Part 3

Ashman, Hon. William N., Clunn, Herschel, Grigg, Mary S., Appleton, Rev. Samuel E., Cadbury, Benj., Harris, Rev. J. Andrews, Ash, H. St. Clair, M. D., Conard, C. Wilfred, Hart, William H., Jr., Allen, H. Percival, Comfort, Henry W., Hagert, Edwin, Baily, Joshua L., Dillingham, John H., Hackenburg, William B., Brown, T. Wistar, Davis, Edward T., Harding, Mrs. W. W., Biddle, Samuel, Detwiler, Isaac L., Hallowell, William S., Barnes, Rev. R. Heber, Detwiler, Walter L., Heller, Clyde A., Burnham, William, D’Invillier, Charles E., Hodges, Miss C. V., Baird, John E., Dallett, Alfred M., Hayes, J. H. M., Baker, Rev. Lewis C., Dean, Agnes, M. D., Haupt, Rev. A. J. D., Boies, Ethel M., Denniston, Mrs. E. C., Hastings, Charles P., Boies, David, Daniel, Gustav, Hoffman, Jacob D., Boies, Helen M., Emlen, Samuel, Hampton, John D., Bartlett, J. Henry, Elkinton, Joseph, Hensell, Mrs. George W., Booth, Henry D., Eisenlohr, Otto, Holmes, Jesse H., Biddle, Catharine C., Engle, Rev. Solomon G., Jester, William T. W., Beatty, Robert L., Fleisher, B. W., Kennard, William, Benze, Rev. C. Theodore, Fullerton, Spencer, Koelle, William, Buckler, Arthur, Fricke, Esther, Kennedy, Harry, Biddle, Hannah S., Fassett, Mrs. Horace, Kemp, Agnes, M. D., Bradford, Elizabeth, Franklin, Melvin M., M. D., Koons, J. Albert, Belfield, T. Broom, Fernberger, Henry, Lovett, Louisa D., Bright, Mrs. Robert S., Garrett, Sylvester, Lytle, John J., Bradford, Robert P. P., Grafley, D. W., Leeds, Deborah C., Barakat, Layvah, Garrett, Elizabeth N., LeFevre, Charles H., Conderman, Ethel, Grant, Mrs. W. S., Jr., Lawrence, Mrs. P. W., Converse, John H., Gilbert, W. H., Latimer, Rebecca P., Clark, Mrs. E. W., Grubb, Mrs. C. L., Latimer, George A., Jr., Colton, S. W., Jr., Garrigues, Samuel B., Lewis, Theodore J., Colton, Mrs. S. W., Jr., Gerstley, Mrs. Louis, Lewis, Mary, Clark, Miss F., Gerhard, Luther, Lamerdin, Rev. Philip, Collins, Henry H., Galenbeck, Louis, Longshore, Frank H., Clark, E. W., Jr., Gerhard, Arthur, Layton, Mrs. S. W., Callahan, John, Gerhard, Mrs. Arthur, Liveright, Benjamin K., Clemmer, Jonas G., Gormly, Mrs. E. W., Mason, Mrs. M. A., Cassel, Henry C., Green, Sallie H., Miller, Isaac P., Morton, Charles M., Rosenberg, Marie, Tomkins, Rev. Floyd W., Martin, Hon. J. Willis, Robinson, Anthony W., Tatum, William E., Mayer, Mrs. Henry C., Reeves, Francis B., Unger, Mrs. J. F., Meloney, George R., Randolph, Mrs. Evan, Uhler, G. H. S., McHenry, Rev. H. Cresson, Randolph, Mary, Vaux, George, McDole, Charles, Riehlé, Mrs. M. B., Votaw, Albert H., Mewes, Mrs. L. M., Senft, Rev. F. H., White, Elias H., Meyer, Rev. H. E., Spellissy, P. H., Wentz, Catharine A., Maier, Paul D. I., Scattergood, William, Whelen, Emily, Noblit, Joseph C., Stokes, Dr. William C., Warren, William C., Nicholson, Robert P., Schwarz, G. A., Wetherell, Mary S., Overman, William F., Snellenburg, Samuel, Wetherell, George S., Ohl, Rev. J. F., Snellenburg, Mrs. Samuel, Walton, Harrison, Oetinger, Albert, Starr, Frank H., Wilbur, Henry, Pooley, Frederick J., Schafger, R. C., Young, Jos. H., Platt, Laura N., Stillwell, Mrs. E., Wright, A. J., Platt, Miss L. N., Smallzell, John, Yardley, C. C., Parker, George F., Thomas, Augustus, Ziegler, J. W., Rosengarten, Joseph G., Thomas, Mrs. George C., Zimmerman, E. M., Reger, George J., Thomas, Augusta, Zimmerman, Mrs. E. M.

THE AMERICAN PRISON ASSOCIATION

The American Prison Association met in annual convention in the city of Richmond, Va., November 14-19, 1908, with an attendance of five hundred and twenty registered members and visitors. All but ten States of the Union were represented, together with the District of Columbia, Canada and Cuba. Pennsylvania had thirty-nine representatives to its credit, ten of whom were members of The Pennsylvania Prison Society, including its President, Vice President and the Secretary of its Acting Committee.

The sessions began on Saturday evening in the auditorium of the Jefferson Hotel. After the invocation by the Rev. Russell Cecil, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, addresses of welcome were made by the Hon. D. C. Richardson, Mayor of Richmond, and the Hon. Claude A. Swanson, Governor of Virginia. These were followed by a brief response by Prof. Charles R. Henderson and the address of the President of the Association, the Rev. Dr. J. L. Milligan.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15

At 3:30 P. M. the conference sermon was preached in the First Baptist Church by its pastor, the Rev. George W. McDaniel, D. D. It made a profound impression, and is here reproduced in full.

SERMON

“He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives.”--Isaiah 61:1-3; Luke 4:18.

The eminent theorists and practical exponents of enlightened prison administration composing this national congress are arousing public sentiment to a necessity for an improvement of the physical and moral conditions in prisons and creating a growing interest in discharged prisoners.

Their philosophic conception and wise application of penological principles are hastening the abolition of cruel punishments, the substitution of reformatory for retributive systems, and the adoption of preventive instead of punitive measures.

The fruits of their labors are seen in the establishment of juvenile courts, the appointment of police matrons, the separation of the sexes and also of new from old, and incidental from habitual offenders; the humane treatment of the criminally insane; the study of the criminal, his history and environment; probation without imprisonment for first offenders, with friendly surveillance; the recognition of labor as a disciplinary and reformatory agent; the indeterminate sentence of the prisoner and his commitment to salutary influences; the abolition of public executions and the substitution of electrocution for hanging, and the establishment of higher standards of prison construction and administration.

An organization rendering such unselfish, valuable and abiding service to the delinquents of the country brings the entire nation under a sense of obligation, and deserves the gratitude and coöperation of all people. To have its members as the guests of our city is an honor of which we are pardonably proud, and to be invited to preach their annual sermon is a privilege for which I make most grateful and humble acknowledgment. Leaving the technical discussion to appointed specialists--though to invade their province is a temptation--I shall bring you a message from the Book of books, which I pray and hope may be becoming this occasion, may be blessed to your spiritual enrichment, and may be pleasing to Him whose we are and whom we serve.

The greatest of the Old Testament prophets was Isaiah. No other climbed so high the mountain peaks of prophecy or saw so clearly as he coming events. His anointed vision beheld unfolded in panorama the program of the Messiah’s kingdom, and his purified tongue described the inner mission and the external glory of the Messiah’s reign.

In the olden times of which Isaiah told, Jehovah glorified his people in the building and adornment of the temple, but in the coming days which he foretold, Jehovah was to be glorified by the binding of broken hearts and the beautifying of soiled lives.

The prophet with inspired skill drew a picture of Him who was to be the liberator of the people. Seven hundred years passed, and one quiet Sabbath day, in a small town in Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth looked upon that picture and declared that He was its original. Even so did Hawthorne sketch the stone face in the mountain, which long afterwards was realized by the youth of the valley who had gazed upon it and prayed to be like it. The words of the prophecy referred directly to the period of Babylonian captivity. Israel, in exile, longed for political deliverance. Dry expositions of the Mosaic law could not satisfy captives who waited for the proclamation of their freedom. They could not sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.

They craved the assurance of the _fact_ of God’s love. Our prophecy is the communication of that fact. It meant more than political deliverance; it meant the graciousness of Jehovah’s pardon, the beauty of his love and the pathos and triumph of his passion in their behalf. “Good tidings” and “proclamation” henceforth became the classic terms for all communications from God to man.

The words “gospel” and “preaching” were first employed in a religious sense in the Greek translation of this passage. Regular preaching developed during this period and took its place with sacramental worship. Then it was that the synagogue arose with its pulpit and became no less a factor in religious life than the altar of the temple. And it was in the pulpit of a synagogue in Nazareth that Jesus reread this prophecy and affirmed the fact of its fulfillment. Thus, the first public discourse of the matchless preacher was a proclamation of the gospel.

The deepest meaning of His message was spiritual. It was to the spiritually poor and blind and bruised and imprisoned, but its historical setting suggests the improvement of temporal conditions. Indeed, the twentieth century test of Christianity is its ability to do this very thing--to produce social values.

Jesus Christ astonished His hearers by His stupendous claims. His program sounded pretentious, and it was, for one who was less than the highest type of man and the very God himself. Do you comprehend the scope of Christ’s undertaking? He himself defined it:

“To preach good tidings to the poor”--Almshouses. “To proclaim release to captives”--Prisons. “Recovery of sight to the blind”--Asylums. “To set at liberty them that are bruised”--Hospitals.

He proposed a program of happiness for almshouses, health for hospitals, healing for asylums and freedom for prisons.

He announced that His presence brought the joyful year of jubilee, when liberty was proclaimed to slaves, release to debtors and the restoration of family estates to their dispossessed owners. In His mind the jubilee year typified the Messianic era, the period of the bestowment of a free, full and finished salvation. Oh! glorious era, foreseen in prophecy, inaugurated by Jesus, and drawing near through the benevolent efforts of this and similar organizations.

What then was the message and the meaning of Christ’s life as related to prisoners? I answer: He preached an evangel of emancipation. He proclaimed the privileges of the pardon. He promised a supernal splendor to the penitent.

He sanctioned punishment. Punishment is justified mainly upon three grounds: The vindication of the law, the protection of society and the reformation of the wrongdoer.

Jesus Christ sanctioned it for the same reasons. In the sublimest discourse ever delivered upon this earth he declared: “I am not come to destroy the law. I came not to destroy but to fulfil; for verily I say unto you, Until heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, until all be fulfilled.” Many of His acts were performed in order that “it might be fulfilled,” and the pendulum of His life swung through the arc of obedience. Among the elements entering into the mystery of the atonement is Christ’s vindication of that law, “The wicked shall not go unpunished,” by bearing the penalty in His own body on the tree.

Another ground for the imprisonment of the criminal is the protection of society. The Saviour’s entire life gives authority and force to that position. Did He not teach that it is better for one member to suffer than the whole body? that the commonweal should control individual conduct? and did he not leave a violent robber unpardoned on the cross, whose liberty might have disturbed the public order?

You teach that punishment is also reformatory, and with you the Scriptures agree. To be very accurate, we should say that justice is satisfied by punishment, and the wrongdoer is disciplined by chastisement. Punishment is for the good of the law, and chastisement is for the good of the sufferer. Incarceration is intended to _reform_ the prisoner as much as to punish him. While rebuking the lawless, you seek to help him back to an honorable career. This you attempt, not by a maudlin and demoralizing sentiment, which minimizes guilt or ignores wrong, but by a sympathetic and educational administration of prisons.

Sufficient support is found in the Bible for chastisement. Indeed, to spare the rod would more certainly harm the criminal than it would spoil the child. The rod of chastening, however, must not be held by a vindictive hand, but by one of love, and its strokes modified by a knowledge of the offender. Then it may become the saving agent in the life of the criminal, as the crosses of the thieves enabled them to see the cross of Christ.

Society writes over the convict’s Inferno, “Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.” Even Byron was more cheerful and charitable. His prisoner of Chillon, doomed to solitary despair, saw a rift in his prison walls. Dragging his chain, he climbed upward and looked through. There lay the silver lake framed in the mountains, and the blue heavens over all. As he gazed through tears for his dead brother, a bird began to sing:

A lovely bird with azure wings, And song that said a thousand things, And seemed to say them all for me.

The gospel sheds upon the prisoner the ray of light, uncovers to him the glad sky, thrills him with songs of redemption and inspires him with the hope of a better life. This must ever be the method of all successful prison reforms.

Reclamation is impossible except by creating self-respect and enkindling hope. To know that good behavior shortens the term incites all save the incorrigibly bad to a noble life. To sit in a dungeon of despair must make the prisoner indifferent to all the good without.

Two young women artists have painted a great picture, which should hang in every prison where all prisoners can see it. The benignant face of Jesus, full of love and compassion, stands out in glorious relief. A poor man, whom each prisoner might take to be himself, kneels with his back to the observer. The Master’s hand is stretched toward the kneeling form, and He is saying, not in rebuke, but in hope, “I condemn thee not; go and sin no more.” We decorate our libraries and public buildings with suggestive mottoes and inspiring scenes of history. We leave the prisoner to gaze through iron bars or look upon bare walls. Jesus Christ would adorn those walls with pictures of hope.

Jesus was not a reformer, but a Redeemer. He reforms man by regenerating him. His mission was not to Pharisees, but to publicans, and in his day the publicans and harlots entered in before the self-righteous.

He came to seek that which was lost. The modern church ministers mostly to the saved. Jesus showed a more excellent way. A convicted robber was the first fruit of the cross, and Gibbon records that the first Christian devotees were social outcasts.

Yes, Christ came to set the captives free--free from their old natures--by making them new creatures, free from the dominion of sin by providing them with the power of righteousness; free from the bondage of despair by enkindling a fadeless hope.

While blest with a sense of His love, A palace a toy would appear; And prisons would palaces prove If Jesus would dwell with me there.

If we could completely change the nature of all prisoners in America, so that they would henceforth love good and hate evil, I venture that this congress would vote in favor of opening the jails and freeing the captives. Nothing short of that is the Gospel program.

Do you remind me that this is ideal? I grant it, but our ideals are the tides of the moon that lift the waters from the ocean of the commonplace. We shall not lower the standards to our lives, but rather raise our lives to our standards. When the decree of papal infallibility was declared there was loud and tumultuous confusion in St. Peter’s. Archbishop Manning, of England, standing upon an elevation and pale with excitement, held the decree aloft in his hands, and exclaimed: “Let the whole world go to bits, and we will reconstruct it with this paper.” To all of the pessimists and doubters, amid all the clamor and criticism of the world, we hold aloft the glorious Gospel of the Son of God, and say, “Let society go to pieces, and we will reconstruct it with this truth.”

Christ proclaimed the privileges of the pardoned. One privilege is to live without suspicion. A certain writer in a recent and readable book takes the position that when a man is sent to the penitentiary even for a year, he is sent there for life, since he will always be regarded as a convict. Therefore, he concludes that a man ought not to be sent to the penitentiary at all. The fact which he states must be admitted with regret, but to adopt his conclusion would encourage wrongdoing and subvert the moral order.

True prison reformers will prefer the method of Jesus. When He forgives a sinner, He blots out the memory of his past life. The debt of sin is not only canceled, but erased. The pardoned are permitted to go in peace. How long will it take a Christian people to imbibe the spirit and imitate the example of their Lord?

The only stigma which He allowed to remain was that in the sinner’s own memory. God forgives and forgets, but the forgiven sinner can never forget. The nails are out, but the holes are there still; there, mark you, to be seen only by himself. God remembers them no more, and God’s people, in beautiful and divine charity, ought to cover them from their eyes and thoughts.

When we shall have attained to this standard set by our Lord, we shall have gone a long way toward solving the problem of the ex-prisoner. To that noble end this Association is moving.

Society has no more perplexing question than the treatment of prisoners who have served out their sentence and desire to lead new lives. Minister as I am, I must confess that the average church member is unwilling to receive the ex-prisoner into his home, or even to look him in the face. People whose only superiority consists in that they have never been convicted scornfully raise their skirts and pass by on the other side. The punishment which society inflicts is more intolerable to the sensitive soul than confinement in prison walls. The ex-prisoner is free, but not restored.

Vastly different from modern society was the attitude of Jesus. He received publicans and ate with them. He went to be the guest of one who was a sinner, and he welcomed the approach of the shame-covered, broken-hearted woman, who came with her tears of penitence and alabaster of affection.

As the last Christmas approached a kind-hearted friend conceived the idea of securing a pardon for a young man who had committed a crime in hot haste, and was apparently penitent and reformed.

The Christian man said, “I want to present him to his mother as a Christmas gift.” Armed with the pardon, he called at the penitentiary.

“Andrew,” he said, “what would you think if I were to tell you I am going to get you a pardon?”

“Oh, sir, I would think it was too good to be true!”

“What would you say if I told you I had your pardon in my pocket?”

The young man threw himself at his benefactor’s feet, clasped his knees devotedly and said: “Oh, captain, have you got it? Have you got it? Thank you, sir; thank you! Thank God! Thank God!”

The friend dressed him in citizen’s clothes and escorted him to the priest (he was a Catholic), and had him swear faithfulness; then took him to his own home for supper, and treated him as a member of the family.

Christmas eve they rode together to the prodigal’s far-away home. The train did not run fast enough, and the impatient youth, with sleepless eyes, read the name of every station. Tenderly did he cling to the friend, and gratefully did he thank him. As the train pulled into the home depot brothers, sisters and widowed mother were there to receive with tears and caresses the returning boy, and they were as happy that night as the home of the prodigal’s father in the long ago.

The friend saw him safely among his family, and turned to go; but, no, they clung to him, they praised him, they prayed God to be good to him, and the ex-convict said, “You have treated me like a son and helped me to be a man.”

My friends, if we had more of the Christian religion in our treatment of the erring, we would make it harder for them to do wrong and easier for them to do right.

The lot of the ex-convict is an exceedingly sad one. Be he ever so anxious to make a new start, he cannot do so without the encouragement of his more fortunate mortals.

How few concern themselves for him! Who will give him the hand of greeting? What business firm will trust or employ him? He needs help and cannot rise without it, and a nominal Christian public refuses to give it. They let him wander forth like King Lear, with uncovered head, into the dense darkness and sweeping storm.

Now the people who help that man to his feet again are the true disciples of Jesus. Excepting alone His purity, Jesus’ most striking trait was His capacity for tenderness and helpfulness toward the straying. He believed in giving the unfortunate another chance, and that is what He meant when He said, “Go and sin no more.” Go, be a clean, respectable and successful woman. Go, and I am with you.

Paul wrote Philemon to receive back the runaway slave, Onesimus, and treat him as a brother. A prisoner is not fully saved until he is saved to society. He is not saved to society until he earns an honest living, and he cannot earn an honest living without the help of the more fortunate.

Fiction tells of one injured by his own sin, brutalized by injustice, and finally changed after nineteen years of imprisonment, who built factories, became a banker, founded a hospital for sick women, and an industrial school for children, and made a city and filled it with the hum of industry.

One day my ’phone rang, and I was asked by a Hebrew merchant and banker in this city to make an engagement to meet him and a young man in whom he was interested.

I called at the appointed time at the bank, and the business man said: “Doctor, this is Mr. Blank. He is one of the unfortunates. He ended his term in the prison last week, and I have secured him a position in a shoe factory. His mother is a Baptist, and I tell him he ought to be under the wing of the church, and I know you will help him and be his spiritual adviser.”

Beloved, that was a unique and joyful experience. A Jew committing to the care of a Christian minister an ex-convict!

The young man was full of appreciation. He promised to meet me at the Sunday school the following Sunday morning. He was there bright and early. On his face shone the light that never was seen on land or sea.