The Review, Vol. 1, No. 3, March, 1911

The cover image was produced by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
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.
A. H. Votaw, Member Ex. Committee.
If some one of the prison officials of New York were to suggest the turning out of hundreds of the prisoners on Blackwell’s Island and Sing Sing into a colony in the fertile valley along the Hudson or the Mohawk river, under the care of a superintendent and a half dozen assistants without an armed guard, the inhabitants not only of New York state but of all the states in the Union would immediately hold mass meetings of protest and set their political organizations to work to have the official making the suggestion removed from office and incarcerated in an insane asylum. This would be the action taken in this far advanced, civilized country.
Yet in the Philippine islands this very thing has been done, and done with success. It has been done with a people said by leading officials of this country and other countries to be incapable of self-government.
To be explicit, there are today 1,423 prisoners, or “colonists,” as they are now termed—prisoners of all classes and sorts, serving terms of from five years to life imprisonment, and for crimes from petty thievery to murder—living without a guard in a small, fertile valley along the river of one of the islands in the archipelago just south of Luzon, the largest island, of which Manila is the capital.
Here the 1,423 convicts live, not alone, isolated as the prisoners of Siberia are, but much the same as they would have lived had they never committed a crime against the community—in peace, prosperity and happiness, with their families, engaged in the pursuit of agriculture-and the only guns on the place are those mounted at the superintendent’s office for saluting purposes and the “six-shooter” the superintendent keeps locked up with his cash in the safe of the penal colony office.