Chapter II: Part 2

“Very little here now,” said several delegates at once. “It isn’t needed now, and it’s frowned upon.” Then up spoke one of the huskiest and best proportioned of the Executive Committee of the League. “I’ll be frank,” he said, emphatically. “I’ve taken pretty nearly every kind of dope that’s known. I took it deliberately. Now I don’t need it, and I’ve cut it out.”

“Let me say something else, too,” said another delegate. “There’s mighty little prison vice here now. You know what I mean. Formerly, when we were all locked up for sixteen hours a day, and hadn’t had any decent exercise, or anything to take our minds off of ourselves and our grievances, all sorts of bad things happened. That’s the curse of the old prison regime. It turned out, among other things, a lot of degenerates. Now--well, we get pretty well tired, and our mind’s taken off of ourselves, and we sleep. There’s a good deal, too, in having that sort of thing put under the ban by the fellows themselves.”

One of us then asked, “How about the growing criticism that prisoners are getting to have too easy a time of it? When we tell the public in general about this Fourth of July celebration, many will say that the prisoners are having more fun and an easier time than the honest taxpayer.”

The delegate, in answering, flared up. “Tell those people to try any prison for a while! What’s a prison for? To torture a man, and send him out hating society, and determined to get even for the years he’s spent as the old-line prison made him spend it? Nobody except the fellow that’s been through it knows what being in prison is. Does the public want us to go insane, get tuberculosis, contract wretched vices, rebel in mutinies, live sixteen hours out of twenty-four in a living tomb, and have day-in and day-out a miserable monotony of existence that dulls our minds and makes us hate the State that munificently pays us a cent and a half a day, and then often takes away the earnings of months in one single fine for some offense that the very manner of existence here almost forces us to commit? Why, what is this hour of recreation, anyway? It’s a health measure, a safety measure, a reformatory measure.

“Do you think fellows would commit crime in order to get into prison to have this little pittance of pleasure? Let me tell you that the very people that talk so about putting the clamps on this giving of soft snaps to prisoners don’t know what that other system did to us. Why, there are a lot of fellows here that had made up their minds to pull off another trick just as soon as they got out. Why shouldn’t they? But now we have something else to work for.”

Much of the above conversation occurred at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the League, to which we were invited. It was essentially a novel experience. Here sat, in the warden’s office, and without the warden or any prison official present, a round dozen of convicts, gray-suited and thoroughly in earnest. They discussed prison conditions and prison problems with all the freedom of a board of managers, and with far greater knowledge of actual conditions. Prisoners know more about a prison than does the warden, the warden than does the superintendent of prisons, the superintendent of prisons than do the inspectors, and the inspectors than does the public. Therefore, if the best efforts and the best loyalty of the prisoners can be harnessed up to a reformatory programme of the square deal for both sides, the possibilities of the future loom far larger than have reformatory possibilities in the past.

So Auburn Prison is pointing the way, by an almost revolutionary experiment, to large possibilities in inmate self-government in State prisons and reformatories. As I write these lines the newspapers bring a word of a similar Saturday afternoon passed in sports for the first time in the history of Sing Sing. Within the last week the State Reformatory of New Jersey, at Rahway, has adopted tentatively a modified form of inmate self-government. Great Meadow Prison, in New York State, which has been for several years the conspicuous honor prison of the eastern part of the country, marched its six hundred men down to the baseball game on July Fourth, a half-mile from the prison, under inmate overseers.

Self-government, to the limit of its possibilities, is almost a fetish with Mr. Osborne. For many years he was President of the Board of Trustees of the George Junior Republic; there he became convinced that self-government is workable not only for youngsters but for older delinquents.

In the old-line prison the ever-present dread of the traditional warden was an escape. His career was judged largely by his ability to suppress escapes and frequently by his ability to suppress public knowledge of the methods he used to keep order. Today the warden is judged able or poor partly by his ability to develop men out of his prisoners, men who on going out will make good. The entire theory of the old-line prison construction was based on the principle that any prisoner would escape if he could, and use desperate means of so doing. The bars and steel-work that you see everywhere in prisons throughout the country show how ingrained the theory has been. But up at Great Meadow, where the bulk of the prisoners roam unattended by guards at their work during the day, it is almost ridiculous to see them securely caged behind several strata of tool-proof steel at night.

In the last few years demonstrations in scores of prisons and other correctional institutions have shown that, if given the chance, when on honor, the prisoners won’t run away. The old adage of “honor among thieves” has taken on an entirely new meaning. It is now “honor among thieves toward the State that trusts them.”

The power of discipline in the League is very limited. The only punishment is suspension or elimination from the League. Such action is delegated to the Executive Committee of the League. Actually, this exclusion from the body politic--since almost every prisoner is a member of the League--carries with it two important disadvantages. It stamps the excluded inmates as _anti-social, not only to the prison administration, but to the body of prisoners_. Secondly, it bars the prisoner from enjoying the freedom privileges that the League enjoys. Therefore the power of suspension, be it for but a few days, has real force. The powers of discipline given to the League by the warden have not been accurately fixed as yet. The warden has told the League that all minor cases of discipline could be punished by them; wisely, I think, the officers of the League have not been desirous of punishing.

So that at present men are turned back to the prison authorities by the League for violation of the League discipline. The theory is that these men will be put back under the old discipline of silence and confinement, because they are no longer members of the League. The main body of the prisoners have then no official interest in them, so that the suspension involves practically a return to the old prison routine.

Recently a new Board of Delegates has been elected, and one of their first acts was to adopt a probation system instead of the definite sentence, in the cases of offenders against the League. A committee of parole has been established, which shall visit the suspended men at least once a week, and as soon as the committee thinks that the state of mind of the suspended men warrants the action the Parole Committee recommends to the Executive Committee the restoration of the men to the full privileges of the League.

“A big test is coming,” said one delegate, “when the members of the League go out. It will be up to them to justify by their conduct after prison the principles they accepted here and the privileges they received.” And the story was told us of one young man who was the first of the delegates to receive his release from prison. He is said to have made a hard fight to stay straight, mainly because he didn’t want to “put the League in bad” by having one of its officers go crooked.

And here opens up still another far-reaching possibility. Why should not the members of the League, once released from prison, form committees in the various cities and communities of the State for the purpose of helping the still later ones who come out of Auburn to make good? Heretofore the best that we of the Prison Association of New York have achieved has been to employ big-hearted and sympathetic parole officers--real friends of the released inmates. And we have scored good success. But it has been always a case of supervision and encouragement by the officer.

And so this was the proposition which we members of the Board of Managers of the Prison Association made to the Executive Committee of the League: “Will you co-operate with us in helping released prisoners from Auburn make their parole satisfactorily? Will you have small groups of ex-League members ready in various parts of the State to work with our county committees to the one end of tiding and helping the discharged and released prisoner over the hard months that immediately follow his release?”

With enthusiasm the suggestion has been accepted. One delegate spoke up: “I’m going out next month. I don’t know where I’ll get work, but I’m willing to go anywhere the League sends me. I’m willing and eager to give my life to this work, if I’m wanted!”

Such, briefly, is a picture of the Mutual Welfare League. That it is significant in its possibilities no one can doubt. What its outcome will be a year from now it would be hazardous to forecast. It may be but a burst ahead of the general humanitarian movement that characterizes prison reform throughout the country. It may be that when the altruistic enthusiasm that now holds the more thoughtful members of the League wanes, as wane it will to some extent, there will come a slump, and an arrogance of demand for more privileges that will give to the reactionary among prison administrators a chance to say, “I told you so!”

But I much doubt it. The greater danger will come from possible stupidity of prison administration, a change perhaps of authority at the prison, and a consequent lack of sympathy with the purpose of the League.

One thing seems sure. Prisons and reformatories will not go back to the old-line repressive and often brutal treatment. The transition to what will ultimately become the new treatment of delinquents is being attended by various experiments, often startling and sometimes amazing. We are not a Nation that thinks for a long time before acting in prison reform. Our successes have come so far largely from experimenting, retaining the successes and scrapping the failures. How much of the honor system, the back-to-the-land movement, the road-work movement, and the increasing classification of prisoners will be scrapped, it is much too early as yet to say.

The final test will probably be along two lines. We shall determine how the “new freedom” works within prison walls, applying the acid tests of health, increased efficiency in labor, reformative value, education, and general training for a decent life in society. We shall also have to show, if we are friends of the “new freedom,” that such treatment within the prison produces a larger number of permanent reformations after prison, a higher percentage of those who make good.

In short, the ultimate test is going to be not the increased possibility afforded the prisoner of enduring his prison term, nor yet the increased ease of administration of correctional institutions, but fairly and squarely as to whether society, from which all these prisoners come, and which has been the sufferer by them, is to be permanently better protected from their further depredations by giving them what today seems to be a square deal within the prisons, and a decent chance to make good after they come out.

EVENTS IN BRIEF

[Under this heading will appear each month numerous paragraphs of general interest, relating to the prison field and the treatment of the delinquent.]

_Road Work and Farm Work by Convicts_--(In the clipping service of _The Delinquent_, road work and farm work by prisoners has become the most frequent single item of news. All over the country prisoners are working, or are “being worked.” We cite this month a number of items, taken at random, and showing the wide scope of the movement to use prisoners for out-door occupations that will benefit the community and the men also).

The first gang of convicts from Sing Sing prison are working on Catskill roads, and are camping. Most of them are short-term men.... In Pennsylvania, at Bellefonte, it is expected that the State will raise 10,000 bushels of wheat and 5,000 tons of hay on the State prison farm.... A bill providing that Federal prisoners kept in State penitentiaries or jails may be used for improving the public roads of any State has been introduced into the House of Representatives.... 20 prisoners have been at work in Franklin county, N. Y., and are netting $20. a day to the taxpayers, putting in stone roads.... The State prison of Wisconsin is running two prison camps. The preliminary work in constructing the new industrial home for women is being done by the prisoners, making the roadbed, building a railroad spur, laying the sewer system, digging the tunnels and otherwise excavating. The workers wear khaki trousers, work shirts, overalls and straw hats. The road the other camp is working on is the regulation road with a fifteen-foot macadam driveway.... At Ames, Iowa, the convicts have had a “raise” in wages, as a result of their first week’s showing. They were receiving twenty cents an hour; now they get twenty-five. They have been working for the Iowa State College, first doing “odd jobs” around the institution, then oiling and cutting roads. “Adams, the guard with the men, is virtually losing his job as guard and becoming merely time-keeper for the bunch.” ... There are now three road camps in New Jersey, with 40, 60, and 60 men respectively. The State Road Department has a large appropriation for hiring prisoners to improve the roads of the State.... At the farm of the New York City Reformatory for Misdemeanants, now under construction in Orange county, the results are as follows: “Two hundred tons of hay and two thousand bushels of potatoes already. A promise of ten thousand tons of fresh vegetables each season.” This farm was started only last spring, and less than fifty young fellows have been at work on it. The produce is shipped to the Department of Correction in New York City.... Sussex county, N. J., requires its prisoners to work on the roads.... Warden Sanders, of Iowa State Prison, has 175 prisoners at work on farms near Fort Madison. With a big auto truck he can take gangs of laborers thirty or forty miles from the Penitentiary where help is needed.... At Auburn Prison, N. Y., a road camp of long-term men has been established, and the prisoners to be sent out in this camp have been chosen by the Mutual Welfare League, who stand sponsor for their good work while outside. Several men of the gang had never seen an automobile.... In Mesa county, Colo., prisoners in the county jail will next summer be allowed to choose whether they will make hay, build or repair roads. This summer it was hay or the rockpile.... Dr. O. F. Lewis, general secretary of the Prison Association of New York, has issued a public statement supporting the plan of Commissioner Davis to establish a municipal farm of 500 acres on land reclaimed from the sea in Long Island Sound, to be worked by prisoners of the Department.... Only one desertion from the Ames, Ia., prison camp had been reported up to July 22.... Residents of Tybee, Ga., have petitioned the county commissioners to use convicts in building roads.... Governor Major of Missouri will ask the next legislature to purchase a farm of at least 1,000 acres across the river from the State penitentiary, for the production of vegetables and meats. He estimates that 400 convicts could be employed. Contracts under the contract system expire at the end of this year.... Provisions of a bill before the Georgia legislature are that the county chain gang shall work four months of each year within the city limits of Macon, under the direction of the mayor and council.... A survey of the proposed prison farm of Ohio has been made by students of the engineering department of Ohio State University. The farm consists of 1,455 acres.... Jefferson county, N. Y., is contemplating purchasing a county jail farm.... The sheriff of Washington county, N. Y., is using a garden for prisoners’ labor, partly because “weeding an onion bed is about the most tiresome work you can put a tramp to, and you won’t see the fellow again after his term expires.”... The North Carolina Good Roads Association resolved in July that all State convicts who are suitable for road work should be used in the construction of public roads.... Prisoners from Great Meadow Prison, N. Y., are building a State road in the Adirondacks.... The Lancaster, Pa., Automobile Club asks convict labor for public roads.... Fifty more prisoners have been sent to the State Prison Farm of New Jersey. Ultimately about 300 prisoners will be busy there. There will be about 2,000 acres of land to cultivate.... Governor Stuart of Virginia has pointed out that there are 1,056 men in the jails of Virginia of whom no work is required, and he has urged the several State departments interested in the matter to consider ways and means to get these prisoners out on the roads.... It has been estimated that the State of Ohio has realized 88.8 per cent. profit in raising cattle on the penitentiary farm. 278 head of cattle were bought for 8 cents a pound in Chicago. It is estimated that the total gain of the cattle, which will be sold to State institutions, will be about $4,500. A large dairy will be established on the farm.... From the District of Columbia Workhouse Farm, which received a maintenance appropriation this last year of $130,000, $60,000 will be returned in revenue, coming from the sale of brick manufactured on the farm.... The city of Washington has purchased 1,800 more acres on which to build a reformatory farm.... Superintendent Peyton, of the Indiana State Reformatory, wants to teach his inmates scientific farming, after the foundry contracts expire in November, 1915.... Thomas Mott Osborne has been spending several weeks, working with the prisoners, at several of the Auburn Prison camps.... City prisoners in Burlington, Ia., will again work on the streets. Sometime ago the prisoners were removed, but it was found that the city was the loser thereby, and that the prisoners wanted to work on the streets.... West Virginia is working State prisoners on roads.... The Sheriff of Suffolk county, N. Y., says that a prison farm is a necessity, and he has started to get one.... A life convict has run away from the honor camp at Auburn prison.... It is claimed that at least a dozen prisoners have escaped in the last few months from the New Jersey State prison farm.... Motion pictures showing convict road builders from the State penitentiary of Colorado at work will be taken in a few days on the Boulder Canon road....

(And the list might be continued almost indefinitely. The above notes are from clippings received during the first two weeks of August).

_Important Resignations Announced_--A number of important changes are taking place in executive positions in well-known prisons and reformatories. Warden Wolfer is shortly to leave the Minnesota State Prison. Warden Bridges has resigned from his long service at the Massachusetts State Prison, Warden Brown has been succeeded in West Virginia by State Senator M. Z. White. Chairman Frank L. Randall of the Massachusetts Prison Commission is said to be resigning on September 1st, Superintendent Reid of the Minnesota State Reformatory is to take Warden Wolfer’s place, and Henry K. W. Scott, formerly warden of the New Hampshire State Prison, is to go to the position left vacant by Superintendent Reid.

Henry Wolfer has been in prison work 43 years. He began, says the Minneapolis Tribune, in a day when filth, vermin, brutality and torture were prominent features of prison life. He ends it as warden of a prison declared by many authorities to be one of the finest in the world. Warden Wolfer began as guard at Joliet Prison as a boy of 18. A recent number of the Delinquent ( ) contained an article about the Warden’s remarkable work as an administrator and as a business man.

Warden Bridges has been 21 years at the Massachusetts State Prison. The Boston Herald says that when he took hold, conditions were chaotic. The Warden has made a specialty of inmate education. The correspondence courses, run entirely within the prison, are noteworthy. The prison paper, the Mentor, is written entirely by hand, and facsimiled. The prison is a congregate, old, cramped structure. Recently, sports have been developed in the limited prison yard.

Warden Brown of the West Virginia Penitentiary seems to be making a place for another appointee. The Wheeling, W. Va., Intelligencer, says that the prison is losing the best and ablest executive it ever had. He had in three and a half years renovated the sanitary system, improved discipline, abolished corporal punishment, elevated the standard of the prison school, turned over to the State (by contract labor) $120,000 above expenses, instituted a prison savings bank, with $35,000 in prisoners’ earnings for the overtime work, and has developed a prisoners’ aid society for helping the families of convicts. He has also developed two camps.

Whether Chairman Randall of the Massachusetts Prison Commission is to leave Massachusetts is at the time of writing unsettled. Rumor has it that he has been seriously disappointed at the practically absolute failure of his extensive prison reform program to pass the Legislature, and also at the failure of the Legislature to appropriate an increase in salary which he was given to understand would occur this year, in view of the fact that he left Minnesota last year at considerable financial sacrifice. There is no question that Massachusetts will be a serious loser, if Mr. Randall goes. There seems also a certain amount of hostility toward an “imported” penologist. This is a sad attitude of mind, but not confined solely to Massachusetts.

_Extension Courses of California University in Folsom Prison._--The report of the university extension director, in charge of the work at Folsom Prison, is interesting:

“We began in January, and the official enrollment is now 324 students. As I soon found that many of the men had brains no better developed than those of a child of 8 years, classes were formed in elementary English, German and arithmetic.

“The teaching is done by convicts who have proved themselves fitted for the positions, 15 being on the staff. Aside from financial reasons, this was done because the prisoners need teachers who are in sympathy with them.

“All are not permitted to take the school work; some because of conduct, others because they are unable to keep up to the required standard; still others do not wish to take it. Any man who is unprepared twice in succession is dropped from the class. Many failed on this account when the work was first began as they were using it merely as an excuse to get out of their prison duties.

“A man often wants to follow a profession or trade to which he is unsuited. Whenever one comes to me asking help in learning a trade, I find out what trade or profession he is best suited for.”

When asked if the convicts appreciated the work, Mr. Jacobs’ face lighted up. “They do now,” he said. “My hand is still sore from the greetings they gave me when I returned from a trip East, but they tried all sorts of tricks to get men when the work was first started.”

_Funds for Deserted Wives._--According to the Pittsburg Times, Pennsylvania’s law which went into effect a year ago, providing payment to wives of men committed to the workhouse for non-support and desertion during the time the husband is serving his sentence, is proving a wonderful aid to women of Allegheny county, as proved by a record of the first year’s results. About $5,200 has been paid to 107 women since July, 1913, when the law went into effect, the average having been $12.50 for each woman.

Lawrence M. Fagan, probation officer in Allegheny county, through whose hands these funds went, is enthusiastic. “It’s been an excellent thing,” he said, “an arrangement which has solved a problem that has confronted probation officers ever since the first man was sent to prison for non-support. Previously the wives were no better off while a man was in jail than they had been before and often were much worse off. They had nothing at all coming in in most cases. Seldom did they receive more than their earnings which in no case were large.”

These women now can expect help each month. Every man is credited 65 cents a day for every day he works and the money is given his wife. This has amounted to $17.45 a month in some cases, although often it has only been a few dollars, but in every case it has been received with great welcome.

Mr. Fagan explained that men are sent to the workhouse only as a last resort. They are generally given a chance to support their families after being arrested for the first time and then if they fail they are committed to prison. The payments have averaged $400 from this source alone.

The general funds that pass through the hands of the probation officer from husbands who are supporting their families on order of the court, with the probation office as an intermediary, and from the workhouse to wives, reached $55,500 during the past six months. During June alone the total was $10,600.

NOTES.

An autobus has been installed to carry prisoners from New York City to Sing Sing prison. This will do away with the necessity of marching prisoners from the station at Ossining to the prison, a distance of about half mile. The prison is thirty miles from New York.

* * * * *

A hospital for tubercular convicts is to be established at the Maryland State Penitentiary, an appropriation of $35,000 having been made by the legislature. A prison school is also having excellent success.

* * * * *

Prison contracts are to be continued “indefinitely” in the New Jersey State prison, according to the Bayonne, N. J., Review of July 2d, because there are not sufficient funds for the installation of the State-use system. About 1,500 convicts are employed at the prison. Were the contracts permitted to lapse, the prisoners would be idle.

* * * * *

The county commissioners of Beaufort county, N. C., have voted that convicts on the county roads may be whipped. “The superintendent shall keep in his possession a lash 18 inches long, attached to a stick 18 inches long and not more than two inches in diameter, and said lash may split three times half-way from the end,” according to the resolution. No convict may be whipped more than once during two consecutive days, shall not receive more than 25 lashes at one whipping, and must not be beaten on the neck or head. (We append these details, because relics of barbarism should also be recorded in the Delinquent. Ed).

* * * * *

Out of a total of 1,478 prisoners confined in the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania 1,008 have signed a petition which will be submitted to the next legislature asking Statewide prohibition.

* * * * *

The old State prison at Stillwater, Minn, was practically abandoned on July 31st, when the last shoe contract expired. Hereafter all work at the Stillwater (new) prison will be done for the State.

* * * * *

During July some riots of considerable seriousness occurred on Blackwell’s Island, New York City. Indictments for assault in the second degree have now been returned against the five ringleaders in the riots at the Penitentiary on July 8th. A maximum sentence of five years is attached to conviction.

STATEMENT OF THE OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, ETC. of THE DELINQUENT,

Published monthly at New York, N. Y., required by the Act of August 24th, 1912.

NAME OF POST OFFICE ADDRESS
Editor, O. F. Lewis, 135 East 15th St.,
New York City
Managing Editor, O. F. Lewis, 135 East 15th St.,
New York City
Business Manager, O. F. Lewis, 135 East 15th St.,
New York City
Publisher, The National Prisoners’ Aid Association, 135 East 15th St.,
New York City
Owners, The National Prisoners’ Aid Association, 135 East 15th St.,
New York City

There are no bondholders, mortgages, or other security holders. O. F. LEWIS, Editor and Business Manager.

Sworn to and subscribed before me this 27th day of March, 1914.
H. L. McCORMICK, Notary Public No. 6, Kings County.
My Commission expires March 31, 1914.

Transcriber’s Notes

A number of typographical errors were corrected silently.

Issue number corrected from 7 to 8.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.