The Review, Vol. 1, No. 6, June 1911

JUNE 1911 ***

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious errors and omissions in punctuation have been fixed.

Any inconsistencies in spelling have been retained.

Table of contents was created by the transcriber and is hereby placed in the public domain.

VOLUME I, No. 6. JUNE, 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. A. H. Votaw, Member Ex. Committee. G. E. Cornwall, Member Ex. Committee. Albert Steelman, Member Ex. Committee.

CONTENTS Page The National Conference 1 Report of Committee on Lawbreakers 2 The Suppression of Moral Defectives 7 The Abolition of the Jail 8 Mental Defects and Delinquency 9 Treatment of the Mental Defective who is also Delinquent 13 Placing Misdemeanants on Probation 14

THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE

The national conference of charities and correction was held in Boston from June 7 to June 14. The committee on lawbreakers had the opening session, on Wednesday. Three section meetings were held by the committee during conference week.

The REVIEW prints in this issue many of the papers prepared for the sessions of the “lawbreakers,” as they were facetiously called. Other papers will be printed next month. This is a small monthly, and some papers have been crowded out.

The keynotes of the “lawbreakers” sections were: (1) Need for the abolition of local and county jails as prisons for convicted offenders and the establishment in their places of state district workhouses or houses of correction; (2) full and impartial consideration by the national conference of the problem of prison labor; (3) more rational and adequate treatment of the mentally defective delinquent; (4) the imperative need of a change in our treatment of misdemeanants, especially vagrants, inebriates and offenders under the age of 21; (5) the necessity of standardizing the methodology of probation work; (6) the need of far greater organization of parole work; (7) the necessity of developing crime statistics and statistics regarding offenders so that records may be of real value.

Many other notes were struck. The spirit of the sessions was optimistic, but questions and comments were frank and searching.

The committee on lawbreakers has a very definite place on the program, even though, as this year, the name of the committee may be changed, the committee for 1912 being called “committee on courts and prisons.”

During the conference strong sentiment was developed in accord with the recommendation of the committee on lawbreakers that prison labor be made an important part of the program of the conference for 1912. It was stated by members of the committee on organization of the conference that the matter was thoroughly discussed in the committee, and that the understanding was that the title of the committee for 1912 admits of the introduction of this subject at the next national conference. It remains now for the members of the committee on courts and prisons to see that this subject is placed on the program.

The conference as a whole was characterized by the excellence of the papers, the fundamental nature of the topics discussed, the high-water mark in attendance reached, and the hospitality of Boston’s representatives at the conference. Year by year the conference departs more from the technical discussion of institutions and methods, concerning itself increasingly with the problem of the general improvement of social conditions. The next conference will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1912.

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON LAWBREAKERS

National Conference of Charities and Correction, O. F. Lewis, General Secretary of New York Prison Association, Chairman.

The Committee on Lawbreakers presents to the National Conference of Charities and Correction a partial survey of needs not yet met in the field of the treatment of the delinquent. In October, 1910, the eighth international prison congress met for the first time on American soil. Never before had this country been under so comprehensive or so discriminating a scrutiny by foreign criminologists. As one newspaper man put it: “The world’s spot-light was turned on American prisons and American treatment of prisoners.”

In April, 1911, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the Chairman of the English prison commission, and president-elect of the next international prison congress of 1915, reported to his government. He commended in general American state prisons and reformatories, but condemned the systems, or lack of systems, in vogue in city and county jails. “Among the jails,” he stated, “many features linger such as called forth the wrath of John Howard, the great English philanthropist, noted for his exertions on behalf of prison reform at the end of the 18th century. Promiscuity, unsanitary conditions, absence of supervision, idleness and corruption--these remain features in many places,” says the report. “Until the abuses of the jail system are removed, it is impossible,” concludes Sir Evelyn, “for the United States to have assigned to her by general consent a place in the vanguard of _la science penitentiaire_.”

This is not pleasant reading, yet the question with us tonight is not whether this criticism makes us as Americans pride-sore, but as to the truth of this friendly but stinging criticism. On our program this evening we have a distinguished gentleman, son of the eminent American founder of the international prison congress, who will testify that the English comments of Sir Evelyn are mild as compared with the American reality.

Rome was not built in a day. As in Chicago you find still in immediate context the mansion and the hovel, we have, in our treatment of delinquents, in close juxtaposition the prison and the jail, the reformatory and the workhouse, children’s courts and lynch law, probation and short term sentences, the indeterminate sentence and industrial prison idleness, parole and definite sentences, prison hospitals for tuberculosis and jail pens for syphilis-infected tramps. Civic pride in great modern prisons exists side by side with civic indifference as to filthy lock-ups or town jails.

At the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century--the century of hoped-for social justice--let us face frankly certain problems yet unsolved in the treatment of delinquents. Far from feeling that we have reached the thumb-twiddling stage of complacent satisfaction, let us see where our methods still break down.

First, _the local and county jails_. Not stopping with the remark of Thomas Holmes at the international prison congress that “every jail I saw on the American trip ought to be wiped off the face of the earth,” and that nowhere in Europe do such conditions exist, we find Professor Charles R. Henderson as chairman of a special committee of the American Prison Association of Chicago in 1907, uttering a scathing arraignment of revolting and demoralizing jail conditions. We find Frederick H. Wines more recently in Maryland arraigning jail conditions in many parts of the country. We find Warren F. Spalding of Massachusetts writing in the Sage Foundation volumes on Correction and Prevention about the jail friendships that make of the novice a life long criminal, of the contamination of women prisoners, the herding of juvenile offenders with adults, the dearth of attention to physical conditions in jails, the deplorable lack of proper ventilation, the ravages of disease among jail inmates and the absence of that rigid vigilance without which the ordinary jail cannot be kept in a sanitary condition; overcrowding, night buckets, monotony, filth, poorly cooked or tainted food, unconvicted prisoners and convicted prisoners in unrestricted communication, the fee system, local inattention to the fundamental principles of penology.

The case against the average jail seems proved. Has not the time come to make a general national campaign against this “school of crime?”

Mr. F. G. Pettigrove of Massachusetts dissents from the above statements regarding jails as follows:

“I do not approve the unqualified general denunciation of jails. Nobody who is familiar with the Massachusetts jails would make such an attack upon them as is implied by the form of the reference to that subject.”

_Prison Labor._ Prison labor is an unsettled problem; one that we must face; a problem complicated by local and state conditions, and one in which the motives of men and even communities have often been impugned. Scanning the titles of papers read at the national conference of charities and correction during the last decade, we have found only in the committee report by Mr. Whittaker in 1908 and in the paper of Dr. James H. Leonard, Superintendent of the Ohio State Reformatory, definite and extended treatment of the prison labor problem, this fundamental problem of penology.

Has the problem been solved? Are prisoners everywhere earning their maintenance? Has any one system proved satisfactory? Is there general consensus of opinion that the prisoner shall not be utilized for private gain? Is there no demoralizing idleness in so-called model prisons? Is there no high tension labor in so-called model prisons?

No, prison labor has not reached a satisfactory solution when we can still cite a recent article of Dr. A. J. McKelway in Volume II. of “Correction and Prevention” regarding prison labor in the South: “The leasing of convicts whether to corporations or individuals, is a system that has been abolished by some of the southern states, but which still prevails in some of the states, accompanied as it always has been with indefensible abuses (p. 72). I make bold to affirm that such abuses as were found to exist in Georgia will be found to exist in a greater or less degree in every state where the leasing system still prevails.”

We learn that in Alabama even the wardens and the guards are employed by the contractors. We find that in Ohio in connection with the discontinuance of contract labor and the development of the State use system the state penitentiary was plunged into the most deplorable idleness. We find in Pennsylvania an archaic legal compulsion to utilize only hand power machinery, and but thirty-five per cent of the prisoners at any one time. We find under the present status of the state use system in New York that the State prisoners earn only about one-fourth of the cost of their maintenance, and a nominal sum of not more than 2c. a day, which earnings can be radically reduced by fines. We find loud protests in Rhode Island because the State lets the services of able bodied prisoners to contractors at 30c. a day, and we find in Maryland under the contract system a penitentiary which is said to have returned to the State treasury in 1910 a surplus of thirty-five thousand dollars from the earnings of prisoners, while the over time work earned for the prisoners themselves $41,928. We find the Detroit House of Correction on the State account system earning a profit in 11 years of $368,000, paying its prisoners from ten to twenty-five cents a day wages, and planning to distribute to the families of prisoners, through the city poor master, $15,000 during the year 1911 in addition to the surplus which it expects to turn over to the city. We find the Minnesota State prison under the State account system making the following report for the last ten years:

Total earnings $2,210,880 Total expenses 1,199,248 ----------- Excess of earnings $1,011,632

The binder twine plan in the ten years has made a profit of $1,653,290, of which $352,553 was paid to the support fund for convict labor. Quoting again from Dr. McKelway, we learn that in Texas the convicts are worked on the leasing, contract, public account and public works system. “But a legislative investigating committee has recently discovered horrible abuses in all these systems. A number of convicts were found who had been literally beaten to death during the last year (1909) and the prisoners seemed to dread the prison farm as much as work within the prison wall, if not more.”

We find Warden Gilmour of the Toronto Central prison stating that on the prison farm of that institution the inmates work cheerfully and without guards. And so, ladies and gentlemen, your Committee on Lawbreakers respectfully suggests that the general subject of prison labor, in its various phases, be made the chief subject of this committee at the next national conference. Prison labor is not simply an administrative problem; it is an industrial problem and a health problem, and concerns vitally the training and efficiency of scores of thousands who, leaving prison, are potential subjects for charity of a public or private nature. It is a vital problem for the national conference of charities and correction as well as for the American prison association. The problem of the proper utilization of prisoners is a fundamental problem in every American state.

The fact that a separate organization, the National Committee on Prison Labor, has been established to study the prison labor problem, and the further fact that the newspaper and magazine press has manifested much interest in the field which this committee occupies, are evidences of the extent and importance of the field.

Frank L. Randall, General Superintendent of the Minnesota State Reformatory and a member of the Committee on Lawbreakers, makes the following suggestion:

“If the recommendation of the Committee on Lawbreakers be adopted to make the subject of prison labor a feature of the next conference the leaders of organized labor should be invited to participate. We should ask the labor representatives, if they urge the state use plan, to concede to the prisons the field, so far as the products are paid for with public funds.”

_The Treatment of Defective Delinquents._

There are undoubtedly thousands of feeble-minded persons in correctional institutions. In recent annual reports, of Elmira Reformatory, it has been stated that about 35% of its inmates are mentally defective. The presence of the feeble-minded is a detriment to many plans that have been adopted for the instruction and training of prisoners. The complete exclusion from the ordinary prison of persons afflicted with tuberculosis has improved the healthfulness of those prisons and has also supplied a better and more hopeful means of treatment for the unfortunate sufferers. The same treatment--segregation--should be applied to all those to whom special treatment would be a benefit, or whose ailments are of such a nature as to endanger the welfare of others. Dr. Henry E. Goddard of Vineland estimates that 25% of delinquents are mentally defective. “All mental defectives would be delinquents,” he states, “in the very nature of the case, did not some one exercise some care over them. The mentally defective must be cared for as we care for irresponsibles.” Mr. Ernest K. Coulter, for many years clerk of the Children’s Court of Manhattan and Bronx, New York City, states his belief that the most important step to be taken by the state in its slow abandonment of antiquated methods of dealing with child offenders and victims of bad environment and neglect must be the establishment of institutions for the special treatment of the mental defectives of this class. In the great state of New York, there is no special custodial institution to which the criminal feeble-minded can be committed and transferred. So important is this matter, that it has been made the subject of one of the section meetings of this Committee on Lawbreakers.

_Parole._ The principle of parole is a fundamental complement to the principle of the indeterminate sentence. Its successful application requires an efficient merit system within the prison, a competent parole board and adequate supervision of the post-prison parole period, the co-operation of the employment giving public, and the persistent following up, recapture and reimprisonment of wilful violators of parole.

Only in a most general way do we yet know the results of the administration of parole systems in the country. We find a general belief based on long experience and some careful study of prison statistics, that about 75% of paroled persons from reformatories or prisons “stay straight” during the parole period. We still lack any study of sufficient magnitude to admit of generalization in the case of any state as to the proportion of criminal recidivism _after_ the parole period. The New York Prison Association will shortly make public an extended study of the careers of seven hundred inmates of Elmira Reformatory, yet this number, though intensively studied, will be too small for any comprehensive generalization but will rather indicate both a statistical method of study of criminal careers and the great inadequacy of present institutional or extra-institutional social facts and social statistics of delinquents.

As regards post-prison treatment and aid of the released or discharged prisoner, we find Amos W. Butler in Volume II of the Sage Foundation series on “Correction and Prevention” reporting that only about 24 organizations exist throughout this country for this purpose, though several of these societies spread their activity through a number of states. We find also very varying periods of parole, some of six months as at Elmira, some of seven months, as at Huntington, Pa.; nine months, as at the Illinois State Reformatory, or until the expiration of the maximum sentence, as at Concord, Mass., or at Bedford, or Albion in New York. We find in Mr. Butler’s study state after state recorded as follows: “State makes no effort to find work or keep in touch with prisoner after his discharge;” “no provision for aftercare of either paroled or discharged prisoners;” “no parole officers;” “no parole agents;” “no provision for finding work or for visiting prisoners,” etc., etc.

A prominent eastern reformatory superintendent recently said: “Why spend nearly two hundred dollars annually to maintain one inmate in a reformatory, and then spend only $1.50 per inmate during his period of parole to help him not to go wrong?” This committee on lawbreakers believes that the parole period of an offender is barely second in importance to the period of imprisonment. The poorly supervised parole period breeds recidivism, contempt for law, the alienation of the sympathy of judges, the irritation and criticism of the public, unintelligent scorn for reformatory methods, and immense ultimate cost to the state in further loss of property or life.

_The Probation Movement_, long known and developed in Massachusetts, has during this last decade made great national progress. Nevertheless the probation movement faces grave dangers. It is on the defensive. The methodology of probation is still in the experimental stage. More important than the extension of the system is the building up of an effective technique. In too many places probation is still synonymous either with sentimental leniency or with perfunctory police surveillance. The most essential factors in probation work are the educative, reformatory and reconstructive work represented by home visitation, the development of right mental habits and the rendering of practical assistance.

The improvement of probation methods depends primarily upon the appointment of interested, faithful and competent probation officers. The tendency is strongly in the direction of increasing the number of public salaried probation officers. Although this tendency is inevitable and desirable, it brings in its trail the gravest danger of which the probation system must meet, namely the danger of appointments being made through the influence of partisan politics. Those interested in the probation system should therefore look squarely in the face the question as to how probation officers should be appointed; whether by judges without interference by any outside regulations or authorities; whether through civil service examination; whether upon the approval of some outside body such as a state probation commission, or whether the appointing power should be vested in authorities other than the judges, as in local non-partisan, non-sectarian committees or commissions.