Pennsylvania Prison Society

“ Here, as elsewhere, some lucky chance has placed a man or a woman of exceptional qualifications at the head of an institution, one who has by his strong personal initiative made the best of a bad situation, as in the case of the Eastern Penitentiary, or who has, with something akin to genius, seized upon a new opportunity, as in the case of the Girls’ School at Darlington and the new Penitentiary foundation at Bellefonte. But these are sporadic and exceptional developments and have furnished no new principle of a revolutionary character to mark the dawn of a new era in penal administration. ”

“ The greatest abuse of the prevailing prison system—the lack of imagination and of understanding which keeps alive in most of our penal establishments the methods of a severe and repressive discipline—cannot be abolished by legislative decree. The greatest reform of which the system is capable—the awakening in the inmates of the new life which comes from active, responsible participation in the life of the prison community—is equally beyond the reach of legislative action. ”

“ Here, then, is the new opportunity for a further advance out of this slough of despond—an opportunity not inferior to that which this Commonwealth so superbly grasped in its heroic youth—to bring its penal administration into conformity with the newer conceptions of delinquency. Tinkering the old machine is not enough. ”

“ This certainly is the theory of our prisons if one is to judge from the products of our reform schools and jails whom I met at Fort Leavenworth. These men very largely had grown up with no other idea of life than that of the big stick. Put one of these prisoners in authority over others and in the majority of cases he can be more dictatorial and cruel than any guard. The supposition is that to make this outcast—the prisoner—bow to authority will make a man of him.
“Prison reform is no easy matter. It must be the work of devoted and expertly trained men and women. ”

“ We have learned that the criminal is not merely a person who has in the exercise of an unfettered will chosen the evil rather than the good, but a person of complex personality shaped by heredity and environment to what he is, none the less a menace to society than the older conception made him, not the less requiring restraint and correction, but demanding and deserving individual treatment according to the nature which has been developed in him. We have learned from recent scientific study of the most rigorous and trustworthy sort that from 50 to 60 per cent. ”

“ Would it not have been wiser to allow these men to continue their lawful avocations on the farm, in the shop, in the mills, than to support them in idleness, to detail a special force to guard them, and to ruin their health by harsh treatment? ”

“ A second, but not less necessary step, is such a change in the spirit and method of prison discipline as will develop in the inmates by actual practice the qualities of self-respect and self-reliance, the sense of honor and of responsibility and the habit of co-operative action so essential to fit them for a life of freedom and responsibility, and at the same time to equip them with the habits of industry and the vocational skill which will enable them to make good in the life that awaits them beyond the prison-wall. ”

“ Conceived as a mere incident of the sentencing power, to be exercised only in exceptional cases, the suspended sentence and probation are beginning to disclose themselves as a momentous, not to say revolutionary step in the progress of penology, not less important in its ultimate consequences than the substitution a century ago of imprisonment for the death penalty and other forms of physical punishment. Like the older forms of punishment which it superseded, imprisonment too has proved a failure, so far at least, as the newer aim of punishment, the reformation of the wrong-doer is concerned. ”

“ The ball and chain, solitary confinement and all the other repressive measures of the prison system have some way not succeeded as yet in turning this man out of prison a ‘better man than when he came in.’ There unquestionably is a criminal element in prison that is a menace to society, but depraved or vicious as some of these men may be, there is yet some good in every one of them and possibilities of truly chivalrous conduct in all of them when properly treated. ”

“ Even in institutions of a purely reformatory character, while they leave little to be desired in the way of healthful conditions of living, orderly administration and educational opportunities, the reformation of the wrong-doer is still too much sought through a system of stern repression, of “iron discipline”—a system which, as all experience shows, defeats its end by crushing out the finer elements of character on which the redemption of the individual must depend. ”

“ The Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, in 1790, was the earliest institution in America in which these more enlightened principles were put into practice. From this second beginning, for a period of forty years, Pennsylvania was elaborating and perfecting the first of the two great systems of penal administration which were destined to dominate the penology of the civilized world during the nineteenth century—the separate confinement of malefactors. ”

“ The evils to which I refer are well known and deplored by that body of earnest and devoted men and women in all sections of American society with whose lofty ideals on the subject of prison reform and generous aspirations for the humane treatment of the prisoner, the Washington Congress made us every day familiar, but they seem helpless and almost hopeless.... I was appealed to by leading men in more than one State, as British representative, to publicly condemn the system, and this I did, at a risk of giving considerable offense. ”

“ A guard once told me while I was in solitary that when he chained a man up backwards as punishment for talking in solitary, as used to be done, he was generally kind-hearted enough to let the man down if he repented and asked for it in the ‘right spirit,’ but if the man was too ‘damned proud to show how much it hurt him he would let him take his medicine.’ I mention this because to my mind it is typical of the punishment and discipline idea of the prison. ”

“ And yet there have been some instances of pitiless malevolence inflicted upon a class of offenders who least deserve it. We are aware of the penalties for disobedience to orders which naturally belong to a military system. In accordance with the military code, disobedience is a heinous crime. So when the officials were confronted with refusal to obey orders, even though the offenders were of the highest character, the mind of the militarist could view the offense from only one angle. We are referring to the treatment accorded to some—not all—of the “conscientious objectors.” ”

“ It is evident that the general adoption in this State of these modern improvements in the treatment of the criminal problem can be effected only through the institution of a central agency adapted to secure a co-ordination of effort and a uniformity of development which under the present system of separate control has been demonstrated to be impossible. It seems equally evident, however, that the system of separate management of the several institutions with their diverse aims and problems possesses advantages which we would not willingly sacrifice to an ideal unity. ”

“ No sexual vice or moral depravity is too low for some of the men confined there. The Disciplinary Barracks have been called the ‘cess pool for the dregs of the army.’ But many a fine young soldier whose only offense was to overstay his leave or be the helpless victim of the antiquated military law in this country, has found his way among the ‘dregs’ of the army; and as for the others, the great majority are the products of our reform schools, orphan asylums and jails. These men are indiscriminately grouped together in the prison. ”

“ And we are coming to see that the protection which society enjoys through the imprisonment for a few months or years of a small proportion of the criminal class is dearly purchased by a system which returns the offender to society less fitted than before to cope with the conditions of a life of freedom. ”

“ The United States cannot with clean hands ask the nations with which it is allied in the war to humanize the laws of war while it tolerates inhumanity in the enforcement of its own military regulations at home. Recalcitrant soldiers offer a difficult problem, of course; but the fact is a greater reason for dealing with such offenders with tact and, above all, with humanity. Torture has no place in the penology of the day, and least of all in the service which prides itself on its patriotism. ”

“ It is my belief that at the bottom of all that I have been trying to tell, lies not the dishonesty or cruelty of individual officials but a state of mind shared largely by us all, even prisoners themselves oftentimes, viz., the idea that the convict is something apart, something taboo, a person who has forfeited all the rights of normal human beings, and with this idea goes that of punishment, the ingrained belief that the only way to deal with viciousness or wrong-doing is to keep the big stick constantly at hand. ”

“ The offender should be kept in confinement only until he is fitted by his prison experience to lead an honest and useful life; when this end is attained he should be released. The answer is that the prison doesn’t in fact reform the wrong-doer; that good behavior under the conditions of prison life is no assurance of the intention or capacity of the prisoner to lead an honest and useful life after his release, and that the inspectors or other paroling authority have no other guide to go by in determining the inmates’ fitness for a life of freedom than his prison record. ”

“ For more than a century of its history the penal, reformatory and correctional institutions of Pennsylvania were limited to the county jails and the few and scattered workhouses, which were erected mainly in conjunction with the almshouses. In the jails there could be no approach to anything like a differentiated treatment of delinquents. In them were herded promiscuously those imprisoned for debt, those convicted of crime and those accused or held as witnesses; those of all ages and both sexes; those convicted of all categories and grades of crime punishable by imprisonment ”

“ So far has the system been carried, that the Court House, once cleaned entirely by prison labor, is now necessarily cared for by a paid force of men outside the draft age. You may better understand why the Court is going to this apparent extreme, when you know that practically every industry in Washington County is engaged in war work, and that these paroled men are placed on farms, and in mines, mills and factories, where they are helping win the war, though only a small percentage of them are American citizens and very few are native born. ”

“ The condition of affairs which I have been attempting to describe is greatly aggravated by the fact that the idea of punishment and discipline reigns supreme in the prison. Much is said in the rules and regulations about the aim of the institution being to improve every prisoner and turn each man out a better and more useful individual than when he came in. ”

“ Mistakes are made both within and outside the prison walls. Those on the inside often give the applicant the benefit of their doubts when the logic of the case seems to urge further detention. When the man is on the outside he is often disappointed in the attitude of the community of which he really desires to become a law-abiding citizen. The members of the community assume a serious responsibility when they put stumbling-blocks in the way of the man who is endeavoring to make good. “Woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” ”

“ There is great diversity of opinion as to the best form of paroling authority. Generally, as in this Commonwealth, this power is lodged in the inspectors or managers of the several institutions or, in the case of commitments to county prisons, in the courts of criminal jurisdiction. In some States, as in New York, a distinct Board of Parole is constituted which visits the convict prisons at intervals and hears and determines all applications for parole that may be awaiting determination. Neither system has worked with complete satisfaction. ”

“ Nowhere is there a centralized authority exercising a general control or an effective influence. The only approach to such a general agency is the State Board of Public Charities, which may investigate and require the submission of an annual report, and the Prison Labor Commission, which exercises a general supervision over the industries of the two penitentiaries and the Huntingdon Reformatory, but which has no effective power to carry its plans into execution. ”

“ Not that there have not in the last half century been notable improvements in the theory and practice of penal administration, some of them bold enough to bring America from time to time into the forefront of interest and example to the penologists of the Old World, but in most of these the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has been content to play a secondary role. ”

“ Agricultural prison labor is strongly advocated by prison authorities and has been in general use in the penal institutions of Pennsylvania for many years. The movement for outdoor work for prisoners has grown rapidly, and as a result, the Pennsylvania legislature, at its 1917 session, extended the scope of agricultural work for prisoners, and authorized by an Act approved July 17, 1917, the employment of prisoners, undergoing sentence in county jails, on county or poor farms.
There is no greater curse than idleness. ”

“ New York thinks that every available prisoner should be employed, but because of constitutional limitation cannot use its convicts on private farms. Practically every penitentiary and county jail in the State is employing its prisoners either at gardening or farm work on State or county owned or leased farms. Food production has been materially increased by these concerted efforts towards agricultural products, and the prisoners themselves are benefited by the outdoor work. Prison labor is also extensively used on the public roads. ”