The Review, Vol. 1, No. 5, May 1911

MAY 1911 ***

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious errors and omissions in punctuation have been fixed.

Any inconsistencies in spelling have been retained.

VOLUME I, No. 5. MAY, 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. James Parsons, Member Ex. Committee. G. E. Cornwall, Member Ex. Committee. Albert Steelman, Member Ex. Committee. A H. Votaw, Member Ex. Committee.

PRISONERS AFIELD

WARDEN J. T. GILMOUR, CENTRAL PRISON, ONTARIO, CANADA.

[Stenographic report of Dr. Gilmour’s address at the annual meeting of the New Jersey State Charities Aid and Prison Reform Association, April 1, 1911. Though The Review guards jealously its space, having but sixteen pages monthly, we are sure our readers will agree with us that the space filled by this article is well filled.--Editor]

When we speak of criminals, we are very apt to picture in our mind’s eye the great criminals, those who commit atrocious crimes. But that class forms but a very small percentage of every prison population, and the methods of dealing with this class are much more clear and definite than dealing with the much larger class that are not quite so dangerous to society. When we speak of criminals we are apt to think of them _en masse_ as a congregation of a few hundred or a few thousand men walled within a prison. Carlyle dissipates this view when he says: “Masses? Yea, masses, every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows--stands there covered with his own skin; and if you prick him he will bleed.”

In dealing with delinquency there are two basic facts; that the great majority of criminals are made in their youth, and that the great majority of youthful criminals are handicapped in life’s race either by physical, mental, or moral defects. That prince of sociologists, Victor Hugo, evidently appreciated these conditions when he gave us that beautiful injunction to study evil lovingly, and then, later on, he gave the key when he said: “There are no bad weeds. They are only bad cultivators.”

Two or three weeks ago a young man came into the corridor of our prison one day and asked, “Warden, will you take me out to the farm?” (A prison farm, of which I hope to speak a little later). I said, “No, Smith, I cannot take you out.” Over in our country when we wish to conceal a man’s identity we always call him Smith; and if we are particularly careful, we call him John Smith. This man was a repeater; he was doing his fifth term; the four previous terms he had been a very difficult man to get along with; but this time he had done very well. We could take no exception to either his conduct or his industry. He said to me, “Have I not done well this time?” I said, “You certainly have.” “Well, then,” he said, “Won’t you give me a chance?” Of course, he had me there; I couldn’t refuse him. I said, “Yes, I’ll give you a chance.” I took him up to the farm on a Monday; he worked well on Tuesday and on Wednesday; and on Wednesday night he skipped. The following Friday we got him again, in a town one hundred and fifty miles from home; and I pitied the poor fellow when he came back, he looked so dejected and so crestfallen; but I blamed myself entirely. I had imposed a burden of self-denial and a responsibility of conduct upon that man that he was not able to bear. He was one of that class, typical of a considerable percentage of our prison populations, that is on the borderland between sanity and insanity; and all the prison officials who are here to-night will recall scores of that class who form a part of their prison population.

As I say, I had made a mistake with this boy; but it only goes to show that penologists are not infallible, not even the youngest of them. If we were to stop to speculate upon the place that this element occupies in the divine scheme, we might tread upon very dangerous ground. It is enough for us to know that the God that made them is the God that will judge them; and herein lies our consolation. I had a man come into prison a few weeks ago to do two years; and yesterday afternoon, just an hour before I left home for coming down here, his wife came into my office leading a beautiful child five years of age by the hand. She came, as so many poor women come, to see if it were not possible to get some relief from her almost intolerable position. As the cruel truth dawned upon her that it was impossible for me to exercise clemency in regard to her husband, the women turned to me and she said, with much emphasis, “If they would only send me and my child to prison, how much better it would have been.”

And the woman expressed a great verity. This little episode I relate to show you that society has two obligations: one to the man shut up within the prison, and perhaps an even greater obligation to the poor woman and children dependent upon the man shut up within the prison. It is necessary to lock up a certain class of men that society may be protected, and that these men may be improved; but when we do that, are we going to put their families in a position in which they will be impelled into either vice or crime? I think it is Milton who asks the pertinent question:

“What boots it, by one gate to make defence And at another to let in the foe?”

In dealing with the wives and children, as well as with the prison inmates, over in our place, we find an immense help from the Salvation Army. We have a prisoner’s aid association and they work harmoniously together; but the Army has one or two advantages in this work that no other organization possesses. In the first place, they are not sentimentalists. They detail one man to give his time to it. He is as free to go into our prison as I am; and I think he spends as much time there as I do. He is there at night, on Sundays, on holidays, at noon hours; and he is going from cell to cell--he becomes thoroughly acquainted with every inmate. That gives that man an immense advantage in dealing with those men when their terms expire. The prison worker that expects to meet the discharged prisoner at the prison gate the morning he comes out, is much more apt to be worked by the prisoner than he is to work the prisoner. In three cases out of five he is clay in the hands of a designing man. One of our governors some years ago said that Canada was a land of magnificent distances. The same remark applies to your republic; but we get prisoners 1,300 miles from our prison. The Army, learning the condition of the families dependent on the man within the prison, writes to the corps, the Salvation Army corps in the town or the city where the man came from, and they are able, by their very extensive and highly perfected organization, to make a study of each family, in addition to having arrangements made there for the employment of that man when his term has expired. We try, just as far as possible, to get all of our ex-prisoners out of the city. We do not wish them to colonize; we try to get them back to their homes where they came from; for unless a man is willing to go back and face society, and live it down, the chances are that he will be driven into what is wrong sometimes through fear.

A year ago now, we started our farm. It is fifty miles out of the city; it contains 530 acres. I commenced by taking up a little detachment of 14 men; and I rapidly increased that until I had 180 men, housed in temporary quarters on this farm. The average term of the man on the farm was about five or six months, though I had several men there who had to do from one to two years. So far we have taken out to this farm 500 men, and out of that 500, four have escaped successfully, and three or four have attempted to escape--unsuccessfully. The other day a minister in our city was calling, and I gave him these statistics, and he looked very sad; he said it was a pity. I said it was; “but,” I said, “can you take 500 of your church membership and have 495 of them make good?” And he changed the subject.

I had a grand jury visit me the other day; it is a custom, over in our country, for the grand juries to come over a few times a year and tell us how to run the place (they sometimes stay an hour); and the foreman, before he went away, said to me, “Warden, I suppose you select the men whom you take out to the farm.” I said, “No, sir. I don’t.” He said, “How do you manage?” I said, “I select a very few whom I _don’t_ take;” for I can take 90 per cent. About three weeks ago I was going into the farm one day; it was a cold, snowy, blowing, blustering day; the thermometer was about zero. When I came near to our building it was quarter to twelve o’clock; and I saw men coming from this direction, and that direction, and from every direction pass alone; no officers with them at all; and it impressed me, perhaps, much more than it would another one not engaged in this work; for I asked myself the question--“How is it? These are the very men that I have had in Toronto behind bolts and bars, watched over by guns and guards; and here they are out here, as free as this air that blows, and they are all coming in to sit down with each other at dinner.” I have asked our men on the farm--many of them, different types, at different places, at different times, and I have asked them all the same question:--“What do you find the greatest difference as between the prison in the city and the prison out here on the farm?” And without a single exception, in one form or another those men have invariably given me the same reply. We give good board at the prison, but it was not that; it was not this liberty, comparative liberty. They have said to me: “Warden, to get away from that cell! To get away from that cell!”

I asked a boy two weeks ago, a young man, and he said, “Warden, to get away from that cell; for,” he said, “to sit there on Sunday, every evening and on holidays and have that cell gate staring you in the face, it is hell;” and he didn’t say it to be irreverent or disrespectful, but it was his pent up emotions. I believe there is something debasing--debasing to a man’s personal manhood--about life in a cell that no one can describe. Our men plow, they harrow, they sow the grain, they reap it; there is no guard with them at all. Of course, these are men who are near the end of their terms, perhaps men who have three months or less to do; but every prison contains enough of that class to enable them to carry on this class of work, agricultural work, to a financial advantage. If we had to pay guards to be with these various men, we couldn’t do it; but we don’t. There is an indefinable something in God’s out-of-doors that has a beneficial effect upon humanity. I can not tell you what it is. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. So is every man that is born of the spirit.”

A few months ago a professor from the University of Kansas wrote a little poem of two or three verses; and one of the verses reads like this:

“A breeze on the far horizon, The infinite tender sky-- The ripe, rich tint of the corn fields And the wild geese sailing high; And all over upland and lowland The charm of the golden-rod: Some of us call it autumn And others call it God.”

Do you catch the spirit of those beautiful lines? They tell (what I should like to tell were I able) of the way God speaks to our delinquents out on the farm through the hazy atmosphere and the golden sunsets; they tell of the way God speaks to those poor fellows through the growing and the ripening grains, and of the message that God sends to them through the birds that sing and soar over their heads. It suggests that beautiful thought of Browning’s:

“This world, as God has made it, Always glitters. And knowing this is love, And love is duty.”

We are aiming at something definite in the construction of our new prison. We are going to try to give that large class of boys and young men that come to prison for the first time one more opportunity of going through life without being immured in a prison cell. In the construction of our buildings, our domicile accommodation will be largely of the dormitory type;--small dormitories, accommodating 14 beds, with a large, semi-circular bay window on one side which will serve as a sitting room; attached to which dormitory will be a completely equipped bedroom and dressing room. The corridor which runs along the side where the officers will patrol is divided from these rooms that I speak of by a glass partition, so that our men are thoroughly under observation every hour of the day and night, and there will be no opportunities whatever for some of those things that penologists so much dread. In addition to that, we have a number of single rooms and a number of cells; but in a prison which is destined to accommodate 600, we are only putting in 40 cells. The men who behave and who demonstrate that they can appreciate that dormitory life and maintain the condition of it, we hope to give ultimately a single room; and the men who fail to appreciate this dormitory life and don’t behave as we wish them to will then be demoted into a cell; but we are going to try, as I say, to get those boys through life, if possible, without the cell. Will we succeed? I don’t know. I don’t know. We have our critics; but this world will never be saved by the critics; it will be saved by the dreamers. The history of humanity is the history of indomitable hope. Emerson says that “Every thing is free to the man that can grasp it;” that “He who despairs is wrong.”

In dealing with delinquents, it is the personal touch that tells. Human nature craves for sympathy. Kingsley was once asked what the secret of his joyous, buoyant life was; and his ready reply was: “I had a friend.” Our Saviour was no exception to this rule; for as our Saviour approached Gethsemane, he yearned for a friend whom he could rely upon to wait and watch while he endured; and expressed it in that pathetic request to the drowsy Peter and his sleepy comrades. When we see a very simple duty staring us in the face in dealing with this class, we are too prone to say, “Lord, here am I. Send him.” It is an easy matter for a man of means to write his check, or give his cash; but it is an entirely different thing to carry that gift to some poor fellow who is down and out and sweeten it with the fragrance of personal kindness.

“Not what we give, but what we share; The gift without the giver is bare.”

We have church service at our place every Sunday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon; one day our preacher failed to materialize. The men were in the chapel; and I did not wish to have them return to the cells without saying something to them; as I could not preach I thought I would do the next best thing, and I would read another fellow’s sermon; only, I gave the other fellow credit for it. I was reading a book just then that interested me very much; and I went down to the office and got it, and I read the first chapter; and when I finished, I asked if I should read more, and they said, “Yes, Warden.” I read a second and a third chapter; I read as long as my voice would hold out; and as I had finished, a man down in the audience said, “Won’t you be kind enough to tell me the name of that book, and the author?” I was very glad to have them ask the question; I told him. The next morning when I was going through the prison industries, the officers kept asking me what book I read, the previous day. I said, “Why do you ask?” They said, “The men are all talking about it.” I sent down town and got fifteen copies and sent it around among the cells, with instructions that no one man could keep it for more than a week. When we collected the books at the end of the first week, I found that a great many men had taken paper and copied out portions of it. This was practically a non-reading population. They had refused a lot of good books we had put in our library which I had thought were fine, much to my disappointment. Perhaps you would like to know the kind of book they so much enjoyed; and, with your permission, I will just read you the first page of the first chapter.

“Man has two Creators: his God, and himself. The first creator furnishes him the raw material of his life and the laws of conformity with which he can make that life what he will. His second creator, himself, has marvelous powers he rarely realizes. It is what a man makes of himself that counts. If a man fails in life he usually says, I am as God made me. When he succeeds in life, he proudly proclaims himself a self-made man. Man is placed into this world not as a finality, but as a possibility. Man’s greatest enemy is himself. Man in his weakness is the creature of circumstances; man in his strength is the creator of circumstances. Whether he be victim or victor depends largely on himself. Man is never truly great, merely for what he is, but ever for what he may become.”

Now, that is pretty good meat. And that afternoon I was the one who learned the great lesson; for I learned that if we approach this subject in the right way we can waken, even in dormant minds, a desire for good literature. And my little experience of the afternoon revolutionized my method of dealing with the boys in this respect.

My time is up.

(A Voice: “Go on!”)

A MEMBER: Who is the author of that book?

DR. GILMOUR: Dr. Jordan, of Boston, is the author of that book, and it is called “Self-Control.” If you hadn’t asked me that question I would have thought I had missed my mission here to-night. Briefly and hurriedly I have just tried to sketch some of the phases in dealing with delinquency. Who are they for whom we should do these things? What claim have they upon us? What is our relationship to them? Did you ever hear the story of the Scotch girl, the one who was carrying a crippled boy over a street-crossing in Edinburgh? A gentleman, seeing her burden, hastened up to assist and sympathize with her; and the girl looked up smiling and replied: “Ah, sir. I dinna mind it. He is my brither!”

CHICAGO HOUSE OF CORRECTION

JOHN S. WHITMAN, WARDEN.

The Chicago House of Correction was established and is maintained by the City of Chicago in accordance with the provisions of an Act of the State Legislature, in 1871. It covers sixty (60) acres of ground, the total valuation of real estate, buildings and equipment being $1,618,688.00. During the year ending December 31st, 1910, there were 13,083 commitments to the institution. This total includes 1,383 women, 355 boys under 18 years of age and 11,345 men. The daily average population was 1,631 (a decrease from 1,766 in 1909, and this latter figure was a decrease from 1,852, which was the daily average during 1908). Persons are committed for violation of state statutes in cases of misdemeanor, and for violation of city ordinances. In the latter case the fine imposed is worked out at the rate of fifty cents per day; however, the maximum term of imprisonment for failure to pay fine is fixed at six months, and an allowance of three days per month is made for good conduct if the limit of imprisonment is served. For violation of the state statutes a fixed sentence is imposed by the Court, the maximum being one year. For violation of certain sections of the statutes an additional fine may be imposed, which, if not paid, may be worked out at the rate of $1.50 per day after sentence has been served. The law providing for the allowance of three days per month for good conduct also covers these cases if confinement is for six months or more.