Pennsylvania Prison Society

“ To be very accurate, we should say that justice is satisfied by punishment, and the wrongdoer is disciplined by chastisement. Punishment is for the good of the law, and chastisement is for the good of the sufferer. Incarceration is intended to reform the prisoner as much as to punish him. While rebuking the lawless, you seek to help him back to an honorable career. This you attempt, not by a maudlin and demoralizing sentiment, which minimizes guilt or ignores wrong, but by a sympathetic and educational administration of prisons. ”

“ The gospel sheds upon the prisoner the ray of light, uncovers to him the glad sky, thrills him with songs of redemption and inspires him with the hope of a better life. This must ever be the method of all successful prison reforms.
Reclamation is impossible except by creating self-respect and enkindling hope. To know that good behavior shortens the term incites all save the incorrigibly bad to a noble life. To sit in a dungeon of despair must make the prisoner indifferent to all the good without. ”

“ Wherever the illusory pleasure of the present is exalted above the ultimate good; wherever luxury is ostentatiously displayed; wherever human weakness is exploited for financial gain; wherever the public will is thwarted; wherever the heart becomes hard and the eye steely; wherever duty is evaded; wherever disease is unchecked—in all these ways crime is encouraged and promoted.
“The prevention of crime, therefore, is a topic not for a brief paper for a portion of one evening’s exercises, but for a constructive program for generations. ”

“ The number who have been unfaithful to this trust and who failed to deliver themselves at the institution is so small as to be practically negligible.
Judge Lindsay is working at that end of human life at which results are most readily achieved. A vessel that has become misshapen can be remodeled so long as the clay is still plastic. Like a skillful potter Judge Lindsay seeks to mold human lives, and the success which has crowned his efforts has deservedly attracted the attention not only of his own countrymen, but of those in other lands who are interested in the child-saving problem. ”

“ If you whip a boy in prison he will suffer martyrdom if he can but have one admiring onlooker. But when you take a fool’s audience away, in prison or out, he loses the stimulation of his vanity. When he leaves our discipline department he cannot swagger that he endured this thing or that, because every person knows that there is only one way to regain his place among his fellows, and that is by the promise to conform. No handcuffs have been used in the Ohio State Reformatory for seven years. Our correction cells, known in the institution as ‘reflection chambers,’ have been all-sufficient. ”

“ The county jail is the classic instance of an institution established to serve one purpose and actually serving exactly the opposite purpose, intended to promote the good order of the community, and actually a most potent factor in every form of demoralization, an agency by which the traditions of crime are handed on undiminished from one generation to another, by which the ranks are kept full and new recruits at least equal in numbers those who drop out. ”

“ The Gospel penetrated the prison walls with that joyous news. And every chaplain who ministers to those behind the bars may promise them a salvation as full and free as any bishop offers to his parishioners.
God is no respecter of persons. If He is on one side more than another, it is the side of the weak. And often we are reminded that the compensations of salvation more than balance the losses of sin. “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” ”

“ To all of the pessimists and doubters, amid all the clamor and criticism of the world, we hold aloft the glorious Gospel of the Son of God, and say, “Let society go to pieces, and we will reconstruct it with this truth.”
Christ proclaimed the privileges of the pardoned. One privilege is to live without suspicion. A certain writer in a recent and readable book takes the position that when a man is sent to the penitentiary even for a year, he is sent there for life, since he will always be regarded as a convict. ”

“ To make the chaplaincy a ‘snug harbor’ for the superannuated is unjust to the chaplain and to the institution. At no time in his life does a minister need to have his physical, mental and spiritual forces in fuller play than when he undertakes the chaplaincy of a prison or reformatory. He may grow old in the service, and his strength increase with his years because of his manner of life and the experience that faithful service has brought to him, but under ordinary circumstances the younger man has the best prospect of success. ”

“ He was sullen, not personally insolent to me, except in a degree unconsciously, and I said to him, ‘I am thinking, my boy, of that good day coming when you will do just the opposite.’ He said, ‘Why do you think that day will ever come?’ ‘Simply because you have sense enough in your head; it is sure to come. You are not so bad. You fancy you are a bad fellow. You are bad enough for all practical purposes, but you are not so bad as you think. All you have to do is to turn around. ”

“ Crime, they say, is not essentially individual; it is actually a social product, the result of a faulty social system. Adopt their plan of social reorganization and in their opinion crime will disappear. Without accepting the too easy optimism of the reconstructors of society, it is evident that their point of view is a valuable corrective of the extreme individuality of our earlier views. It must be evident to anyone who keeps his eyes open and tries to be honest with himself that crime is a joint product of the individual and his environment. A crime is not an isolated act ”

“ I think of a prison as simply a fulcrum for the lever of reformatory effort. By the sentence of the court confining these two young men heretofore referred to, I was afforded the fulcrum to bring to bear the right kind of discipline.
“The next type calling for special discipline is the outrageous fellow. I have asked myself what reason there is in psychology, in humanity or in common sense for making a prison a silent tomb. How can we hope to socialize young 60 men by denying them communication by speech? If a man refuses to talk or laugh, incipient insanity is at once suspected. ”

“ We have in the past decade witnessed an extraordinary development in many States of the Union of a system which is in effect an effort to carry personal interest, care, affection, uplifting influence, inspiring personality, into the home. This is the probation system. The probation officer is simply a representative of the community striving to make up that which has been lacking; to counteract the slowly acting influences which have made for deterioration; to set in motion the recuperative factors in the individual and in his immediate environment. ”

“ Prevention of crime is the motto of our juvenile courts, reformatories, probation officers and societies for the aid of the discharged convict.
“After ten years of investigation as prison surgeon, I am unreservedly of the opinion that sterilization of our habitual criminals is a proper measure, and I believe that if habitually enforced it will lessen their number.
“The punitive side of our dealings with criminals is always to the front. Punish him is the first proposition. ”

“ A prisoner is not fully saved until he is saved to society. He is not saved to society until he earns an honest living, and he cannot earn an honest living without the help of the more fortunate.
Fiction tells of one injured by his own sin, brutalized by injustice, and finally changed after nineteen years of imprisonment, who built factories, became a banker, founded a hospital for sick women, and an industrial school for children, and made a city and filled it with the hum of industry. ”

“ It seems as though better results are secured in States that have abolished the death penalty.
“Insanity to-day is usually the moneyed defense. The fact that a rich man with a homicidal habit can produce experts, apparently respectable, who will swear that at the time of the commission of the crime he was insane by reason of a brain storm, but is sane at the time of trial, has brought such expert testimony into merited contempt and the administration of criminal law into deserved distrust. ”

“ Corporate interests that now possess as many avenues of escape from regulation that can be made effective only by criminal prosecution, as there are different State governments, are unwilling to have these regulations made and enforced by the undivided power and responsibility of one sovereign law. To them each State government is as a city of refuge. One of the great questions to-day is whether government shall control the corporations or the corporations the government. ”

“ In setting aside those who are trusties we appeal to intelligence and thoughtfulness. What has been the result? We had six hundred acres of land to farm, first as an economic proposition, and second as an agency for training. Originally our farm was a burden upon the institution, because all the farming was done under an armed guard. It was quite a spectacle for men to go along our public highways and see a boy, a convict, so-called, plowing corn with an $840 man following him with a gun. ”

“ They may have bread and water for diet and a plank for a bed. In one prison a third offense of this kind is punished with confinement in a small, dark, unfurnished cell for thirty days on diet of bread and water. But in many of the smaller jails these distinctions of punishment are not observed.
It is quite possible that men of just that laudable combination of talent which may fit them for both restraining and reforming the erring are rarely to be found, but surely more attention should be given to the selection of men who have adaptation for such an important work. ”

“ To the average person the word ‘crime’ suggests some isolated act of an individual, having as to its origin little relation presumably to his other acts, still less relation to other persons, and no relation whatever to the community at large, except in its unfortunate effects. The instinctive feeling of the average person to the criminal is that he is an irrational being, and our hope is that he may be put away, or at least kept a safe distance from us. The average person’s philosophy of crime is intensely individualistic. ”

“ The majority of prisoners welcome opportunities to work. Such occupation is refreshing, as it aids them in whiling away the tedium of their hours of restraint. I heard of no complaints arising from the necessity of laboring, but I did hear complaint arising from the scarcity of employment. In several places both officials and prisoners claim that they are hampered by the State regulations on the subject of prison labor.
“Separate and solitary confinement” is a portion of the sentence which is honored more in the breach than in the observance. ”

“ It is a source of deep regret that in some prisons the juvenile criminals are confined in the same part of the prison with the older lawbreakers. Usually the boys who have been convicted are very soon sent to the State Reformatory at Huntingdon, but while awaiting trial, or while serving short sentences, they are held in county prisons where there are no arrangements for the segregation of the male prisoners. The women prisoners are usually entirely segregated, but in a few prisons they are confined in cells opening into the same corridors which the men use. ”

“ Under these circumstances the offender almost invariably feels himself the victim, not of his own wrongdoing, but of chance. He regards the operations of the law not as expressing slowly but surely the community’s sense of right and justice, but as the gambler watches the cards or the dice, and, with all the gambler’s belief in luck, is confident that the penalty will not finally be actually inflicted. ”

“ And if we add to such a degree of chance as perhaps must of necessity exist, the belief spread abroad in the community, whether rightly founded or otherwise, that political, personal or other improper considerations reach out and influence the decisions which are supposed to take cognizance only of the law and the facts, we have gone a long way toward a state in which every man feels justified in being a law unto himself. ”

“ Among them we may mention every church which is teaching the subordination of the present pleasure to the future greater good; every home circle in which dignity and strength of character are being built up; every health officer who is conscientiously laboring to restrict the ravages of preventable diseases; every teacher who inculcates self-mastery by precept and by example; every public official who is striving to make effective the public will for better things ”

“ Add again labor in factories where hygiene and sanitation do not hold sway, where factory dust constantly fills the lungs of the convict. Add yet again the depressing effects inevitable from even the best prison discipline—add these causes together, I say, and we have a sum total that appals us and seems to deprive the poor convict of every chance to escape this terrible scourge.
“Conquering tuberculosis in our prisons, as elsewhere, is not to follow upon any one method or agency or from the unaided efforts of the medical profession. ”

“ All of us know that in many instances the criminal inherits his instincts. The detective of forty years’ experience will tell you that a large percentage of prison inmates are hereditary criminals. Now, if the grandfather had been sterilized, what a lot of crime and suffering would have been prevented. In our enlightened age we should stop this hideous reproduction of criminals and sterilize the grandson for the good it will do in the coming years. ”

“ Two young women artists have painted a great picture, 23 which should hang in every prison where all prisoners can see it. The benignant face of Jesus, full of love and compassion, stands out in glorious relief. A poor man, whom each prisoner might take to be himself, kneels with his back to the observer. The Master’s hand is stretched toward the kneeling form, and He is saying, not in rebuke, but in hope, “I condemn thee not; go and sin no more.” We decorate our libraries and public buildings with suggestive mottoes and inspiring scenes of history. ”

“ Jean Valjean, the youthful criminal, after nineteen years, emerged from the prison with a heart as cold as marble and a will as hard as granite. Tides of revenge tossed through his soul like billows in a storm. Society has robbed him, and now he will rob society. The inhumanity of man has all but quenched the last spark of the divine within him.
In front of this convict, furious with the black wolves of hatred, Hugo, with the hand of a master, places the good bishop, sympathetic as divinity and patient as destiny. He speaks as an apostle of love, “We are ourselves ex-prisoners ”