Part 4

Eastern Penitentiary, population 1,371 Caning chairs 16 Cigarmaking 11 Shoemaking 42 Knitting hosiery 38 ----- 107 Absolutely idle 839

Western Penitentiary, population 720 Broommaking 10 Brushmaking 2 Weaving 18 ----- 30 Absolutely idle 393

Huntingdon Reformatory, population 579 Auto-tagmaking 32

Whether considered as a relief from the crushing burden of expense that our penal establishments entail, or as a remedy for the physical and moral degeneration resulting from enforced idleness, or as a means to equip the inmates for lives of industry and usefulness after their release, a system of prison labor which produces the results set forth in these figures stands self condemned.

To make the plan embodied in the law of 1915 effective, it should further provide:

(1) That municipalities as well as the Commonwealth and the political divisions thereof and all public institutions shall be required, as far as may be practicable, to supply their needs from the labor of the penal and correctional institutions;

(2) That the authority of the Commission or of any body in which its powers may be vested shall extend to the reformatory institutions at Darlington, Glen Mills, Morganza and Muncy and to all State, county and municipal institutions of a penal or correctional character;

(3) That the power of such Commission or body to regulate prison industry be extended to all forms of labor activity of the inmates of such institutions, including farming, roadmaking, land reclamation, forestry, etc.;

(4) That such Commission or body be empowered to determine the compensation of prisoners for industrial and other work performed by them and the method of applying such compensation to the use of such prisoners or their dependents;

(5) That the strict “State use” plan be modified by permitting the sale in the open market, at not less than the market price, of any surplus product resulting from the labor of the inmates over and above the product disposed of as provided in the act.

V.

THE COUNTY PRISONS.

In Pennsylvania, as in most, if not all, of the other States of the Union, the county jail is the despair of those who look for a better day in the treatment of the wrong-doer. The admiration which our experiments in the reformatory treatment of the young have excited in eminent foreign penologists has turned to loathing when their attention was directed to the county jails. Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the distinguished head of the English prison system, in an article published a few months after his visit to this country in 1910, described them in the following terms:

“In these gaols it is hardly too much to say that many of the features linger which called forth the wrath and indignation of the great Howard at the end of the eighteenth century. Promiscuity, unsanitary conditions, absence of supervision, idleness and corruption--these remain the features in many places. Even the ‘fee’ system is still in vogue. The gaolers are still paid by fees for the support of prisoners, and commitments to gaol are common when some other disposition of the case would have been imposed had not the commitment yielded a fee to the sheriff, who is usually in charge of the gaol. In many gaols there are not facilities for medical examination on reception, for ventilation, for exercise, or for bathing.... The foreign delegates were amazed at this startling inconsistency between the management of the common gaols and that of the State prisons and State reformatories. The evils to which I refer are well known and deplored by that body of earnest and devoted men and women in all sections of American society with whose lofty ideals on the subject of prison reform and generous aspirations for the humane treatment of the prisoner, the Washington Congress made us every day familiar, but they seem helpless and almost hopeless.... I was appealed to by leading men in more than one State, as British representative, to publicly condemn the system, and this I did, at a risk of giving considerable offense. Until the abuses of the gaol system are removed, it is impossible for America to have assigned to her by general consent a place in the vanguard of progress in the domain of ‘_la science penitentiaire_.’”

Your Commission desires to submit as its considered judgment that the foregoing statement does no injustice to many of the county prisons of this Commonwealth, and that the Legislature can do no greater service, nor one that will reflect more credit on the Commonwealth, than to sweep away the entire county jail system without delay.

Attention has been called elsewhere in this report to the deplorable conditions of idleness which prevail in the prisons of our Commonwealth. These conditions are at their worst in the county institutions. In the last six years the average daily number of prisoners in the county jails of the Commonwealth has been about 6500. Only about one-fourth of these have some form of employment other than domestic service. But when all of the returns are in with regard to the work accomplished, the number of days spent in complete idleness in the course of a year will average more than one million. If we regard the labor of the prisoners as worth fifty cents a day, the amount of waste thus exceeds $500,000 annually.

In order to obviate this condition of affairs, the General Assembly in 1917 passed an Act (No. 337, P. L. 1917), vesting in the officers in charge of county prisons the privilege of allowing the prisoners to work on county and poorhouse farms. Although only twenty-seven counties have taken advantage of this Act, its results have been very beneficial. The workers have improved in health, strength and morale, and the produce of their labor has been of material help in the up-keep of the institutions. Unfortunately, the operation of this Act terminates with the close of the war.

A more comprehensive Act was proposed by the Penal Commission of 1913-1915, which recommended the establishment of six industrial farms to be controlled by the State, to which all persons convicted of crime or misdemeanor, and now committed to county institutions, should hereafter be sent. This admirable measure was, however, amended in such a way as to leave the initiative in the creation of such farms and the control thereof to the County Commissioners of the nine groups of counties into which the State was divided for the purpose (No. 399, P. L. 1917). This legislation has fallen flat, not one of the industrial districts having carried the scheme into effect.

Your Commission submits that there is no remedy for the condition of affairs above described other than the complete assumption by the State of the custody and care of the offenders, whether felons or misdemeanants, who are now committed to the county institutions.

Farming for prisoners, as our investigations in other States have clearly shown, has passed beyond the experimental stage. The State of Massachusetts, some years ago, established a penal farm for misdemeanants at Bridgewater. A large tract of ground was purchased, consisting largely of swamp and abandoned land, which, by the use of fertilizers and by drainage, has been brought to a high degree of cultivation. This enterprise has been so signally successful that it is now proposed to move the State Prison at Charlestown to this same farm at Bridgewater.

Perhaps the most successful experiment of the kind has been made in Indiana, where the State has taken over the custody of misdemeanants on the plan which was recommended by the Pennsylvania Penal Commission of 1913-1915, a recommendation which is renewed in this report. The Superintendent of the Indiana State Farm makes the following report:--

“The farm had an average daily population, in 1918, of four hundred and sixty-two prisoners. All institution buildings and outbuildings, the sewer system, power plant, heating and water systems, land reclaiming, farming and gardening, has been done with the labor of misdemeanants at a surprisingly low cost for guards. The Indiana State Farm is allowed fifty-five cents per man per day for its entire maintenance, while the same man in jail, at the present time, will cost more than one dollar per day for the gross maintenance. The fifty-five cents per man per day pays the entire pay roll, subsistence, fuel, light, heat, medical services, clothing, transportation, field and garden seeds, fertilizers, common labor, tools and all other items of maintenance....

“The effect that the Indiana State Farm has had on the jail system of the State is indicated by the following figures: In the year 1914 there were 18,130 commitments to county jails, in 1915, 14,644, and in 1916, 9,896. The doors of the State Farm were opened April 12, 1915, and the full effect of the State Farm was not noticeable until the close of the year 1916. The moral effect of the institution on the misdemeanant class was one very important factor in reducing the jail commitments.”

During the year ending September 30, 1918, this penal farm was two-thirds self-supporting, and it is confidently expected that the institution will soon be entirely self-supporting.

New York City has established a reformatory farm of 630 acres at New Hampton, N. Y., to which boys and men from sixteen to thirty years of age are committed. They have no bars, no wall, no restraining thing, except supervision. They have no cell for punishment. From the farm they secure most of their provisions. In handling 2000 prisoners, they have lost only five. The health of the inmates is greatly improved. It is estimated that 45 per cent. of the prisoners there were addicted to the drug habit. Most of them were sent away restored. What they needed was to be built up by fresh air, good food and exercise, and to be employed in wholesome work. In fact, they have been taught the dignity of labor--a thing to which most of them had hitherto been strangers.

But we need not go beyond the limits of our own State to prove the benefit and success of farming for misdemeanants. The administration of the Allegheny County Workhouse illustrates the economy of providing employment for prisoners on an industrial farm. Here the average daily number of inmates in 1918 was 722. The daily average cost of each inmate was 81 cents, but after deducting the earnings of the inmates, the net cost was only 32 cents. This means that the inmates earned 49 cents a day toward their own maintenance. Their bookkeeping indicates merely the cost of raising the crops. If the institution had charged itself with the produce used by it at the prevailing market price, the net cost would have been much less. The farm has 670 acres, of which 560 acres are farmed and used as pasture. The inmates are continually coming and going. Many of them are committed for ten days or less, and a large part are sentenced for 30 days, while comparatively few of them remain longer than one year. This shows that a great deal of efficient work can be secured, even from those who serve for short terms.

A similarly striking result has been attained in Delaware County under the law of 1911, empowering the judges of the Courts of Common Pleas to release on parole convicts confined in county jails or workhouses under the supervision of designated probation officers. Acting under this law, the President Judge of that county has during the year 1918 paroled a number of inmates of the county jail to work on farm lands rented for the purpose with the remarkable result that only two of the men so paroled made their escape (both being afterwards retaken) and that nearly $14,000 worth of crops were sold for cash in addition to the vegetables used and stored in the prison. The net profit is estimated at $7,000.

Logically, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the State ought to assume the care of all offenders. The laws are made by the State, and the indictments charge the accused with offences against the “peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” not against the peace and dignity of the county, municipality or borough. The conclusion is inevitable that the Commonwealth should assume the responsibility for the protection of the community from both felons and misdemeanants. And since such an arrangement as has been proposed will result in reduced taxation, uniformity of management and in greater facilities for the education and reformation of the delinquent, we feel that the establishment of State industrial farms to receive the delinquents now committed to the county prisons should receive your favorable consideration.

The bill submitted to carry this recommendation into effect omits the counties of Philadelphia and Allegheny from its operation. Allegheny County already has a prison farm which in many ways may be considered a model of its kind. Philadelphia has a farm in connection with the House of Correction which furnishes employment to many prisoners and supplies much produce for the institution. We recommend that at some early date the City of Philadelphia may, by the purchase of more land, extend the advantages of a penal farm to its convict prison and in some way combine under one management the entire penal system of the municipality.

The fee system, whereby the sheriff or warden receives a stipulated sum each day for the board of prisoners, is so liable to abuse that we submit a proposition to abolish the practice in all our prisons. Whenever the profits from boarding the prisoners is a part of the remuneration of the officer in charge, the tendency is doubtless to exploit the prisoners, or to reduce to a minimum the supply of food, in order to derive the greater profit.

In 1915 a comprehensive study of the cost of boarding the prisoners in the largest 25 counties of the Commonwealth indicated that the average daily cost of food per prisoner in the 15 prisons where the food was purchased on the contract system was 12 cents, and in the 10 counties where the fee system was in vogue 33.7 cents, the difference in favor of the contract system being 21.7 cents per day for each prisoner.

We estimate that in these 10 counties alone the saving to the taxpayers by the adoption of the contract system will be at least $50,000 annually. The economy of the proposition is evident, making due allowance for providing in some counties additional compensation for the official in charge of the prison. In all cases where a change has been made from the fee system to the contract system, the food has improved in character, thus tending to the betterment of the health and morale of the inmates.

Moved by these considerations, the General Assembly in 1909 provided that in all counties having a population of 150,000 or more, the food for the prisoners must be purchased by contract. We are now proposing to extend this principle to all the counties of the Commonwealth, with the understanding that no such change is to take place during the incumbency of the officials who are at the present time in charge of the prisons.

VI.

PROBATION AND PAROLE.

(_a_) Under the law of May 10, 1909, the several courts of criminal jurisdiction are invested with the power of suspending sentence on certain classes of convicted offenders and of placing such offenders on probation instead of committing them for definite or indeterminate periods of imprisonment. Probation officers, charged with the duty of supervising the behavior of such probationers, are appointed by the judges to serve in their respective counties. In this Commonwealth, as in many others, experience has demonstrated that there is little uniformity in the practice of the courts in suspending sentence or of the probation officers in exercising their powers.

Conceived as a mere incident of the sentencing power, to be exercised only in exceptional cases, the suspended sentence and probation are beginning to disclose themselves as a momentous, not to say revolutionary step in the progress of penology, not less important in its ultimate consequences than the substitution a century ago of imprisonment for the death penalty and other forms of physical punishment. Like the older forms of punishment which it superseded, imprisonment too has proved a failure, so far at least, as the newer aim of punishment, the reformation of the wrong-doer is concerned. And we are coming to see that the protection which society enjoys through the imprisonment for a few months or years of a small proportion of the criminal class is dearly purchased by a system which returns the offender to society less fitted than before to cope with the conditions of a life of freedom. More and more, as we develop a probation service worthy of the name, will the courts be reluctant to commit men, women and children to the demoralizing associations and discipline of institutional life and will give them their chance to redeem themselves under competent guidance and supervision among the associations and activities of everyday life.

Even under existing conditions it is safe to say that far too many adult and youthful offenders convicted of criminal offences are committed to prison and far too many delinquent children to reformatories and other correctional institutions. Your Commission believes that the suspended sentence should be more liberally employed by the courts of the Commonwealth under strict conditions requiring a life of useful industry under careful supervision; that children under 12 years of age should never be committed to penal or correctional institutions but rather, where institutional care is deemed necessary, to parental schools such as have been established in other States as a part of the regular educational system; and that children of larger growth, say from 12 to 16, should, wherever possible, be placed on probation or put under private guardianship.

Those considerations have led the Commission to the conclusion that the whole subject of the suspended sentence and probation in this Commonwealth should be thoroughly studied in order that the principles that should govern it may be carefully defined and its procedure worked out, supervised and put on a uniform basis. New York and other States have for this purpose created a permanent probation board or commission and the success which has attended their labors suggests the institution of a similar body in this Commonwealth.

(_b_) The indeterminate sentence, which made its appearance in this Commonwealth in the law of May 10, 1909, has passed through several phases to a state in which its purpose is almost completely defeated. In its original form it provided that the maximum term to be imposed upon a convict who should be sentenced to imprisonment in either the Eastern or the Western Penitentiaries should not exceed the maximum time prescribed by law and that the minimum term when not fixed by law, should not exceed one-fourth of the maximum time. This law was amended by an Act approved June 19, 1911, striking out the restriction as to the minimum sentence, thus leaving to the courts complete discretion to fix the minimum to be served at any period short of the maximum. Many of the courts have in frequent instances virtually nullified the indeterminate sentence principle by imposing minimum sentences so excessive as to bring the judicial office into disrepute. Sentences of from 18 years to 20 and from 19 years to 20 have been common, and there have been cases so grotesque as sentences of 19 years 11 months, or of 19 years, 11 months and 29 days to 20 years, of 23 years and 3 months to 25 years and of 27 to 28 years. These are only the more extreme illustrations of a practice which has been common enough to justify a demand for a law which will result in greater uniformity in the matter of imposing sentences for crime.

At its best the maximum-minimum form of the indeterminate sentence is an unsatisfactory compromise between the ideal aim of penologists and the traditional attitude of the courts, which cling tenaciously to their ancient prerogative of “making the punishment fit the crime.” That the power of determining the period of imprisonment requisite to meet the demands of justice and the interests of society may safely be confided to other than judicial hands has been conceded in the case of all offenders entitled to commitment to reformatories, who are sentenced to an indeterminate term limited only by the maximum fixed by law, or, in the case of minors, to the attainment of their majority, and who may be released on parole in the discretion of the boards of managers of the institutions to which they are committed. It is only in the case of hardened offenders or of those guilty of certain major offenses that a minimum sentence is imposed.

For more than a generation prison reformers have urged the extension of the pure indeterminate sentence to this class of offenders also. Their logic is sound; it is the facts that are against them. The argument runs like this: The offender should be kept in confinement only until he is fitted by his prison experience to lead an honest and useful life; when this end is attained he should be released. The answer is that the prison doesn’t in fact reform the wrong-doer; that good behavior under the conditions of prison life is no assurance of the intention or capacity of the prisoner to lead an honest and useful life after his release, and that the inspectors or other paroling authority have no other guide to go by in determining the inmates’ fitness for a life of freedom than his prison record. If the reformer makes the obvious retort--“then reform your prison so that it shall reform its inmates, and reform your paroling authority so that it shall make its determination on all the facts of the inmate’s personal history including a study of his mental conditions, his heredity and the social influences that have shaped his character,” he is admitting that we are not yet ready for the complete acceptance of the indeterminate sentence in all classes of cases.

But there is a middle ground between the position of the extreme reformer and that which has been assumed by the courts of this Commonwealth. If there is to be anything short of a fixed sentence, declared by law, it should be a reasonable minimum which should also be declared by law. The policy of the indeterminate sentence is that the delinquent shall be supervised and guided and his capacity to lead an honest and useful life tested by actual experience under normal conditions of living for a period of years long enough to try out his capacity to readjust himself to a life of freedom in society. For this reason an adequate interval between the expiration of his minimum sentence, when he becomes eligible to parole, and the expiration of his maximum sentence, when he becomes free from judicial control, should be guaranteed by law.