Paterson exaggerated when he told a friend that he had found borstal ‘little more than a boys’ prison’ and re-founded it on educational lines. In truth he would build on his predecessor's work. Evolution, not revolution, even though the evolution was rapid and the transformation considerable. As borstal boys after the Great War were no longer being released directly into the armed forces, the institutions could be thoroughly ‘civilianized’, the emphasis being on individualised treatment, education and industrial training. It was the means to achieve the end that differed between the borstal system devised by Ruggles-Brise and that developed by Paterson, not so much the end itself, which for both men largely converged: to turn wayward youths into conforming members of industrious working-class society. In Alec's case, however, there was a further aspiration: some working-class boys could become not only working-class leaders but commanders over the ‘better-born’. Alec knew that there were ‘natural leaders’ in every section of society. There should be no social barrier to success or elevation. Merit was what counted or what should count, as he had observed on the Western Front.

Character-building measures aimed at instilling ‘stern and exact discipline’ through external controls were replaced by methods aimed at changing attitudes through personal example and developing self-respect and self-discipline. Alec Paterson was Elizabeth Fry reincarnate. Rather than re-founding the system as he boasted, he re-animated it and re-dedicated it to the rehabilitative ideal, taking away the military and disciplinary element and distancing the whole borstal system from the penal. The system as he developed it was ‘a reflection, in many ways, of his personality, his experience, and his faith’.

Alec learnt a lesson from the most recent acquisition to the borstal estate: Portland in Dorset. In August 1921, the same month as Ruggles-Brise's resignation, the old convict prison had reopened as the third borstal for boys, although Edward Shortt, the Home Secretary, admitted that had money been no object he would have preferred a custom-built establishment on a different site to this ‘great grey stone fortress’, frowning ‘from its rocky eminence over the English Channel’.