The Disgraceful Jails of Iowa.—Rev. Charles Parsons, of the Iowa Society for the Friendless, is on the warpath. He says that “the jails of Iowa have been condemned and relegated to the junk pile many times, and yet they go on doing business at the old stand in the same old way, as if they were the most scientific institutions possible. “I have spent enough time in the jails of our State during the past five years to almost entitle me to membership in the jail fraternity. If the jail has anything to be said to its credit, I have been unable to find it, though I have searched diligently for it in most of the jails within our borders.” “One step in the program for betterment would be to avoid imprisonment through inability to pay a fine, but give the opportunity to pay the fine upon installments. This plan would save the culprit his employment if he has any. It would save his family humiliation and disgrace and help to save his self-respect. “Another step in the line of progress would be to parole all offenders where the penalty is less than 30 days. If they fail to make a right use of the parole, give a work-house sentence. “A third step in the program for progress would be the establishment of district custodial farms with work-house facilities for all prisoners serving 30 days or more. These district institutions must and should be under the management of the State. “Farming, gardening and diversified industries should be followed most suited to the location of the institution, but such industries must be used which are most easily acquired. That the labor of short term men can be profitably utilized in such institutions has been demonstrated in a number of instances. “The work-house of Minneapolis is a financial success with men whose average terms is only 17-1/2 days. “That such labor can be used outside of prison walls with perfect safety is shown by the success of the prison camp which has been in operation for several months past, at Ames, and the hay pressing gangs that have been working from Fort Madison. “During 1912, 3,739 inmates passed through the Minneapolis work-house. All the men worked in the open without walls, yet during the year there was only one escape.” Warden Scott of New Hampshire Retires.—Many are the caustic criticisms directed at the Governor of New Hampshire, who recently removed Warden H. K. W. Scott of the State prison, and who appointed in his place a man of no equal prison experience. Warden Scott held office from 1905, and has served under five governors of the State, receiving his appointment from Governor McLane. The Concord Evening Monitor has published a large number of scathing criticisms from the State press on the action of the Governor in removing Warden Scott. Warden Scott, during his connection with the institution, has abolished the striped suit, lock step, downcast eye, dark cell and corporal punishment, which were practiced before his coming, and has instituted a night school. Instead of a candle each man now has an electric light in his cell, a grade system has been established and during the last summer a prison baseball league was organized, in order that the inmates might have outdoor exercise. Four teams were in the league and games were played Saturday afternoons. During the last session of the Legislature Warden Scott worked for the passage of an act to provide for pecuniary assistance of prisoners and their families, whereby a certain per cent. of their earnings is laid aside. The warden had submitted to the Governor and council a plan for the carrying out of this Charges preferred against him by Rev. Claudius Byrne, a former chaplain of the prison, were investigated by Legislative committees and proved groundless. Warden Scott says that for the present he will remain in Concord, N. H., as his two sons are attending school. Sterilization Law Unconstitutional in New Jersey.—Upon the grounds that she was denied the equal protection of the laws to which, under the constitution of the United States, every person is entitled, the Supreme Court of New Jersey, in an opinion by Justice Garrison, has set aside the order of the Board of Examiners of feeble minded, criminals, Epileptics and other defectives providing for the operation of salpingetomy upon Alice Smith, an inmate of the State Village for Epileptics. In reaching this conclusion, Justice Garrison holds that without regard to the power of the State to subject its citizens to surgical operations that shall render procreation by them impossible, the statute creating the Sterilization Commission is invalid because it denied to the victims of the law the constitutional protection to which they are entitled. In the syllabus of the opinion Justice Garrison holds that the artificial regulation of the welfare of society by means of surgical operations for the prevention of procreation, being based upon the suppression of the personal liberty of individuals, must be accomplished, if at all, by a statute that does not deny to the persons thus injuriously affected the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States. Commenting on this decision, the Springfield Republican says editorially: It is constitutional to sterilize defectives and criminals in the State of Washington, but it is unconstitutional to sterilize them in New Jersey. The United States Supreme Court will have to settle the question finally. To the lay mind it would seem that, if the State has power to break a man’s neck by hanging, or to kill him by electricity, it would have the lesser power to subject him to a surgical operation, not in the least dangerous to life or limb, for the protection of society. The question of constitutionality aside, it is to be observed that sterilization involves various social questions whose seriousness should compel caution on the part of Legislatures in authorizing its practice in public institutions. It cannot be said that the problem has yet been completely thought out and all the consequences fully considered. A recent article in a medical journal by one of the foremost advocates of sterilization was notable for the physician’s frank admission that the objections to the operation, in their broadest significance, were very weighty. An operation that leaves the subject physically as fit as ever for the sex relationship, yet eliminates the danger of the conception of children, would have very deplorable moral and social results if it should become in the least common. It is a question that may easily involve large classes of people outside of prisons and asylums for the feeble-minded. Farm Work in Minnesota.—From the near northwest comes the tale that twenty-five convicts are to be sent to the State lands near Walker, Minn., from the State penitentiary at Stillwater, to begin a system of intensive State farming and land reclamation, according to plans announced by the State Board of Control, which is compelled to find employment for more than two hundred men after January 1. The new laws prevent the prison from taking contracts, and the shoe contract will accordingly be dropped. The announcement of the new plan was made after the board had bought 160 acres adjoining the prison farm at Stillwater. This land will be farmed. The board has other land adjoining State institutions and owns a large tract near the State sanatorium at Walker. The men prisoners will be sent there to clear the land and put in crops. Only the prisoners with best records will be sent to the farms. If the first detachment makes a success of the venture others will be sent out. Alumni Day at a Reform School.—It does happen! This was what occurred at the Lyman School for Boys, Westboro, Massachusetts, on November 15, 1913. The trustees of the School, Superintendent E. L. Coffeen, and Superintendent of the Parole Department, Walter A. Wheeler, sent letters to all of the 144 boys who have become twenty-one years of age the past year, inviting them to a dinner and celebration in their honor at the school. About one fourth of them attended, and as many more sent letters of regret, containing remarks of warm appreciation. Some of the boys were in the Army and Navy; others had moved out of the State. For any one of the boys to attend, meant the sacrificing of a day’s work and the cost of carfare. The program included a football game between the present inmates and an outside team, a reunion of boys with old officers and teachers, an inspection of the new features of the school, which they had not seen in the last five or six years, and finally a banquet. The usual speeches were made by the trustees, superintendents and invited guests, but the feature was the voluntary address in behalf of the boys made by one of their number. After thanking those present for what the school training and the friendly oversight of the parole board had done for him, he pledged the old boy’s interests in doing whatever they could to help the younger brothers “make good” when released from the school. It is intended to have a Home Coming Celebration every year, of which this was the successful experiment. After Forty-Three Years.—Pardoned after forty-three years—the best years of his life—in a State penitentiary! Seeing the new world for the first time at sixty-six—such is the experience of John Taborn, pardoned by Governor Cox, of Ohio! Why, it’s like coming to life again after half a century of death, says the Bay City (Mich.) Times. When Taborn entered the State prison at Columbus in 1870, Grant was President. The telephone was unknown; electric lights were not dreamed of; there were not electric cars; skyscrapers in the largest cities were four or five-story buildings; Edison had not conceived the phonograph, while flying machines and wireless telegraphy were the dreams of madmen. The United States navy consisted of a few iron-clad and many wooden ships. When he was pardoned, Taborn was taken about Columbus by Warden Thomas’ secretary to see that he was not confused by the traffic and injured. He gazed in awe at the electric cars; he got lost in the revolving door of an office building, the height of which astonished him; he enjoyed his first ride in an elevator; he smoked a good cigar, but was puzzled by the safety matches, which would not ignite when scratched on his trouser leg; he heard a phonograph and talked over the telephone for the first time in his life. Despite his sixty-six years, Taborn is active and has keen sight, reading without glasses. In the prison he learned three trades—that of machinist, shoe-maker and molding—and plans to begin his last span of life as a machinist. When he left the prison he had about $100. The prisoners took up a collection and gave him $30; the State turned over $20 and Taborn had about $50 himself. He was placed upon an electric car for a trip to Delaware, O., from which town he was sentenced for killing a man during a quarrel. Then he will go to his old home in Cass County, Michigan, and later to Hillsboro, N. C., where employment awaits him. Social Surveys of Delinquency and Vice.—The Russell Sage Foundation Library publishes the following useful summary:
The State Use Problem in New Jersey.—The Newark News has a plain and clear statement of the difficulty. New Jersey is finding in going over from the contract system to the State use plan. The State Economy and Efficiency Commission is to-day investigating State prison conditions. The problems before it should concern every tax-payer, not to mention those who are interested in the great problem of prison reform. The need for their investigation was indicated yesterday by the report of the prison inspectors. The prison of this State is operated under the law of 1814 as it has been amended from time to time. Its operation is based upon an obsolete idea of prisons and their purpose: the idea that prisons are places of confinement under the control of a keeper whose business is, as his title implies, to keep the prisoners. To secure revenue for the State, and incidentally, to preserve the mental and bodily health of the prisoners, provision was made for hiring out their labor and for this purpose a supervisor was appointed. The State wards then fell under the jurisdiction of the keeper and supervisor, whose duties were regulated by statutes requiring interpretation by the courts. Then a Board of Inspectors was appointed to see to it that the keeper kept the prisoners and that the supervisor kept the contracts for their labor; but the board has neither authority nor responsibility. Finally, a Labor Commission was appointed to devise a scheme for carrying out the State-use system of keeping the prisoners busy; an undertaking that it has proved unable, so far, to carry out. Two years ago the Legislature decided to put an end to the exploitation of prison labor as fast as the existing contracts expired. The contracts bring the State a revenue of practically $100,000 a year, two-fifths of the cost of running the prison. By abolishing the contracts, the State forfeits this revenue without decreasing the expense of the prison. Employment for the prisoners must be found, and the State is committed to the principle of employing them for State use, and, at the same time, of providing healthful employment under the honor system in the hope that it will prove reformatory as well as physically and mentally beneficial. Immediately two difficulties arise. One is due to the fact that the State law divides without clearly defining authority and responsibility. The attorney-general has decided that the keeper is responsible for keeping the prisoners, and the keeper demands that whether they are kept in the Trenton prison, at the State road camps or farm, they shall be attended by a greater number of guards than the inspectors think either necessary or for their moral good. There is here a question of expense, of the extension of outside work, of the moral effect of modern prison methods. The inspectors are hampered, also, in the expansion of the State farm and road making experiments by the supervisor, who is responsible for keeping the contracts The second difficulty is that existing plans for their work offer employment for only a small percentage of the prisoners. At the expiration of the contracts—very soon—the great majority will be forced into idleness unless the contracts are temporarily extended. To meet this situation, the inspectors confess they have already broken the law in order to keep the prisoners at work. No plan has been devised, no equipment has been installed, for furnishing labor to this great majority of prisoners. For this there are several reasons, none greater, perhaps, than the fact that the Trenton prison is not fitted for this employment unless the congestion there can be relieved very materially. It might be necessary to make provision elsewhere for two-thirds of those now confined there. The Legislature has failed to make appropriations for installing a plant where the prisoners can make articles used by the State because no definite plan has been presented to it upon which agreement could be reached. The working out of the transformation of prison methods contemplated by the law of 1911 must be evolutionary. It will take time, and, meanwhile, contracts, it would seem, must be temporarily extended, regrettable as it is. What is needed, first and foremost, however, is a clear definition and concentration of authority and responsibility. The First Woman Commissioner of Correction. New York City.—Miss Katherine B. Davis, formerly superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, took office on January 1, 1913, in New York City as Corrections Commissioner. She has thus been appointed by Mayor Mitchell as the director of the Tombs, the penitentiary, workhouse, three branch workhouses, the Brooklyn city prison, the Queen’s County jail, and a number of district prisons—enough of a task even for Miss Davis’s recognized ability. She also has the construction to attend to of the city reformatory for misdemeanants. She has associated with her as deputy commissioner, Burdette G. Lewis, a “social worker at City Hall.” Heartiest congratulations are being extended to the new heads of the Department of Correction. The readers of the “Delinquent” know Miss Davis well already. “Was it as big as my fist?” asked the judge, concerning a stone which was responsible for a broken window. “It ban bigger,” replied the Swedish witness. “Was it as large as my two fists?” “It ban bigger.” “Was it as big as my head?” “It ban about as long,” said the imperturbable Swede, “but not so thick.” STATEMENT OF THE OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, ETC. of THE DELINQUENT.
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