go to college to learn who won the Peloponnesian wars and the names of the generals, and how to play football.

It’s true. All penitentiaries are crime schools for the young with brilliant professors, empirical professors, doing the pitching. How any criminal could go to such a school and fail to come out a better criminal, I cannot imagine — because the teaching and the ideas are brilliant, even if in most cases the premise stinks, as in paranoia. 

It would be hard for a you gster to see wherein the premise is faulty. A class in just this in the educational department would be a very good idea.

For instance, one thing youngsters are taught by old cons is that it is vaguely wrong to steal from individuals; but that to heist a corporation is the acme of Robinhoodesque virtue. It does not occur to the youngsters that corporations are composed of individuals.…

Jack Woodford, on prison life in his personal report on his short time incarcerated, Home Away From Home (1962), p. 194.