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 ‘civilianised’, becoming almost entirely therapeutic, 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 the end itself which for both men was to turn wayward youths into conforming members of industrious workingclass society. 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. Paterson was Elizabeth Fry reincarnate. Rather than re-founding the system as he boasted, he reanimated it and rededicated it to the reformatory ideal. This was just as Hobhouse and Brockway had recommended: taking away the military and disciplinary element and distancing the whole borstal system from the penal.

Paterson 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 was 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’. The number of convicts at Portland had shrunk to around 250 and they could easily be assimilated at Dartmoor. Phantoms of its past haunted the deserted prison. Sentry-boxes lined its grim walls and ‘it was not difficult to imagine that the ghosts of old warders with carbines still kept an alert eye open for escapes’.