Chapter II: Act IV: Judication

Condemnation
Long Vacation
“Rats.”

* * * * *

_Antiquated Methods at Fall River._—The citizens of Fall River, Mass., have recently been aroused by a revelation of conditions prevailing in the central station house of that city. Because of the lack of modern detention quarters, children, women and men of all degrees of vice are crowded together in a common compartment. A clergyman, who investigated the place, says:

“I found two children there, a boy and a girl, about twelve years of age. At night the station filled up with its inevitable horde of drunkards and offending women, whose language, if not immediate presence, was forced upon these children. I called upon the boy on Sunday and found him the companion of the loose women whose cases were to be heard in court Monday morning. I have nothing to say in regard to the accommodation of the men and women who must needs be shut up. But I think the treatment accorded to these children was outrageous.

“Why were they there? For the inexcusable, the damnable reason, that there was nothing else to be done with them. I am not criticising the officers of the central station. They are extremely kind to these children. It is the city of Fall River that is responsible. The community is committing an offence against children. If the city, as by all means it should, will take in hand either to punish or reform little children, it ought to make provision to properly accommodate such.”

* * * * *

_Convict Labor in Colorado._—The rapidly spreading custom of employing convict labor on the roads is strongly indorsed by the experience of Governor Shafroth of Colorado. Under the Colorado system, Governor Shafroth says:

“The prisoners, in large gangs and with but two overseers in charge, work on the state roads, and at times are two hundred miles distant from the penitentiary. There is no confinement, guards or other precaution, yet during the past year there was a net loss of only two men by escape. In one instance a piece of road was constructed through solid rock for $6,000, that would have cost $30,000 under the contract system.”

That the convicts are reconciled to the conditions, the Governor explains is due to a law providing that the time of every prisoner is commuted ten days for every thirty he works upon the roads, and the penalty of three years added to the original term of very convict who escapes, in case he is recaptured. The convicts are in better health than they can possibly be when kept in prison, and work harder than men who are paid by the day.

* * * * *

_Prison Verse._—“Verses of Hope” is the title given to a book of poems, written by prisoners at the Kansas state prison, and published under the direction of the chaplain.

I wonder now that parents ever fret
At little children clinging to their feet;
Or that the racket, when the day is spent,
Brings angry words to them so pure and sweet;
Oh, if I could find a muddy shoe,
Or cap or jacket on my prison floor;
If I could mend a broken cart today,
Tomorrow make a kite to reach the sky,
There is no man in all God’s world could be
More blissfully content than I.

* * * * *

I sometimes think I’d rather be forgot
Than be remembered by the things I’ve done
I’ve often wished my name was but a blot,
On mortal scrolls of battles lost and won.
Or rather still I’d like to be a child,
As innocent as in those other days,
If from stern duty’s path I was beguiled,
Ere I had reached the parting of the ways.
But still I see the folly of my fears,
For something seems to say: “It’s not too late;
For to whatever port the pilot steers,
He may return. It is not left to Fate.”

* * * * *

Turn failure into victory,
Don’t let your courage fade;
And even if you get a lemon,
Just make the lemon aid.

* * * * *

_Night Court Proposed for Baltimore._—A night court, modeled after the Night Court of New York city, should be incorporated in the proposed reform of the police magistracy system of Baltimore, according to Justice Alva H. Tyson. He believes that the numerous instances of innocent people having to spend a night in a cell in a police station is a relic of a crude governmental system, beyond which Baltimore should have passed years ago.

Another great field in Baltimore for charitable endeavor has been exploited in New York—that is probationary systems for women. Under the present magistracy system of Baltimore, almost all women who are arrested on minor charges, unless hardened criminals, have to be dismissed. What is a magistrate today to do with a woman on her first offense of having too much to drink in the opinion of a police officer? There should be a probationary official to whom she could be released and who could look after her future conduct.

* * * * *

_Farm Work for “Convalescent” Offenders._—A new plan, intended to give Kansas convicts a new idea of life, has been put into effect at the Kansas penitentiary, according to the report of Warden J. K. Codding to Governor Stubbs. Every man that is sent to the prison is given six months’ work on the farm just previous to his release. The men get out in the open. They are tanned and sunburned, have more liberty, less discipline, get close to nature and leave the prison with the hatred of men and laws gone and really wanting to try to live better lives. Since the new system has been tried not one released convict has come back. Warden Codding believes that through this system Kansas may gain a record for a minimum number of second-term men which will be lower than that of any other state.

Many years ago an island in the Missouri river was sold to the state. The island has never been used, and the lands owned by the state around the prison have never been used to any great extent for farming. Warden Codding began work two years ago, and the first thing he did was to give the prisoners half an hour’s liberty each day in the prison yard. The men can do anything they wish during that half hour. They can talk to each other and the guard, play ball, pitch horse shoes, play croquet or a dozen other games.

The prisoners had been morose and sullen, and there were twenty-two insane prisoners in the hospital and a half dozen tuberculosis patients. The plan was adopted to see if the insanity and tuberculosis could not be stopped. Not a new patient has developed in 14 months, and there is not a single prisoner in the tuberculosis hospital at this time.

“The farm does two things of great importance,” says Warden Codding. “The first is that it gives the men a new aspect of life as they are about to leave the prison. The farm work and a half hour recreation period have reduced the ordinary prison vices seventy per cent. The plan of working the men on the farm has not been going long enough to make any figures, but I believe that there will be a less percentage of men returned to prison for second terms now than under the old plan of keeping them confined all the time.”

* * * * *

_The State of Jails in Massachusetts._—The state board of health of Massachusetts finds 45 jails in the commonwealth unfit for occupancy. They are unsanitary and not properly managed. Describing his incarceration in the Middlesex county house of correction in Somerville, Mass., Rev. E. E. Bayliss said in the Boston American of September 24th, that

“When prisoners are admitted they are given no medical examination whatever. The weak, the strong, the sick and the well are all one in the eyes of the prison officials. All receive the same food and the same treatment.

“The result is that there are any number of prisoners suffering from very serious and shocking diseases, who receive either no treatment or treatment of the most perfunctionory sort. In addition all these men use the same knives and forks, the same drinking cups, and the same towels as the rest of the men. They are shaved every day with the same razor.

“In other words no precautions whatever are taken to guard healthy individuals from contamination from diseases, the virulence and contagiousness of which are only too well known.

“The sanitary conditions of the jail are abominable. They are not fit to describe in print, and they nauseate me when I think of them. The bedding, walls and floors swarm with vermin, and the half-hearted attempt to get rid of them by an occasional sprinkling of ill-smelling powder only emphasizes their presence.

“Humanity, common courtesy, the slightest sympathetic realization that we are all human beings, after all, is unknown. There is no one to say a good word to the prisoners. During the three months I was there we had only two sermons, and these were perfunctory in the extreme, and delivered without the slightest idea of appropriateness and of crying spiritual needs of the listeners.”

* * * * *

_Alien Criminals._—A study recently made by Joseph P. Byers, general secretary of the state charities and prison reform association of New Jersey shows that 35 per cent. of the prisoners in that state are foreign born. Of the inmates of the state reformatory, 23 per cent. are foreign-born and 45 per cent. are either foreign-born or of foreign parentage.

Alien prisoners in 1909-10 comprised one-fourth of all the inmates of the state prison of New York.

* * * * *

_Prison Philosophy._—From the Charlestown (Mass.) state prison paper, the Mentor, come the following verses, written by a prisoner.

CHANCE

He made us all of flesh and blood,
And we, in troth, are kin;
You in your place as ruler stood,
I in my place of sin.

A turn in the mould, a spot in the clay,
Would have changed our spheres of life;
Mine would have been the glorious day,
And yours the bitter strife.

Brothers in spirit and brothers in form,
Only a step apart;
One life was lost in a raging storm,
One saved by a fairer start.

* * * * *

_What Miss Jane Addams Says._—“More and more our reformatories are filled, not with criminals, but with the boys who have in them the basis of play unsatisfied, the basis of art unfulfilled, even those beginnings of variation from types which we call genius.

“It is these children, our brightest and best, whom we are spoiling by giving them no proper chance for development. The city offers adventurous children nothing to satisfy their desire for pleasure, nothing which will allow them to cherish their determination to conquer the world and make it a better one.

“So these children go out and get into trouble, or else they stay in their poor houses and factories and turn into stupid dullards, all initiative, all ambition stamped out of them.”

* * * * *

A commission, one of whose members is Governor Harmon, is seeking a site for a new reformatory in Ohio.

The commission wants 300 acres of land, and an appropriation of $200,000 was made for purchasing the site and beginning the preliminary work. The commission proposes to locate the prison within a radius of 50 or 60 miles of Columbus.

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 1 Added periods after the word Committee, 4 times
pg 4 Changed criminal classes, corruping to: corrupting
pg 6 Changed jails and refomatories to: reformatories
pg 10 Removed repeated word than from: less than than the familiar
pg 11 Changed a nominating commitee to: committee
pg 11 Added period after letter R in: R B. McCord
pg 15 Changed things of great importance. to: importance,