Part 5

“Methods of Reformatory Administration” was the subject of a paper by Mr. W. H. Whittaker, Superintendent of the Indiana State Reformatory, Jeffersonville. Mr. Whittaker claimed that in many institutions methods had not kept pace with advancing civilization. Ideal reformatory management must, first of all, have a solid foundation to stand upon. Said foundation consists of the men in charge of an institution. These, from the superintendent down, should be men of broad intelligence, good morals, and clean habits, who thoroughly believe that they are their brothers’ keepers, and who, in the discharge of all their duties, will constantly have in view the reformation of the prisoner. No good results can come from physical punishment or the employment of such methods as humiliate the prisoner. All methods should aim to secure the harmonious training of the heart, the head, and the hand, and should have for their one purpose the building of character.

In a paper on “The Delinquent Girl,” Mrs. Lucy M. Sickels, Superintendent of the State Industrial Home, Adrian, Michigan, pointed out that the real delinquent in most cases is the parent. The delinquent girl is not born so. She comes into the world with all the winning graces of babyhood; but when she reaches the years of girlhood, she is allowed to have her own way and to run wild. The mother is perhaps so busy attending missionary and temperance meetings, endeavoring to save others, that she has no time for her own daughter. If the girl has no mother, or a widowed mother, who, in order to support her little family, is obliged to go out to hard work day after day, until she becomes nervous, impatient, and petulant, an equally unfortunate situation again presents itself. Or parents are constantly quarreling, until divorce stalks in, breaks up the home, and sets the children adrift. In eight cases out of ten, ill temper and divorce in the home are the cause of delinquency. Delinquency or incorrigibility is only another name for parental neglect. What we want are laws to protect the children and punish the delinquent parent, for this is the root of all the evil we are striving and contending against.

Mrs. Sickels outlined the methods followed in the institution which she directs. “We go back to the first home principles, a mother and a mother’s love. A manager or mother is at the head of each family home, of which we have eight, each family having a kitchen, dining room, and laundry, just as complete in itself as you are from your neighbor. Each family cooks its own food, makes its own bread, and does its own laundry work. Each girl has a nice little room all to herself, in which is a single bed covered with a clean white spread, a pretty pillow sham on the pillow, a dresser, a mirror, a rug and a chair. Each room has a large airy window. The girl may beautify the walls and dresser according to her own taste and skill.

“The first requisite for a girl as she enters the Home is _occupation_, not work only. It may mean work, but instruction is given along all lines most necessary and useful to every woman in order to fit her to be a housekeeper and home-maker.” A chapel, in which two services are held each Lord’s Day, a schoolhouse and graded school with eight teachers, a hospital and trained nurse, a sewing school, a cooking school, a dressmaking department, a greenhouse, and an orchestra and brass band composed of girls, form part of the equipment. There is no wall or fence around the Home, but a clear open space and beautiful lawn, with walks and flowers, shrubbery and trees. The results obtained have been most satisfactory, at least seventy-five per cent. of the girls so far received having turned out good, true women, many of them being devoted wives and mothers.

EVENING

Mr. Alexander Johnson, General Secretary National Conference of Charities and Correction, Indianapolis, Indiana, spoke on “The Reformation of Jails.” Many county jails, he declared, are a blot on civilization. Should this be the case when we seek the reformation of the prisoner? Reform has begun at the top of the prison system, but the jails have made little progress upward, and a great number deserve to be called “schools of vice.” What is the remedy? The physical condition of the county jail must be improved. Each prisoner should be separately confined. The fundamental error is that the jails are used for two dissimilar purposes: for men awaiting trial, and for men who are sentenced. The two do not belong together. I have seen these two classes together in the same cell, and treated perfectly alike. When a man has been convicted he no longer belongs to the county, but to the State, and should be sent to a State institution. Then the jail would remain only as a place of detention for those awaiting trial. But why the State? Because the county would hardly be justified in going to the expense of supporting a real work-house. Another reform imperatively needed is speedier trials. It is infamous to hold a man in jail for months awaiting trial. “I hope the time will come when the question will be, ‘What kind of a man is this, that we may fit him for society.’ When we make our prisons hospitals for the moral reformation of men, we will realize that the jail will be the place in which to begin.”

“The Juvenile Court: Its Uses and Limitations,” was the title of a paper by Dr. Hastings H. Hart, Superintendent of the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society, Chicago. The juvenile court is an evolution. Some twenty States have juvenile court laws--all within about six years. This evolution is still in progress, and the matter still in its infancy.

The juvenile court is founded on three great ideas: 1. The value of the child for its own sake and for the community. 2. The abandonment of the _lex talionis_, _i. e._, the infliction of a punishment commensurate with the wrong done. This is impossible as well as a wrong. No man is wise enough to adjust the punishment accurately to the crime. 3. The recognition of the responsibility of the mother State for the children, especially for the erring and neglected ones.

The first essential feature of the juvenile court is the breadth of its scope: it deals with delinquents and dependents. The second is the character of its proceedings. “What is the best possible thing to be done for the good of the child?” This is the question which the juvenile court endeavors to solve every day. A third feature of the juvenile court is that it places the child in such hands as will do what is best for it. Having such a high character and such noble purposes, no jurist is too eminent to serve as a juvenile court judge. Another distinctive mark of the juvenile court law is the probation officer, who is the very heart of the work, and who not only learns to know the child in the home, but also represents it in the court. Finally the juvenile court recognizes the great fundamental principle that the home and family, when properly constituted are the great molders of character.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20

MORNING

From the proceedings of Thursday morning the following admirable paper by Mr. C. E. Haddox, Warden of the West Virginia Penitentiary, Moundsville, is selected and reproduced in full:

SOME ELEMENTS OF PRISON DISCIPLINE

Old Noah Webster, in that charming book of his entitled “Dictionary,” of which Bill Nye says his chief criticism is that it changes the subject too often, gives the following definition of discipline:

“Education, instruction, cultivation, and improvement; comprehending instruction in arts, sciences, correct sentiments, morals, and manners, and due subordination to authority.”

These are not all the elements Webster says constitute discipline, but they are quite enough upon which to base a paper, and it is well enough to keep this definition in mind, especially for such as may have the impression that discipline consists solely and alone in administering punishments for real or imaginary, deliberate or unintentional, breaches of good conduct.

To the unthinking, the sole object of imprisoning a convict may be regarded as the making him suffer for the crime he committed, and that the judge in imposing sentence should calculate how much suffering will be commensurate with the crime, and adjust the sentence accordingly, the prison authorities then taking hold of him, holding him in “durance vile” for the period of his sentence, keeping him as quiet and orderly as they can, and when his sentence has expired, discharging him without further concern or responsibility for him or his future.

THE SCOPE OF DISCIPLINE

Discipline comprehends in its fullest scope absolutely everything that has to do with the convict, as to his training physically, morally, intellectually, and spiritually, and embraces in its application every agency that has to do with his development as a laborer, his advancement as a student and a thinker, his uplifting morally and spiritually, and his complete and perfect rounding out as a man.

It does not refer alone to the agency of the dark cell, the strap, the taking of good time, the bath, the ball and chain, and similar devices; and in a properly conducted, well-ordered, and painstaking institution, these agencies are far and away the smallest, least used and least effective of all those which make and promote this thing called “discipline.”

In a rightfully planned and properly manned prison, the officers maintain much the same attitude toward the heterogeneous population there gathered--most of whom are children in mental attainments, children in moral culture, children in industrial bent--that a parent occupies toward his child. The motive, the hope, the desire, the object, the plans, and the efforts should be much the same, changed and modified only as the conditions necessarily demand a modification of plans.

The thoughtful and intelligent parent ponders and studies about the future of his child. He knows that he must fit and prepare him for the solemn duties of life, and upon the preparation or lack of preparation he gives him, the discipline or the lack of discipline the child undergoes, will depend that child’s future welfare or misery.

If the parent is wise he carefully arranges for the child’s physical well-being, he plans for his mental cultivation and discipline, and provides systematically for proper environments and training for his moral and spiritual growth and strength. Nothing is left to chance, little to precept, much to example, and the use of the rod or other correctional methods or devices, is an obvious confession of a failure on the part of the parent to take all the necessary care and precaution in training or drilling the child. No child ever needed physical correction at the hand of its parent, that the parent was not also some to blame in neglecting precautions that would have obviated this necessity.

Rev. Samuel J. Barrows, to whom prison people are under so many lasting obligations for his invaluable contributions to prison literature, said no truer thing than when in his admirable address at Kansas City, in 1901, on “Jesus as a Penologist,” he said:

“The ideal discipline is that which educates and strengthens the will without breaking it, and which develops a man without crushing him.”

LABOR AS DISCIPLINE

The first and prime requisite to discipline is a proper labor system that calls for a reasonable amount of satisfactory, productive, remunerative labor from every convict fit to labor. It is altogether the greatest problem that confronts any prison, and is most vital.

Idleness in prison is grossly wasteful, utterly uneconomical, terribly demoralizing, and prevents almost entirely all plans for a regimen that looks to discipline. For those in health there should be no wasted hours at any time or any place in prison.

A score of idle or partly idle convicts can do more mischief, subvert more discipline, destroy more regularity and system than a regiment of men kept at proper, legitimate employment. So the key to discipline is a labor system that embraces in its scope every person in prison.

To devise a system of labor for an institution that will keep everyone sufficiently employed and underwork none (for strange to say, in practice, the prison that overtaxes convicts probably does not exist), is the hardest problem, requiring the most labor, care, and attention that could possibly be imagined, and means that the warden who accomplishes it and continues it will be the most severely taxed of all. It is not the convict that is likely to do an honest, just day’s work, but the management who undertake to see that this most vital and salutary agent of discipline is always in full force and effect.

THE CONTRACT SYSTEM

I have no sympathy with those who inveigh against contract labor in prisons. A contract system in which the State receives the proper compensation for the labor of convicts, and the convict receives a just compensation for surplus work, a system which eliminates the abuses formerly found in contracts, a system in which the government, control, and treatment of the men is in the hands of the prison officials only, and the amount and the kind of labor is adjusted by the warden only, may be the best practicable economic system.

The abuses formerly chargeable to the contract system, and possibly chargeable now in sections, are not necessary, and existed and exist only because prison officials permitted them or fostered them; and instead of abolishing the system, men should have been substituted who would prepare a proper contract, obtain the right compensation, secure rational treatment for the convicts, and get just conditions generally, and have the invaluable experience of expert manufacturers to teach the men deft and skillful labor at something they know becomes a factor in the world beyond the walls.

Shall the meat packing and producing business be destroyed because great abuses have recently been unearthed, or shall it be reformed and corrected?

Shall the oil industry be wiped out because an undue share of the benefits are absorbed by a few, or shall the conditions be changed, the wrongs be righted?

Just think of the consistency of the people who rail at the contract system in prisons, but view with complacency the spectacle, in the East Side of New York, of almost countless thousands of children of four years of age, and sometimes younger, working in basements fourteen hours a day, making paper bags at four cents per thousand; or three-and-a-half-year-old children making artificial flowers on Mott Street, at eight cents per gross! Twenty-three thousand licensed, not to speak of the unknown thousands of unlicensed, tenement houses (home) factories in the city of New York, of the State of New York, which sternly forbids any form of contract labor in prison!

Far be it from me to criticise the State account system, ideal, utopian; but the superintendent who can combine the business qualities necessary to run successfully and economically the factories with the executive qualifications requisite for the other duties of prison governments, is certainly a prodigy, and cannot often be found.

THE REFORMATORY

Neither have I anything to say against the reformatory system of manual training, so called, which builds only to destroy again, except to regret that the only way the State provides manual training for its young men is through the passport and credentials of crime.

THE HABIT OF LABOR

It is not so necessary that a convict shall know a trade, in these days of machinery and constant and continual changes in the methods of manufacture, as it is that he shall have developed in him habits of industry and the willingness to work at what he can do. The great trouble with the average convict is, that he not only does not know a trade, but that he has not been drilled in any kind of labor, and prefers to obtain his substance from the labor of others, by surreptitious, unlawful and unjust means. The _habit_ of labor is what he needs more than the specific kind of work.

As Superintendent Brockway said many years ago: “Only motivelessness is the seat of incorrigibility. To discover or create a want is to find a motive. Given a motive, you may direct a habit. To form a habit is to create character. Habit is the school of conscience. Conscience and habit reinforce one another.”

Let us have the _habit_ of labor rather than the expensive training in trades, which in countless thousands of great industrial establishments will be of no additional value.

LITERARY DISCIPLINE

Next to education in labor, I place as the most important factor in prison discipline the development of the mind through the medium of the various agencies that may be employed for that purpose, not forgetting that labor develops the mind as well as the muscle.

An overwhelming majority of the inmates of any prison are densely and grossly ignorant, and mentally deficient. The polished, scholarly, shrewd criminal is a creature of fiction, not of fact, the exception, not the rule. The average convict is a living example of Horace Mann’s aphorism, that “ignorance in this country is a crime.”

THE PRISON SCHOOL

The convict’s mental discipline can be accomplished in many ways, one of which should be the prison school. The work here will often have to be of the most elementary character. This work should not be merely perfunctory, but should have the most careful attention and consideration. The eagerness with which even comparatively old men undertake to master the simplest primer is one of the pathetic but encouraging aspects of prison-school life.

As the school will probably have to be an evening school of but few hours’ duration, the course of study will necessarily have to be comparatively brief, in order that all inmates needing its help may have their turn.

But the brief term in school should be supplemented by a course of reading and study in the cells, or elsewhere, which should have the same attention, the same systematic oversight and encouragement that the work in the school had. This serves a twofold purpose: first, to drill and discipline the minds, furnish them with concrete information; and second, to fulfill a vital necessity in proper prison discipline, the continual occupation of the subject in his waking hours, with labor, study or proper recreation.

The writer recalls reading recently with some curiosity and interest a stricture written some nineteen years ago on the methods of the Elmira Reformatory referring to the study in the cells of “The Prologue of the Canterbury Tales,” “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” Emerson’s “May Day,” Browning’s “Paracelsus,” and similar literature, and the critic stated that if the convicts are to remain in prison for life, there can be no objection to such reading, but otherwise, the time thus occupied is worse than wasted.

But there is where the critic is wofully mistaken. No man can read even such classics as are here named without being substantially and materially benefited and strengthened, and better able to cope with the practical bread-and-butter part of life. This statement may seem far-fetched, but it is true.

But he does not need to be confined to such books. In this intensely practical age, books are as practical as other things. In the institution over which I preside, scores of men are taking courses in the correspondence schools, doing well, and neglecting no prison requirements. Let the library be stocked with practical handbooks that tell men how to do things, such as to mix concrete, lay brick, build houses, construct telephone lines, run machinery, and similar enterprises.

Prison libraries are generally the result of heterogeneous and indiscriminate donations, the aftermath of the spring house-cleanings of the philanthropically inclined. Such donations should be accepted in the spirit in which given, graciously, thankfully, then where proper, classified, catalogued and used. But this source should not be depended on entirely, or even largely, to supply the library. The books should be selected with as much care and fidelity as they are selected for a university or a public library, for they are to accomplish the same purpose.

THE DAILY AND WEEKLY NEWSPAPER

The writer never shared in the fear of the daily or weekly newspaper in the prison. He acknowledges their necessity to himself, and feels that what is helpful to him ought not seriously to injure his men. In this day, the yellow journals, so called, are mighty agencies for reform, and they and their associate muck rakers, the magazines, are uncovering frauds and wrongs in high places, and driving powerful wrongdoers to cover; and when their work is completed, the smaller criminals will not have the baleful example of some people in high places to justify them in their evil ways. The taste for a blood-and-thunder paper, magazine or book, is infinitely preferable to none at all. The taste will pall eventually on such pabulum and call for better.

Every prison is a community of itself and to itself. The things that elevate people outside, should be found inside the walls. There should be neatness and cleanliness and sanitary conditions everywhere. The lawns should be green, neat and carefully kept. Every prison should have a greenhouse, and flowers should abound in profusion, for civilizing, ennobling and disciplinary powers of nature at her fairest cannot be over-estimated.

The reading courses should be supplemented by instructive lectures and literary entertainments, for such times as are practicable. Theatricals should be permitted and encouraged at intervals. Such relaxation is a great lubricant. Quartettes, octettes and choirs should be organized, and all the men possible taught vocal music under a competent instructor. Orchestras and brass bands should be maintained from the inmates, and music should be a feature of very proper occasion.

To the timid soul who fears that all these pains will pamper the convict and make him love the prison and do something to be returned, let me say that the greatest punishment is in being immured behind great walls beyond which he cannot go, and any deprivation of the elements of reform and enlightened discipline is a mere bagatelle compared to the main fact of imprisonment. As Chaplain Tribou forcibly says: “Men are not sent to prison to be punished, they are punished by being sent to prison.”

Let the great aim be to show the men the many legitimate avenues of improvement, enlightenment, enjoyment and amusements that are open to those who never transgress the law.

Convicts are not to be classed as a peculiar species of genus homo, but are to be regarded as _individuals_, amenable to the same influences, the same treatment, the same hopes as other men. Charles Reade, in his famous book “It Is Never Too Late to Mend,” tells of two little children who come to see a thief just arrested. “Farmer Fielding,” says the little girl, courtesying, a mode of reverence which was instantly copied by the boy, “we are come to see the thief; they say you have caught one.” “Oh dear!” and her bright little countenance was overcast, “I couldn’t have told it from a man.”

Prison sentiment is a powerful auxiliary in discipline, and the consciousness among the men that “a square deal” from the management can be depended upon for the cause of enlightenment, refinement, cheer and relaxation, is worth more than a regiment of soldiers.

RELIGION AS A FACTOR

Religion ought to be a mighty factor in correct prison discipline. If _good_ men need religion to help them and sustain them, certainly _bad_ men need it far more. This department of discipline should be presided over and directed by a strong, level-headed, pious God-fearing man, who may have at once the confidence of the warden and his subordinates, and the inmates as well, a very difficult undertaking.