In September 1938 Paterson provided the preface for the posthumously published Notes of a Prison Visitor by Major Gordon Gardiner, one of the first lay visitors at Wormwood Scrubs. For the previous sixteen years the policy of the Commissioners, recognising the deleterious effects of confinement on the personality, had been to invite ‘men of goodwill to visit prisoners weekly in their cells’. More than 600 had taken up the challenge. Gardiner's notes from the years 1922 and 1923 were of ‘inestimable value in giving a picture of the inside of a prison that is without the bias of too close a perspective’ – unlike the accounts written by ex-officials and ex-prisoners. Unusually, ready consent had been given for them to be published. Unusual the publication may have been, unpredictable it was not. The Notes were confirmation of the great claims that the Commissioners had made for the scheme, all the more compelling for coming from the early years of prison reform. The more public awareness of prisons and the Commissioners’ policies, purveyed by ‘objective outsiders’ such as the author, the better. Prison visitors were even encouraged to push for change, particularly in respect of boy prisoners. In March 1935, ‘with the consent and full cooperation of the Commissioners’, they had conducted an inquiry into their lot. It had found that there were over 300 of them, a third of whom were first offenders. Provision for them was poor, contamination inevitable, but ‘one salient fact emerged: the Prison Commissioners were doing all they could against overwhelming odds.’

A few days after Gardiner's book was published Alec addressed a group of women magistrates on ‘the present policy of the Prison Commission’. He reiterated his three points. The cardinal one was ‘to treat the offender as an individual, as a separate and distinct personality, quite different from every other one who is in our charge.’ He quoted Temple's maxim that ‘no man is a criminal and nothing else.’