The Personnel of Prison Management.
Address of C. E. Haddox, warden of the West Virginia penitentiary, to the National Prison Association, at its annual session, Louisville, Ky., Congress of 1903:
This is the age of industrial development. On every side we see colossal enterprises undertaken and prosecuted to a successful and profitable conclusion.
Great railroad systems span the continent, carrying millions of passengers and countless tons of freight, with safety, celerity and dispatch, to the doors of factory, workshop, store and consumer.
Immense industrial enterprises are constantly being projected, consolidated and carried on in a manner to excite the admiration, mayhap, the wonder and fear of mankind.
Colossal financial transactions amaze the minds of those uninitiated to the magnitude and the intricacies of such undertakings.
The unexplored recesses of the earth are exploited in a manner and on a scale heretofore undreamed of and unknown, and every department of enterprise is carried on to a degree that distinctly stamps this decade as the acme of industrial enterprise and achievements, the golden age of industrial prosperity, and the acquirement of material improvement and material gain.
If it be asked why such strides have been made along industrial lines, the answer is that it is due to ORGANIZATION AND SPECIALIZATION.
The PERSONNEL of the management have devoted their lives, their talent and their energies to the special work before them. They have been drilled and educated along special lines; they have been deaf and blind to outside matters not relevant to the work in hand, and by close and careful study, by unceasing and constant labor, care and effort, having evolved, projected and carried on these immense enterprises.
The National Prison Congress at its meeting this year is mindful of the material progress of the country.
This association is equally ambitious along the lines peculiar to itself to obtain from the various penal institutions of the country the highest and best results morally, educationally, reformatively, and as an incident, punitively and financially.
How shall we keep pace in penal improvements with the great material progress of the outside world?
The answer necessarily must be, that improvements in our department of work must come, as they do elsewhere, by the investigation, the study, the thought and the effort of those who are in actual control, of those who are in a position to see, to observe and to know.
In other words, the question as to whether prisons are to improve, whether their work shall continue to be of a higher and nobler character, whether we are finally and forever to break away from the customs of the galleys of France, the prisons of Hawes in England, of the Mamertine of Rome and of Rothenburg in Germany, will depend utterly, entirely and absolutely upon the personnel of the prison management of the country.
Prof. Henderson, in his admirable address delivered at the Philadelphia meeting in 1902, on "The Social Position of the Prison Warden," says: "Some institutions have no marked qualities; they have walls, cells, machinery, prisoners, punishments, but no distinct, consistent and rational policy."
Where this is true it means that the worst possible condition of affairs exists. Such an institution has the dry rot. It is managed (or rather mismanaged) by time servers, too careless to feel the high responsibility devolving upon them, and too listless to acquaint themselves with the many opportunities spread before them to improve and keep pace with the onward march of progress.
Such officers in their abuse, by inaction, of the opportunities afforded them, commit "Crimes against criminals" and through them against society.
On the contrary institutions which have distinct features and characteristics, have them as the result of the careful investigation, the patient research and thought of those who are in responsible and actual control, and these characteristics and features reflect the wisdom and intelligence of those who have given their energies and their lives to the special work before them.