Part 3

Not that there have not in the last half century been notable improvements in the theory and practice of penal administration, some of them bold enough to bring America from time to time into the forefront of interest and example to the penologists of the Old World, but in most of these the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has been content to play a secondary role. Throughout this era of slackened energy she has not cared or dared to initiate, to lead, to “carry on,” but has followed belatedly and afar off the progress of other States. Examples of this are the Auburn congregate system, which divided with the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement the interest of European as well as of American penologists, and which was adopted in the Western Penitentiary in 1869, a full generation after its establishment in New York State, and which has only recently conquered the parent institution on Cherry Hill; the justly famous Elmira experiment of progressive classification and industrial training of inmates embodied in the Huntingdon Reformatory in 1889, and the long-promised reformatory for women at Muncy, which, six years after its creation by legislative action, has not yet been rendered available for the purpose for which it was designed.

The first step in the development of an intelligent conception of delinquency and its treatment came not in an accurate conception of the nature of crime and its causes, but in a clearer and more correct notion of the function of punishment. By 1790 the element of deterrence in punishment was recognized and emphasized. The element of reformation was a cardinal point in the theory and practice of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, and this Society did its best to infuse this doctrine into the Pennsylvania system of prison administration. Before 1830 it was very generally asserted that reformation, as well as deterrence and social revenge, was to be regarded as a chief aim of punishment, though the offender was still regarded as an unregenerate free moral agent.

This theory of crime received a severe shock in the “forties” from the investigations of Dorothea L. Dix and others, who showed the great prevalence of insanity and idiocy among the delinquent classes. It could scarcely be denied even by the traditional jurists that the exercise of free will was likely to be seriously impeded by insanity or feeble-mindedness. From 1850 to the beginning of the present century the most notable advances toward a more intelligent conception of crime and its treatment consisted in the gradual but definite triumph of the notion of detention and punishment as agencies for reformation rather than as instruments of social revenge.

For more than a century of its history the penal, reformatory and correctional institutions of Pennsylvania were limited to the county jails and the few and scattered workhouses, which were erected mainly in conjunction with the almshouses. In the jails there could be no approach to anything like a differentiated treatment of delinquents. In them were herded promiscuously those imprisoned for debt, those convicted of crime and those accused or held as witnesses; those of all ages and both sexes; those convicted of all categories and grades of crime punishable by imprisonment; those of all mental states--normal, feeble-minded, neurotic, psychotic, epileptic. The few colonial workhouses were employed as little more than an agency for suppressing vagrancy.

The first step in a differentiated treatment of crime and criminals came with the erection of a semi-state prison in the Walnut Street Jail in 1789-90. This provided for a partial differentiation between those convicted of the more serious crimes and those convicted of petty offenses or awaiting trial. It did not however, attempt any scientific differentiation on the basis of age, sex or mental state. Children and adults, male and female, sane and insane, were confined in contiguity. The opening of the State penitentiaries at Allegheny and Philadelphia in 1826 and 1829, with their fundamental principle of solitary confinement, carried further the process of differentiation, but still continued to apply the same general type of treatment to all incarcerated inmates. It was a system of separation rather than of a differentiated treatment of special types of prisoners.

The second important development in the direction of specialization in the provision of institutional treatment of delinquents appeared in the establishment of a House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents in Philadelphia in 1828. Though this was at first a private rather than a State institution and was of very limited capacity, it marked an epoch in the progress of Pennsylvania penology by making possible some elementary differentiation on the basis of age, degree of criminality and relative susceptibility to reformation. The next attempt at further differentiation came with the erection of the State Hospital for the Insane at Harrisburg between 1841 and 1851, chiefly as a result of the agitation initiated by Dorothea L. Dix. This and the other State hospitals for the insane, subsequently erected, provided for a treatment of the more important types of mental disorder, though no adequate provision was made for removing the insane from the prison. Not until 1905 was an act passed providing for the erection of a State hospital for the criminal insane at Fairview which was opened in 1912.

During the quarter of a century following 1850 there was an active agitation to provide a means of differentiating the treatment of criminals on the basis of age, sex and degree of criminality. The first important achievement in this direction was the further development of reform schools for juvenile delinquents through the removal and enlargement of the Philadelphia House of Refuge in 1850-54 and the erection of the Western House of Refuge at Allegheny during the same period. Juvenile delinquents, if petty offenders, could thereafter be removed from their degrading confinement in the state prison or worse county jails and receive the properly specialized treatment which their circumstances demanded. No provision for the differentiated treatment of the less definite and confirmed types of adult delinquents was made until the opening of the reformatory for men at Huntingdon in 1889 and the authorization of the State Industrial Home for Women at Muncy in 1913. The provision of reformatories and juvenile correctional institutions marked a double process of differentiation, in that these institutions not only called for a diversity of treatment according to age, sex and degree of criminality, but also from the fact that they were clearly differentiated from the State prisons and the county jails in making reformation rather than punishment or detention their chief aims.

Along with this development of a properly differentiated system of treating the delinquent population, has gone the growth of specialized institutions for dealing with the closely related class of defectives, which was once treated indiscriminately along with the delinquent classes when its members were guilty of criminal action. The State institution for feeble-minded at Polk, opened in 1893, and at Spring City, provided by an act of 1903, and the State Village for Feeble-minded Women at Laurelton, not yet available for use, are designed to furnish scientific treatment for large numbers of those who would today be confined in the state prisons or county jails, if the ideas and institutions of 1840 prevailed. Even an institution for inebriates was contemplated in an act of 1913.

But this vital and all important process of the differentiation, classification and specialized treatment of the delinquent and defective classes has now proceeded far beyond that most elementary stage of furnishing separate institutions for dealing with the most general classes of delinquents and defectives. It has been found that the terms defective, insane and criminal have only a legal significance and are practically useless when involving the problem of exact scientific analysis and treatment. Each general class of delinquent boys, of defective girls or of criminal adults, for instance, is made up of distinguishable and distinct types which demand specialized treatment in the same way that it is required for one general class as distinguished from another. Though it is as yet very imperfectly developed, the present tendency is for each institution to differentiate into a number of specialized departments, each designed to provide the proper treatment for one of these types.

Finally, within the last decade beginnings have been made in what is likely to be an important future development, namely the non-institutional care of the less pronounced and confirmed types of delinquents, particularly of delinquent minors. The developments along this line have, up to the present, consisted chiefly in the adoption of parole systems in all the State penal, reformatory and correctional institutions and in a more liberal use of the suspended sentence and probation. The recently established Municipal Probation Court of Philadelphia is a pioneer in Pennsylvania in this promising new development in the preventive treatment of the less confirmed type of delinquents.

Looking at the whole matter as it stands today, it cannot be said that conditions in Pennsylvania are in any material respect either better or worse than in other progressive States, except in the one matter of the useful employment of the convict population. Here, as elsewhere, some lucky chance has placed a man or a woman of exceptional qualifications at the head of an institution, one who has by his strong personal initiative made the best of a bad situation, as in the case of the Eastern Penitentiary, or who has, with something akin to genius, seized upon a new opportunity, as in the case of the Girls’ School at Darlington and the new Penitentiary foundation at Bellefonte. But these are sporadic and exceptional developments and have furnished no new principle of a revolutionary character to mark the dawn of a new era in penal administration.

Meanwhile the hopeless and demoralizing idleness to which most of the inmates of the Eastern Penitentiary and of most of the county institutions of the Commonwealth are doomed, is a spectacle in which the people of Pennsylvania can take nothing but shame. But even if this is remedied, as it should be at once by drastic legislative action, Pennsylvania will have done no more than reach the level of penological theory of the Quaker innovators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The step is an imperative one, but it will not restore to the Commonwealth the proud position of leadership which once was hers, which is still, by virtue of past achievements and by common fame, attributed to her.

While we have thus been dreaming, tardily and ineffectually putting into effect the aspirations of a long-distant past, a new penology has come into being, based not on humanitarian sentiment or on “the common sense of most,” but on the scientific study of the delinquent and his environment. New sciences of psychology, psychiatry and sociology have been forged to meet the conditions of the new day and these have furnished us with a new basis for penological experimentation. We have learned that the criminal is not merely a person who has in the exercise of an unfettered will chosen the evil rather than the good, but a person of complex personality shaped by heredity and environment to what he is, none the less a menace to society than the older conception made him, not the less requiring restraint and correction, but demanding and deserving individual treatment according to the nature which has been developed in him. We have learned from recent scientific study of the most rigorous and trustworthy sort that from 50 to 60 per cent. of the inmates of our correctional institutions are abnormal--feeble-minded, insane, psychopathic--to the point of irresponsibility, to all intents and purposes the same kind of people that fill our hospitals for the insane and institutions for the feeble-minded. We have also learned, from sociological case studies, that a very large proportion of those that the psychiatrist would class as normal are the victims of neglected childhood and of the depraving influences of the institutions in which they have spent a great part of their young lives.

It seems clear that this new knowledge makes for a new classification, based not, like that of the Elmira system, on behavior in confinement, nor, like that of the current penology, on the character of the crime committed, but on the exact study of the individual and that the treatment accorded him must be adapted to the results of such study.

Here, then, is the new opportunity for a further advance out of this slough of despond--an opportunity not inferior to that which this Commonwealth so superbly grasped in its heroic youth--to bring its penal administration into conformity with the newer conceptions of delinquency. Tinkering the old machine is not enough. It must be remodeled altogether. Adding to the powers of a board of inspectors here, curbing them there, setting up new boards and commissions to direct the doing of this, to restrain the doing of that--all these are but a part of the old game, which will after all continue to be played in very much the old perfunctory way. What is demanded is a genuine reconstruction of the penal system of the Commonwealth, one which shall, with as little disturbance to the existing management of the several institutions as possible, put at their service all the resources of the new knowledge of crime and its treatment. It is the purpose of this report to suggest the lines of this future development of our penal system.

III.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PRESENT PENAL SYSTEM.

As the foregoing outline indicates, the several State institutions of a penal, correctional and reformatory character, with the two Glen Mills Schools (which, though largely under private management, are essentially public institutions) have been developed at different times, under the influence of changing conceptions of social responsibility for different types of offenders. As a result of this circumstance each is separately managed by a board of inspectors or managers, which exercises complete control over the policy of the institution to which its authority extends. This Board appoints the Warden or Superintendent, fixes his or her compensation, determines the industrial and educational policy of the institution and, under the authority of the Legislature, disburses the funds appropriated for its maintenance. The disciplinary policy of the institution is almost invariably entrusted to the Warden or Superintendent and, as is natural, if that official happens to be a person of strong individuality and initiative, his policy in practice, if not in theory, governs the entire administration. Nowhere is there a centralized authority exercising a general control or an effective influence. The only approach to such a general agency is the State Board of Public Charities, which may investigate and require the submission of an annual report, and the Prison Labor Commission, which exercises a general supervision over the industries of the two penitentiaries and the Huntingdon Reformatory, but which has no effective power to carry its plans into execution. There is, accordingly, no uniform policy, even in the case of institutions like the two Glen Mills schools, which have a similar type of inmates and an identical aim, nor in the case of all the institutions under consideration in matters where their problems and needs are the same. That there are advantages in this policy of separate control cannot be denied. It gives to an energetic and progressive superintendent or board of managers a degree of initiative in reform and experimentation which, under a highly centralized control of all the institutions, it would be difficult to secure. On the other hand it may have the effect of depriving the individual institution, because of its poverty or because of the reactionary character of its administration, of the benefits of an advance which may have been made elsewhere. There could not be a better illustration of the unevenness of development resulting from this lack of co-ordination in the Pennsylvania prison system than the fact that the Eastern Penitentiary was compelled to wait for the initiative of its present Warden for the partial adoption of the congregate system, which had for forty years existed in the Western Penitentiary, and which had everywhere demonstrated its superiority over the system of solitary confinement.

Upon the whole, however, what strikes the thoughtful observer is not the diversity of policy and management among these institutions, even where they have avowedly different aims, but their conformity to a common type, and that the prison type. With only two exceptions--Sleighton Farms and the Training School at Morganza--the persistent shadow of the Penitentiary rests upon them all. It is true that in the new Central Penitentiary on its broad acreage at Bellefonte and in the Eastern Penitentiary, so far as the physical and industrial conditions render possible, the shadow has been lifted, but it is safe to say of the penal system of the State as a whole, that it is still too much dominated by the ancient ideal of demonstrating to the inmates that “the way of the transgressor is hard.” Even in institutions of a purely reformatory character, while they leave little to be desired in the way of healthful conditions of living, orderly administration and educational opportunities, the reformation of the wrong-doer is still too much sought through a system of stern repression, of “iron discipline”--a system which, as all experience shows, defeats its end by crushing out the finer elements of character on which the redemption of the individual must depend. An almost invariable incident of this type of disciplinary control is the persistence of the policy of securing good conduct through punishment--often severe punishment for trivial offenses--rather than by the more enlightened and humane method of holding out incentives to good behavior, either by the grant of special privileges or by putting on the inmates themselves the responsibility for the good behavior of all.

Other instances of the persistence of the traditional attitude toward the offender are the almost complete lack throughout our penal system of a scientific, balanced ration, such as has in the experience of prison administrators in other States, as notably at Sing Sing Prison in 1916, and more recently in our army camps, demonstrated the value both for health and efficiency and from the point of view of economy of a scientific management of the problem of food supply for large masses of men; the general indifference to outdoor recreation and exercise, so essential to the health and morale of the inmate body; the meagre provision for any education worthy of the name; the all but complete lack of comprehensive and well rounded systems of vocational or industrial training, on which the efficiency of prison labor and the ability of the inmates to “make good” in the world of industry after their release so largely depends; the demoralizing idleness which is still after three decades of effort the most marked characteristic of our prison system; and, finally, the insufficient care for the physical and mental health of the inmates of our correctional institutions, which still for the most part mingle indiscriminately together the tuberculous and syphilitic with those who are sound in body and the insane, psychopathic and defective with those who are sound in mind.

Many of these conditions which continue to put the brand of the prison on the inmates of our correctional institutions are doubtless due to the survival of the Bastille type of prison architecture, which is exemplified in the Eastern and Western Penitentiaries and in such structures as Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia, the Convict Prison at Holmesburg, the Philadelphia House of Correction and many others. It is scarcely too much to say that no human being is vile enough to deserve confinement in such a place or dangerous enough to need it. Even the most unbending of the old type of prison official will concede that 80 per cent. of the inmates neither need nor deserve to be confined behind triple bars of steel or in cells like catacombs or within walls like those of Egyptian tombs. Keepers and inmates alike lose half their humanity by confinement in these grim and forbidding structures. No reforming influence however humane and generous, can long survive in their atmosphere.

Public opinion is at last moving away from this antiquated type of prison architecture to the newer type represented in the honor prison at New Hampton Farms in New York and in our Commonwealth in the cottage colonies at Sleighton Farms, Glen Mills, Morganza, and Muncy. The change which comes over the men who are transferred from the Western Penitentiary to the new prison site in Centre County is a sufficient commentary on the older type of prison, and demonstrates beyond peradventure the duty of affording to all of our convict population a similar life of freedom and opportunity. This result, so desirable from every point of view, could in large measure be attained in a short time by equipping the Eastern Penitentiary with a suitable area of farm land in the Eastern Section of the State and by making immediate provision for the institution of State industrial farms for the convicts confined in the county prisons, as is recommended elsewhere in this report.

IV.

PRISON LABOR.

The conditions existing in the penal institutions of the Commonwealth with respect to the employment of the inmates in useful industry have been so fully set forth in the Emergency Report submitted by the Commission to the Governor in September last (a copy of which is annexed to this report) and in the comprehensive study of the problem by the Penal Commission of 1913-1915 (submitted to the General Assembly under date of February 15, 1915) that it is not deemed necessary to go into the matter at length in this place. It suffices to call attention to the fact that the conditions described in those reports have not in any material respect been improved. Of approximately 10,000 inmates in the penal and correctional institutions of the State, less than one-half are usefully employed, not more than one-fourth in productive labor. The economic waste of such a system extended over a century is scarcely less appalling than its inhumanity. By the law a large part of this interminable procession of offending and suffering humanity has been condemned to hard labor. In actual practice nearly all of it has been doomed to wasteful and demoralizing idleness.

The law of June 1, 1915, “providing a system of employment and compensation for the inmates of the Eastern Penitentiary, Western Penitentiary and the Pennsylvania Industrial Reformatory at Huntingdon” and creating a Prison Labor Commission to carry its provisions into effect, has proved almost wholly inoperative, owing primarily to the failure of the Legislature to provide for the compulsory purchase of prison-made goods by the Commonwealth or the political divisions thereof or by public institutions. As a consequence, out of a total population of 3200 in the three institutions to which the authority of the Commission extends, at the close of the year 1918 only 169 were employed under the direction of the Commission. These were distributed as follows:--