Sunday, September 16th
MORNING
The Conference Sermon was preached by the Rt. Rev. William Crosswell Doane, D. D., LL. D., Bishop of the Diocese of Albany, in the Cathedral of All Saints, where the delegates attended in a body. The Bishop’s text was Matt. 25:36, “I was in prison and ye came unto me.” He said in part: “Almost by an instinctive impulse these words come first to the mind of the preacher at such a service, and by a striking and happy coincidence this service falls upon the Sunday when our Book of Common Prayer appoints for the second morning lesson the chapter which ends with this intense expression of our Lord, containing, I think, the seed principle upon which the noble work of this Association was founded and has been carried on. Last year the preacher took the earthly ministry of our dear divine Lord as the pattern of this work, ‘Who went about doing good.’
“I am only supplementing and carrying along the line of his thought when I ask you to think of the divine Master as giving not the pattern only, but the principle of your work. There is no contradiction in the double presentation of our Lord’s personality along this as along so many other lines. He is so essentially by His incarnation in our human nature that we bring Him to those to whom we minister in His name and find Him in those to whom we bring Him. And in either of these sides the truth is set forth and enforced that the object of all Christian service, whether it be the work of Christianity in religious teaching, or the work of Christianity in the administration of civic affairs, is not the violent denunciation or vindictive infliction of punishment upon a sinner, but the offer of help and the opportunity of reform. The Prison Reform Association may well claim that it describes and expresses in its name the purpose for which in Christian lands prisons exist. ‘He came not to condemn the world, but to save it.’ ‘The Son of Man has come to seek and save the lost.’
“Curiously enough, whatever technical differences may lie in the use of the various words prison and gaol and reformatory, there is one that stands out as having in its root meaning the very thought of that on which we are dwelling, because the penitentiary is certainly the place where men are led and drawn, through real penitence, to seek and find pardon and peace.
“I am not losing sight of the purpose of imprisonment both to stamp crime as crime and to protect society from the criminal. I am only advocating the thought of reform for which this Association stands. If a man is a murderer condemned to die, then there is the overwhelming duty and responsibility of bringing him to repentance, that he may die forgiven. If he is serving a sentence indeterminate or for a fixed time, then surely the influence and effort of prison discipline must be not to harden him into sullen hatred of law and of all that the law stands for, not in a harbored purpose to revenge himself in some way, when once he is free, upon the society which has condemned him; but to waken in him such a sense of shame as shall force him back to the possibility of self-respect, and bring him to that point of realized wrong by means of which he shall ‘come to himself.’ That is the Master’s own description of the prodigal son. Far as he had strayed from his father’s house, he had strayed farther from his real self, the self of his innocent childhood, the self of his home and surroundings, the self of his true nature, and it was when the true man wakened in him that, coming first to himself, he came next to his father’s house.
“In this recognition of the criminal’s sin there must be enforced the discipline of penalty, and of penalty as punishment, but it must be carefully dealt with, so as in no sense to convey the thought of retribution or of vindictive retaliation. The strides of progress which have been made in the last century and a half under the methods of such real reformers as Howard and Wines (whom, as a boy, I remember very well), and Elizabeth Fry and Dorothy Dix, have, among other things, set the stamp of this idea in the fact that capital punishment, which used to be inflicted for many crimes, is reserved to the one for which it was divinely ordered, and from which, I trust, it will never be taken away, namely, the sin of shedding another’s blood. Meanwhile, more and more, in the selection of wardens, in the appointment of chaplains, in the abolition of the fearful cruelties of physical torture, in the decent sanitation of prisons, we have grown more and more to realize that the condemned criminal is to be treated as a man who needs protection, systematic discipline, the training of the prison, to protect him from himself, to put into him the purpose and set before him the possibility of a better life, rather than to humiliate and crush him into desperation and despair. It is quite true that no amount of legislation and no method of enforcing laws can make a man moral, but it is also true that the law which defines and punishes sin deters men from the commission of crime, and when the criminal is condemned and sentenced and his punishment begins, only the power of religion can reach him to convince him of his sin, to convert him from his habits, to reach the motives of his life, to change the tendency of his will, to form in him new habits, to give him the spiritual help by which his conscience may be enlightened and his character changed.
“And there are certain human, natural, physical reasons for the right attitude to the convicted criminal which more than warrant us in assuming it as the groundwork and motive of our dealings with him. It is told, I think of an English bishop, seeing a criminal drawn in a tumbril to execution on Ludgate Hill, in London, that he said, ‘There go I but for grace.’ Somehow I know it is true that now and then men whose lives have been surrounded from childhood up to the very moment of their fall with the best influences, suddenly lapse into great sin. We have instances in the last year which have startled and staggered communities, men in places of trust who have betrayed it, and have either been flung down from the position of confidence and honor or fallen themselves, and found in flight or in suicide the fatal termination of what has seemed to be a career of honorable service. I am bound to say a word even for these. I believe the vindictive personalities which have assailed some of these men are in some cases absolutely unjust.
“There ought to be, thank God, there is, more and more in the great movements in our cities, a strong, set effort of prevention, which is far better than cure. The prisons will be emptier when we have reached the root and reason of crime. If we can control the use of liquor and stop at least its excess; if we can stamp out the curse of drunkenness; if we can more and more arrest the degradation of our slums; if we can train up a race of children in surroundings of physical healthfulness, of moral decency and dignity; and still better, if we can instil into them from earliest childhood the principles and pattern of Jesus Christ, we shall have begun, at the right end, the restoration and the reformation of humanity. Meanwhile, until all these movements have ripened into some result, it becomes us to remember from what sources and in what surroundings the grown-up criminal has come; to realize how far we, by our neglect and indifference, have been responsible for them; and to reach out the helping hand of deep sympathy and pity in the effort to reclaim, to restore and to reform.
“The great revealed truth of universal redemption is full of grace and help. Still more, the truth of individual indwelling of the Christ in us, the hope of glory. It is true that in a way this is a doctrine, a dogma, as people say who think of a dogma as a tyrannical imposition upon their intellectual liberty; but it is truer still that, like many another thing which we call dogma, it is a fact on which depends not merely our holding right faith in Jesus Christ as the God-man, but on which also depend the method and the hope and the value of our dealing with humanity at large or with the individual man. It has in it besides the very highest human hope possible for you and me, that in the great day of eternal decision there shall be for us who have recognized Jesus in those to whom we ministered here the full revelation and manifestation of His glorious God-head, with the word of ‘well done’ and welcome into ‘the kingdom prepared for us from the foundation of the world.’”
EVENING
At many churches of the city various phases of the work of the Association were presented by delegates to the Congress. At the Cathedral Mr. Thomas M. Osborne, President of the George Junior Republic, Auburn, N. Y., spoke on “The True Foundations of Prison Reform”; Mr. George B. Wellington, of Troy, on “The Duty That We Owe the Convict”; and Prof. Henderson, of Chicago, on “Preventive Work with Children.” The latter maintained that the proper training of a child to keep it from becoming a criminal began before it was born. Crime was not a heritage, but criminal tendencies sometimes were. Judge Lindsay, the great enthusiast in behalf of children, had said that the Juvenile court was organized to keep children out of jail, but that now the problem was to keep children out of the Juvenile court. The problem is to get back to childhood, back to infancy. Babyhood determined whether there should be a large or a small criminal class. Place the child from earliest infancy into such a physical environment and under such mental and spiritual influences as will produce the habit of right living.