ADDRESS—HON. C. V. COLLINS, SUPT. N. Y. STATE PRISONS.
“Education as an Element of Reform Among Criminals.”
“The course of education, training and discipline in a penal institution should be one that would stimulate, develop and strengthen the criminal physically, mentally and morally—one that will show and impress upon him the folly and personal loss of defying the laws, and becoming an outcast, and that will lead him to understand, and therefore to desire the benefits that honesty, sobriety, industry and thrift will afford him; that is, to aim to create in him a desire for, and abhorrence of, the associations, the conditions and penalties of a criminal life, and instil into him a respect and desire for the associations, conditions and regards of an upright life. The ideal penal institutions should combine with elementary mental training and the functions of a sanitarium, a reformatory and an industrial school.
“In order that the State may attain more satisfactory results in its efforts to educate its criminals into good citizens and diminish the number of this class, I deem it necessary that the methods followed in the several classes of penal institutions to have close relation one to the other; this can only be brought about by adopting a general plan of administration, whereby the State shall take charge of all places for the detention of criminals, and shall control them through a central directing head, thus locating the responsibility, and by the inauguration of a comprehensive and systematical system of labor and discipline to insure a continuity of correctional and educational training that may easily be made productive in material results and in salutary influence on the prisoners.”
Mr. Collins indicated, that for first offender criminals, the State had a fixed standard of criminality and punishments, but that the State either feebly enforced it, or refused to establish it.
Our object is, or should be one that would strengthen and uplift the prisoner, to utilize all the conditions of whatever uprightness there was in him, by Christian teaching, industrial education, good dietary, baths, shops, cells, etc., in fact, physical and spiritual training. Every prison needs one or more dentist and oculist, we need many for our 4,300 convicts. Some of the convicts are credited with small earnings, received when they go out. The number of the illiterate is less than ten per cent. We need auxiliary helps to give employment.
In Sing Sing there is a bi-weekly paper, contributed, edited and printed exclusively by State’s prisoners, it has a great educational influence, called “Star of Hope.” At the Paris Exposition, it so impressed the leaders in France that they have decided to adopt it. A parole under proper restrictions is what is hoped for; idleness is the general cause of all county jails. Now if you will only rescue all classes, say for even less than a year, by proper parole, there is no telling how much progress we can make.
Don’t put the old offender and the first offender together; the third or more term men should be cellular. A general plan of administration with a central head of government in charge of all the condemned of the State (like the Bertillon Bureau) is to be desired everywhere.