Part 1

VOLUME I, No. 3. MARCH, 1911

THE REVIEW

A MONTHLY PERIODICAL, PUBLISHED BY THE NATIONAL PRISONERS’ AID ASSOCIATION

AT 135 EAST 15th STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

TEN CENTS A COPY. SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS A YEAR

E. F. Waite, President. F. Emory Lyon, Vice President. O. F. Lewis, Secretary and Editor Review. E. A. Fredenhagen, Chairman Ex. Committee. Charles Parsons, Member Ex. Committee. G. E. Cornwall, Member Ex. Committee. Albert Steelman, Member Ex. Committee. A. H. Votaw, Member Ex. Committee.

A VALLEY OF LIFE[A]

If some one of the prison officials of New York were to suggest the turning out of hundreds of the prisoners on Blackwell’s Island and Sing Sing into a colony in the fertile valley along the Hudson or the Mohawk river, under the care of a superintendent and a half dozen assistants without an armed guard, the inhabitants not only of New York state but of all the states in the Union would immediately hold mass meetings of protest and set their political organizations to work to have the official making the suggestion removed from office and incarcerated in an insane asylum. This would be the action taken in this far advanced, civilized country.

Yet in the Philippine islands this very thing has been done, and done with success. It has been done with a people said by leading officials of this country and other countries to be incapable of self-government.

To be explicit, there are today 1,423 prisoners, or “colonists,” as they are now termed—prisoners of all classes and sorts, serving terms of from five years to life imprisonment, and for crimes from petty thievery to murder—living without a guard in a small, fertile valley along the river of one of the islands in the archipelago just south of Luzon, the largest island, of which Manila is the capital.

Here the 1,423 convicts live, not alone, isolated as the prisoners of Siberia are, but much the same as they would have lived had they never committed a crime against the community—in peace, prosperity and happiness, with their families, engaged in the pursuit of agriculture-and the only guns on the place are those mounted at the superintendent’s office for saluting purposes and the “six-shooter” the superintendent keeps locked up with his cash in the safe of the penal colony office.

There is a guard on the reservation, but it is only a police guard, and the only arms its members carry are a small policeman’s club, which is more ornamental than useful.

With this lack of military display on the part of the authorities, there has been but one outbreak or attempt at escape, and that occurred soon after the colony was first established and before the valley had been drained and rid of malaria and cholera. Since that first outbreak and the subsequent capture of all but one of the nineteen who escaped (and that one died) there has been peace and quiet on the reservation.

It was in 1904 that George N. Wolfe, then warden of Bilibid, the “bastile” of Manila, now director of the bureau of prisons of the Philippine islands, found the prison fast becoming overcrowded. He had male and female inmates confined there who were serving sentences for all manner of crimes. He was confronted with the problem of finding an additional housing place. He took the matter up with the superintendent of prisons with the result that it was determined to establish a colony of prisoners under a guard.

Accordingly, in November, 1904, the superintendent of prisons appointed Warden Wolfe, Prof. William S. Lyon, horticulturist of the bureau of agriculture, and Dr. Arlington Pond, star pitcher on the old Baltimore Oriole baseball team in the McGraw and Keeler days, then city health officer of Manila, to select a site for a penal colony.

After hunting up and looking over several sites the committee finally selected Iwahig, a small valley on the Iuhuit river on the southern point of the island of Palawan and directly opposite the town of Puerto Princesa. The valley is about ten miles long and contains something like 270 square miles.

The site selected, sixty prisoners of all classes and confined for all manner of crimes, most of whom were hardened criminals, were sent there under an armed guard.

At first health and discipline were not good. Malaria and cholera made great inroads upon the little band. The valley, while of fertile soil, was covered with water more than half the year, and that which was not under water was densely overgrown with bamboo timber. The first sixty dwindled down to less than one-third that number. Others were sent to take their places and they, too, became either infirm or more hardened criminals. Conditions got worse, and one day there was a mutiny, in which nineteen of the prisoners made their escape. All but one of the nineteen were captured and sent back to the colony. Things became so bad that Warden Wolfe decided to make a change in the superintendent of the colony, and he made a request therefor to the superintendent of prisons.

At that time the penal institutions of the Philippines were under the jurisdiction of the secretary of the department of commerce and police. They were later placed in the bureau of public instruction and under the bureau of prisons.

The governor general of the Philippines in 1906 appointed Major John R. White of the constabulary superintendent of the colony.

Major White immediately set to work to cure the evils. He got several physicians and sanitary officers of the Philippine government to lay out general plans for draining the valley, so as to rid it of the malaria and cholera. He was more than successful; in fact, in 1907, when he turned the colony over to the present superintendent he had obliterated both diseases. Major White also started a radical reform in the system of handling the prisoners, and instead of driving them and herding them in a few buildings he used kindness.

The real change from a penal colony to a “Golden Rule” colony took place in the latter part of 1907, when Carroll H. Lamb was appointed superintendent.

Mr. Lamb had ideas of handling the prisoners that were different from those of his predecessors. He exercised from the first a humanitarian policy, and instead of asking for the worst behaved of the convicts of Bilibid he asked for the “trusties,” who were the greater in number. His requests were granted.

Superintendent Lamb consulted with sociologists and leading criminologists, after which he laid down for himself and the prisoners the following principles by which a good convict might be made a good citizen:

“Proper environment and association, fixed habits of conduct and industry, intellectual and moral instruction and industrial and practical teachings.”

He instilled these principles into himself and into the convicts, as the method to fit them soonest to return to society, cured mentally and physically, and to teach them to be law-abiding and self-respecting citizens.

Mr. Lamb devoted much study to the character of the Filipino and found him, as many others have found him, easy to manage, especially where tact and kindness is used. He also found that the primitive civilization of the Filipino people and their natural bent toward agriculture aided in the application of the principles he laid down.

He began by reducing the restraints and increasing the independence of the colony as a whole. He also began the utilization of agriculture as the burden of the convicts’ labors, and impressed upon them the idea that not only were they working for the government against which they had committed offenses but for themselves. He pointed out that they would not only gain virtual freedom at once, but would participate in the earnings of the colony.

His first lot of prisoners numbered more than 100, and they were, as in the early history of the colony, made up of all classes of criminals, but men who had been given certain liberties in Bilibid for good behavior. He had as assistants two Americans, the oldest of whom was less than 30, and the youngest of whom was but 21, a Filipino band director, a Filipino physician, a Spanish padre for chaplain, and a matron. The matron was necessary, as among his prisoners were some twenty women.

Today, three years since Mr. Lamb first went to Iwahig, there are 1,423 prisoners. He still has his two American assistants and the two Filipino assistants. In addition he has thirty-one petty officers, all of whom are prisoners. Two of these petty officers are “lifers,” serving sentences for murder in the first degree; two more of them are serving long terms for offenses almost as serious as murder, and the rest of the thirty-one are men who have more than five years yet to serve.

Every one of these thirty-one petty officers lives in his own home, has his wife and family, and is a director in the colony’s bank, established last year for the deposit of the colony’s funds and the gratuities saved by the prisoners. These gratuities are paid monthly, and as the convicts raise everything they use, even to beef and to the leather shoes they make from the hides of the cattle, their gratuities amount to a considerable sum.

Each of these petty officers is in charge of a certain number of prisoners called squads. The squads in turn are formed into brigades or battalions and commanded by the superintendent and assistants. The distribution of all prisoners is about the same as in a military garrison, where a company of soldiers is divided into squads in charge of a corporal and a sergeant.

The petty officer is responsible to the superintendent for the deportment of the members of his squad. The general orders, which are really regulations, are known by every colonist, and once a month must be recited by him to his petty officer.

In the Philippine islands there are many more holidays than in the United States, and on each of these holidays all work is suspended and the colonists are allowed to engage in sports, church fiestas and social intercourse. The American game of baseball is the principal sport. There are four crack teams in the colony, among the players being several American convicts. Each dry season the superintendent gives a pennant to the winning team and a small sum of money to be distributed among the players. The rivalry for the “flag” is sometimes as keen as in some of the games between teams in the United States.

The colonists have their own court, too, with the superintendent as a supreme judge. He acts finally and independently of the lower or convict court, but with one or two exceptions his action has always confirmed that of the lower court.

At this court are tried such cases as the police report to the petty officers. Last year there were 102 cases before this court, ninety-four of which were minor, or for slight infraction of a rule. The punishment meted out was generally a loss of gratuity and a mark against the individual to be used against him for any future offenses. In each of these the convict court sentenced the culprits to be returned to Bilibid, and Superintendent Lamb approved their decision and returned them. Six of the eight have since been sent back to the colony at their request and on their promise of good behavior.

* * * * *

A bill appropriating $50,000 for a reformatory for women, and authorizing the government to appoint a commission to secure plans and specifications has been proposed in the Connecticut legislature.

DEFECTIVE DELINQUENTS

[Abstract of Recent Article in The Outlook]

The undoubted presence among so-called juvenile delinquents of a considerable number of mentally defective children, the utter lack of proper institutions to which to commit such defectives and the inadequate provision made for a timely discovery of such defectiveness, were treated recently before the New York Academy of Medicine by Mr. Ernest K. Coulter, clerk of the Children’s Court of New York County. After calling attention to recent studies which show that 33 per cent. of the inmates of Bedford Reformatory for Women, and 39 per cent. of the inmates of Elmira Reformatory, are said to be mentally defective, Mr. Coulter, out of his own experience with 80,000 cases, adopted two per cent. as a conservative estimate of the proportion of mentally defective children among the total of those arraigned for conflict with the law.

This percentage would bring annually into the Children’s Court of New York County alone, two hundred defective delinquents. Mr. Coulter then stated that “while there are more than thirty institutions to which the court in New York County can commit children, there is not one where those of the mentally defective type can be sent on legal commitments.” The only course open to the court, therefore, is to thrust the mental defective into an ordinary reformatory institution. In providing no other treatment for this type, “the state is blind,” said Mr. Coulter, “to its cruelty to the child, the injustice to the institution, and the menace to the community. In this blindness and parsimony the state is thus sowing a continuous crop for its prisons and alms houses. If the public cannot be aroused to the human rights violated by this course, perhaps the money cost will one day stir it from its lethargy.”

There is no adequate provision for even the discovery of such deficiencies among those children who are taken into custody, said Mr. Coulter. “If while these defectives were still children,” he declared, “the causes of the abnormal mental condition which predisposed them to prey on society could have been removed, many of them would have been saved to useful citizenship. With such cases the time for relief, if curative or ameliorating remedies are possible, is in youth and at the first indication of criminal tendencies. * * * The causes of the overwhelming tendencies that array them against society may often be determined by pathological and physiological and psychological examination. Such causes, for instance, may be the existence of adenoids, which retard normal development, render the child irritable and mentally lazy; they may be the absence of thyroid glands, which brings about cretinism; they may be due to hereditary syphilis, which often results in a lesion of the brain. The children of this class are not responsible for the acts that lead to their commitment to reformatories. Taken in childhood, these causes may often be removed and the victim restored to society a normal being. A correct diagnosis is absolutely essential. Without a correct diagnosis no rational treatment is possible.”

AN INMATE’S STORY

It is a principle of evidence that the testimony of a witness with a favorable bias is to be taken at a discount, whereas the admissions of one with an unfavorable bias are of face value. Therefore, when an ex-prisoner speaks good of the prison in which he has been incarcerated, we listen with nearly full credence. Recently the Philadelphia _North American_ published the story of a forger who had served his term in the state prison at Charlestown, Mass.

“That was a red-hot prison fifteen years ago,” says the _North American_. “It was infamous as a hell on earth, from the punishments, which included stringing up by the thumbs, the humiliating paddle and the water cure by means of the fire hose turned on the recalcitrant in his tiny cell, to the prisoners’ own contribution to the pandemonium in the way of riots and stabbing affrays. The discipline was as shamefully farcical as the prison officials were brutal.”

Then the conscience of New England rebelled, continues the _North American_. A change in wardens made General Benjamin F. Bridges head of the institution and N. D. Allen deputy warden. These men abolished all cruel and inhuman punishments, stopped regarding the prisoners as they would wolves, treated them like men of “decent honor and probity,” and established, in a word, the “friendship system.” The spirit and atmosphere of the place changed.

The story of the treatment now accorded the prisoners in this institution, as told by the time-expired forger mentioned above, is in part as follows:

“The convict learns, the minute he enters, that the whole world is not against him.

“‘I don’t care,’ Mr. Allen says to him, ‘what your past life has been. We intend to take you as you are, and we’ll treat you as a man until it is shown by your actions that our confidence is misplaced. Your treatment here will rest entirely with you. We will give you every help in our power to equip you for the struggle you will have to face at the time of your release.’

“Can you conceive the effect of such an exordium on a man whose spirit is sullen in its resentment against the society that has begun to punish him? His feeling of antagonism vanishes. He realizes that no needless humiliation awaits him. He is known by his name, not by a number. He can wear his hair and beard as he chooses. He can shave with his own razor—or he can go to the prison barber. There is no lockstep march to mess. He quits work ten or fifteen minutes before dinner and chats with his fellow-workmen as freely as if he were on his job outside.

“Apart from the regular school there is a correspondence school service, which teaches languages, mathematics, bookkeeping, stenography, custom tailoring, designing, arts and crafts and mechanical and electrical engineering. The convict can join the prison band or orchestra, or take a course in painting, if his talent inclines either way.

“There are two first-class baseball teams and Saturday afternoon in the prison yard lets everybody loose to root as joyfully for his favorite team, and as loudly, as if he’d paid his half dollar to chase the pennant at home. During the winter, vaudeville and moving-picture shows take place in the chapel, which I have known to be completely darkened, simply on the word of honor of 860 convicts that they would take no advantage of the gloom.

“The visits of friends are not the cruel mockeries of a steel screen and a keeper’s open eye and ear. The prisoner can sit side by side with his visitor and talk free of jealous watch, for a full hour. He is permitted to buy luxuries—fruit, pies, candies, tobacco—and the prison will take care of them for him so that they sha’n’t spoil. He has his private bank account and can earn money by work for himself after the regular hours. They can even trade among themselves, by a special transfer system. When their private supplies arrive—two and three tons some days—the prison office looks like a grocery store.

“If a system has ever been devised which has succeeded in transforming a convicted criminal into an honest man, this is the one. There are very, very few men who go out of Charlestown prison who, at the time, are not honest, law-abiding citizens.”

Once, when a visiting warden saw General Bridges’ convicts pass him and his host, he remarked:

“Why, say, general, these men don’t look like prisoners. They walk upright and look you straight in the face. I haven’t a man in my penitentiary who doesn’t look hangdog.”

“They look at us like men,” rejoined Bridges, “because they feel like men. And they feel like men because they are treated like men.”

“Oh, that may all be, general. I have men that stare at me sometimes, too. But these prisoners actually smile and laugh at you. Maybe they’re just feeling good. But what gets me most is that you speak to them just as they do to you.”

That criticism took all the wind out of the general’s intellectual sails. All he could do was to answer lamely:

“Why, my dear sir, if I didn’t speak to them they’d be offended. They’d imagine I was angry over something.”

THE BOSTON NEWSBOYS’ TRIAL BOARD

After four months of existence the Boston Newsboys’ Trial Board, though still an experiment, is justifying its existence. A glance at its nature and functions may be of interest.

It was formed to deal with newsboys under 14 years of age who were charged with violation of the terms of their licenses. The licensing of newsboys in Boston is entirely in the hands of the Boston School Committee, and that body alone has power to revoke such license. Therefore, under the former system, even after the offending newsboy, with his parents, had been summoned before the juvenile court and the heavy judicial machinery of complaint, summons, service, investigation, hearing, and verdict had been brought to bear on a trivial offense, before the boy’s license could be revoked the finding of the court had to be reviewed and approved by the school committee. This procedure took the boy away from school, took his parents from their work, cast a stigma on the boy and his family for having been called to court, and called for activities out of proportion to the offense.

The Trial Board, devised to meet these conditions, is composed of five members—two adults, appointed by the school committee, and three newsboys, elected by the licensed newsboys in the Boston schools. The only connection between the court and the Boston Newsboys’ Club is that the latter offers two rooms for sitting of the court, this circumstance operating, of course, to bring the tribunal closer to the confidence of the boys themselves. The court sits once a week—every Friday night at 7:30. An aggrieved newsboy has previously brought his case before the clerk of the Trial Board, who calls it to the attention of the judges, and if the case can be settled without formal procedure against the accused, this is done. Otherwise, the court will hear the testimony and render a verdict. In effect, the court can, by way of punishment, revoke or suspend the license of a guilty newsboy. As a matter of fact, it can only recommend to the school committee that such action be taken, but such is the confidence of the committee in the court that the recommendations of the latter are always carried out. In cases where the offender defies the Trial Board, the latter can, of course, always fall back on the police and the juvenile court.

The Trial Board thus has power to do everything which the juvenile court may do to the offender, except to fine him. Special summonses, warrants and other court papers have been formulated and printed for the Board. It is not part of the legally constituted judicial machinery of the city or state, yet its findings have all the weight of finality.

* * * * *

Since its organization ten years ago, the Prisoners’ Aid Association of Washington, D. C., has benefited over 28,000 prisoners, 9,000 of whom were returned to their homes. The records show that 90 per cent. of those aided financially have returned every cent advanced to them by the association, while the majority of the others were unable to repay the association.

A recent report made by the parole officer of the Board of Public Welfare of Kansas City, Mo., shows that 547 persons are paroled from the workhouse and Leed’s Farm. These persons are earning an average of $10 per week. All have been put at work except 70, and of these 20 are too ill to be employed. The parole system is said to be saving the city $392 a day.

IN THE PRISONERS’ AID FIELD

=THE MARYLAND PRISONERS’ AID ASSOCIATION.=

(Although the following article is an account of a single association, it contains material of such general interest that it seemed desirable to print it in full. The article appeared in the forty-first annual report of the Prisoners’ Aid Association of Maryland, for the year ended April 30, 1910.—THE EDITOR)

The objects of the Prisoners’ Aid Association of Maryland are the uplift and rehabilitation of the criminal.