SERMON
“He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives.”—Isaiah 61:1-3; Luke 4:18.
The eminent theorists and practical exponents of enlightened prison administration composing this national congress are arousing public sentiment to a necessity for an improvement of the physical and moral conditions in prisons and creating a growing interest in discharged prisoners.
Their philosophic conception and wise application of penological principles are hastening the abolition of cruel punishments, the substitution of reformatory for retributive systems, and the adoption of preventive instead of punitive measures.
The fruits of their labors are seen in the establishment of juvenile courts, the appointment of police matrons, the separation of the sexes and also of new from old, and incidental from habitual offenders; the humane treatment of the criminally insane; the study of the criminal, his history and environment; probation without imprisonment for first offenders, with friendly surveillance; the recognition of labor as a disciplinary and reformatory agent; the indeterminate sentence of the prisoner and his commitment to salutary influences; the abolition of public executions and the substitution of electrocution for hanging, and the establishment of higher standards of prison construction and administration.
An organization rendering such unselfish, valuable and abiding service to the delinquents of the country brings the entire nation under a sense of obligation, and deserves the gratitude and coöperation of all people. To have its members as the guests of our city is an honor of which we are pardonably proud, and to be invited to preach their annual sermon is a privilege for which I make most grateful and humble acknowledgment. Leaving the technical discussion to appointed specialists—though to invade their province is a temptation—I shall bring you a message from the Book of books, which I pray and hope may be becoming this occasion, may be blessed to your spiritual enrichment, and may be pleasing to Him whose we are and whom we serve.
The greatest of the Old Testament prophets was Isaiah. No other climbed so high the mountain peaks of prophecy or saw so clearly as he coming events. His anointed vision beheld unfolded in panorama the program of the Messiah’s kingdom, and his purified tongue described the inner mission and the external glory of the Messiah’s reign.
In the olden times of which Isaiah told, Jehovah glorified his people in the building and adornment of the temple, but in the coming days which he foretold, Jehovah was to be glorified by the binding of broken hearts and the beautifying of soiled lives.
The prophet with inspired skill drew a picture of Him who was to be the liberator of the people. Seven hundred years passed, and one quiet Sabbath day, in a small town in Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth looked upon that picture and declared that He was its original. Even so did Hawthorne sketch the stone face in the mountain, which long afterwards was realized by the youth of the valley who had gazed upon it and prayed to be like it. The words of the prophecy referred directly to the period of Babylonian captivity. Israel, in exile, longed for political deliverance. Dry expositions of the Mosaic law could not satisfy captives who waited for the proclamation of their freedom. They could not sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
They craved the assurance of the fact of God’s love. Our prophecy is the communication of that fact. It meant more than political deliverance; it meant the graciousness of Jehovah’s pardon, the beauty of his love and the pathos and triumph of his passion in their behalf. “Good tidings” and “proclamation” henceforth became the classic terms for all communications from God to man.
The words “gospel” and “preaching” were first employed in a religious sense in the Greek translation of this passage. Regular preaching developed during this period and took its place with sacramental worship. Then it was that the synagogue arose with its pulpit and became no less a factor in religious life than the altar of the temple. And it was in the pulpit of a synagogue in Nazareth that Jesus reread this prophecy and affirmed the fact of its fulfillment. Thus, the first public discourse of the matchless preacher was a proclamation of the gospel.
The deepest meaning of His message was spiritual. It was to the spiritually poor and blind and bruised and imprisoned, but its historical setting suggests the improvement of temporal conditions. Indeed, the twentieth century test of Christianity is its ability to do this very thing—to produce social values.
Jesus Christ astonished His hearers by His stupendous claims. His program sounded pretentious, and it was, for one who was less than the highest type of man and the very God himself. Do you comprehend the scope of Christ’s undertaking? He himself defined it:
“To preach good tidings to the poor”—Almshouses.
“To proclaim release to captives”—Prisons.
“Recovery of sight to the blind”—Asylums.
“To set at liberty them that are bruised”—Hospitals.
He proposed a program of happiness for almshouses, health for hospitals, healing for asylums and freedom for prisons.
He announced that His presence brought the joyful year of jubilee, when liberty was proclaimed to slaves, release to debtors and the restoration of family estates to their dispossessed owners. In His mind the jubilee year typified the Messianic era, the period of the bestowment of a free, full and finished salvation. Oh! glorious era, foreseen in prophecy, inaugurated by Jesus, and drawing near through the benevolent efforts of this and similar organizations.
What then was the message and the meaning of Christ’s life as related to prisoners? I answer: He preached an evangel of emancipation. He proclaimed the privileges of the pardon. He promised a supernal splendor to the penitent.
He sanctioned punishment. Punishment is justified mainly upon three grounds: The vindication of the law, the protection of society and the reformation of the wrongdoer.
Jesus Christ sanctioned it for the same reasons. In the sublimest discourse ever delivered upon this earth he declared: “I am not come to destroy the law. I came not to destroy but to fulfil; for verily I say unto you, Until heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, until all be fulfilled.” Many of His acts were performed in order that “it might be fulfilled,” and the pendulum of His life swung through the arc of obedience. Among the elements entering into the mystery of the atonement is Christ’s vindication of that law, “The wicked shall not go unpunished,” by bearing the penalty in His own body on the tree.
Another ground for the imprisonment of the criminal is the protection of society. The Saviour’s entire life gives authority and force to that position. Did He not teach that it is better for one member to suffer than the whole body? that the commonweal should control individual conduct? and did he not leave a violent robber unpardoned on the cross, whose liberty might have disturbed the public order?
You teach that punishment is also reformatory, and with you the Scriptures agree. 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.
Sufficient support is found in the Bible for chastisement. Indeed, to spare the rod would more certainly harm the criminal than it would spoil the child. The rod of chastening, however, must not be held by a vindictive hand, but by one of love, and its strokes modified by a knowledge of the offender. Then it may become the saving agent in the life of the criminal, as the crosses of the thieves enabled them to see the cross of Christ.
Society writes over the convict’s Inferno, “Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.” Even Byron was more cheerful and charitable. His prisoner of Chillon, doomed to solitary despair, saw a rift in his prison walls. Dragging his chain, he climbed upward and looked through. There lay the silver lake framed in the mountains, and the blue heavens over all. As he gazed through tears for his dead brother, a bird began to sing:
A lovely bird with azure wings,
And song that said a thousand things,
And seemed to say them all for me.
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.
Two young women artists have painted a great picture, 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. We leave the prisoner to gaze through iron bars or look upon bare walls. Jesus Christ would adorn those walls with pictures of hope.
Jesus was not a reformer, but a Redeemer. He reforms man by regenerating him. His mission was not to Pharisees, but to publicans, and in his day the publicans and harlots entered in before the self-righteous.
He came to seek that which was lost. The modern church ministers mostly to the saved. Jesus showed a more excellent way. A convicted robber was the first fruit of the cross, and Gibbon records that the first Christian devotees were social outcasts.
Yes, Christ came to set the captives free—free from their old natures—by making them new creatures, free from the dominion of sin by providing them with the power of righteousness; free from the bondage of despair by enkindling a fadeless hope.
While blest with a sense of His love,
A palace a toy would appear;
And prisons would palaces prove
If Jesus would dwell with me there.
If we could completely change the nature of all prisoners in America, so that they would henceforth love good and hate evil, I venture that this congress would vote in favor of opening the jails and freeing the captives. Nothing short of that is the Gospel program.
Do you remind me that this is ideal? I grant it, but our ideals are the tides of the moon that lift the waters from the ocean of the commonplace. We shall not lower the standards to our lives, but rather raise our lives to our standards. When the decree of papal infallibility was declared there was loud and tumultuous confusion in St. Peter’s. Archbishop Manning, of England, standing upon an elevation and pale with excitement, held the decree aloft in his hands, and exclaimed: “Let the whole world go to bits, and we will reconstruct it with this paper.” 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. Therefore, he concludes that a man ought not to be sent to the penitentiary at all. The fact which he states must be admitted with regret, but to adopt his conclusion would encourage wrongdoing and subvert the moral order.
True prison reformers will prefer the method of Jesus. When He forgives a sinner, He blots out the memory of his past life. The debt of sin is not only canceled, but erased. The pardoned are permitted to go in peace. How long will it take a Christian people to imbibe the spirit and imitate the example of their Lord?
The only stigma which He allowed to remain was that in the sinner’s own memory. God forgives and forgets, but the forgiven sinner can never forget. The nails are out, but the holes are there still; there, mark you, to be seen only by himself. God remembers them no more, and God’s people, in beautiful and divine charity, ought to cover them from their eyes and thoughts.
When we shall have attained to this standard set by our Lord, we shall have gone a long way toward solving the problem of the ex-prisoner. To that noble end this Association is moving.
Society has no more perplexing question than the treatment of prisoners who have served out their sentence and desire to lead new lives. Minister as I am, I must confess that the average church member is unwilling to receive the ex-prisoner into his home, or even to look him in the face. People whose only superiority consists in that they have never been convicted scornfully raise their skirts and pass by on the other side. The punishment which society inflicts is more intolerable to the sensitive soul than confinement in prison walls. The ex-prisoner is free, but not restored.
Vastly different from modern society was the attitude of Jesus. He received publicans and ate with them. He went to be the guest of one who was a sinner, and he welcomed the approach of the shame-covered, broken-hearted woman, who came with her tears of penitence and alabaster of affection.
As the last Christmas approached a kind-hearted friend conceived the idea of securing a pardon for a young man who had committed a crime in hot haste, and was apparently penitent and reformed.
The Christian man said, “I want to present him to his mother as a Christmas gift.” Armed with the pardon, he called at the penitentiary.
“Andrew,” he said, “what would you think if I were to tell you I am going to get you a pardon?”
“Oh, sir, I would think it was too good to be true!”
“What would you say if I told you I had your pardon in my pocket?”
The young man threw himself at his benefactor’s feet, clasped his knees devotedly and said: “Oh, captain, have you got it? Have you got it? Thank you, sir; thank you! Thank God! Thank God!”
The friend dressed him in citizen’s clothes and escorted him to the priest (he was a Catholic), and had him swear faithfulness; then took him to his own home for supper, and treated him as a member of the family.
Christmas eve they rode together to the prodigal’s far-away home. The train did not run fast enough, and the impatient youth, with sleepless eyes, read the name of every station. Tenderly did he cling to the friend, and gratefully did he thank him. As the train pulled into the home depot brothers, sisters and widowed mother were there to receive with tears and caresses the returning boy, and they were as happy that night as the home of the prodigal’s father in the long ago.
The friend saw him safely among his family, and turned to go; but, no, they clung to him, they praised him, they prayed God to be good to him, and the ex-convict said, “You have treated me like a son and helped me to be a man.”
My friends, if we had more of the Christian religion in our treatment of the erring, we would make it harder for them to do wrong and easier for them to do right.
The lot of the ex-convict is an exceedingly sad one. Be he ever so anxious to make a new start, he cannot do so without the encouragement of his more fortunate mortals.
How few concern themselves for him! Who will give him the hand of greeting? What business firm will trust or employ him? He needs help and cannot rise without it, and a nominal Christian public refuses to give it. They let him wander forth like King Lear, with uncovered head, into the dense darkness and sweeping storm.
Now the people who help that man to his feet again are the true disciples of Jesus. Excepting alone His purity, Jesus’ most striking trait was His capacity for tenderness and helpfulness toward the straying. He believed in giving the unfortunate another chance, and that is what He meant when He said, “Go and sin no more.” Go, be a clean, respectable and successful woman. Go, and I am with you.
Paul wrote Philemon to receive back the runaway slave, Onesimus, and treat him as a brother. 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.
One day my ’phone rang, and I was asked by a Hebrew merchant and banker in this city to make an engagement to meet him and a young man in whom he was interested.
I called at the appointed time at the bank, and the business man said: “Doctor, this is Mr. Blank. He is one of the unfortunates. He ended his term in the prison last week, and I have secured him a position in a shoe factory. His mother is a Baptist, and I tell him he ought to be under the wing of the church, and I know you will help him and be his spiritual adviser.”
Beloved, that was a unique and joyful experience. A Jew committing to the care of a Christian minister an ex-convict!
The young man was full of appreciation. He promised to meet me at the Sunday school the following Sunday morning. He was there bright and early. On his face shone the light that never was seen on land or sea.
With joyful emotion he confessed: “I have given my heart to Jesus since I saw you. He forgave my sins at the tent meeting Wednesday night. My mother wants me to join her church, and I told her I promised to meet you here this morning, and I must keep my promise.”
You may be sure the minister was almost as happy as the convert, and very heartily was the young man urged to join his mother’s church. He did so, and is now a circumspect Christian and a self-supporting member of the community.
Jesus in His day found the greatest faith in a Gentile, and, lo! in our day, I have found the finest flower of Christian charity and helpfulness in a Jew!
He promised garlands of joy. Reverting to the prophecy in Isaiah, we find the beautiful promise to captive Israel: “Garlands for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.” One day they shall arise from the ashes of humiliation and march forth with garlands of victory wreathing their brow. Their weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning. Their broken spirits have humbled their frames, but they shall yet stand erect and beautiful in the garments of praise. 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.”
Again, our prophecy says: “They shall be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.” The Gospel undertakes the task of cleansing the defiled and clothing him in robes of righteousness. It proposes to make possible the survival of the unfit. It goes to the prisoner with this message of cheer and confidence: “You have been weak and wicked. You may be strong and upright. You have been a brittle reed, bent and broken by the winds of temptation. You may become a stalwart oak, withstanding all storms.”
And this strength and goodness come through the abounding grace of God, which flows from Christ into the sinner’s heart through the channel of faith. It is sufficient for all spiritual needs and is able to save unto the uttermost. It not only changes the heart, but the life, and brings forth fruits of repentance and righteousness.
To deny such power in the Gospel is to manifest the deepest unfaith and to doom to despair every repentant prisoner. And any man who does that is not worthy of a position in penal institutions. To believe it is to feel a solemn and binding obligation to commend that Gospel to the prisoner. Every prison official then seeks to better the moral and spiritual condition of the prisoners. He feels for them the unutterable compassion of Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost, and he sees underneath the prison garb the marred image of Deity, which may yet be restored and glow with the image of the heavenly.
The mission of the prison is for this more than for the protection of the innocent. It is for the reclamation and restoration of the delinquent. Leaving such an institution, the ex-prisoner might truly say: “I came in a thief, I leave an honest man; I entered a murderer, I depart loving God and man. My conscience, which once made me a coward, now makes me a true man.”
The supreme hour of Christ’s passion was devoted to two convicts. Let us stand a moment around that cross and hear the message it speaks to us. Does it not say, “The law must be executed”? for Jesus refused to accept the challenge to come down from the cross, and one of the malefactors by His side said they were receiving a just penalty for their crimes.
Does it not also say, “There is redemption for the penitent thief”? for when one cried, “Lord, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom,” the answer came swifter than light and sweeter than the murmur of the evening zephyrs, “To-day thou shalt be with Me in paradise.”
Christ gave them both the same chance. One died in stubborn rebellion and was lost. The other turned in humble supplication and was instantly transformed from a criminal to a Christian. When heaven lifted up her gates for the King of Glory to come in, and He swept through the celestial portals, He took with Him the penitent thief as a first sheaf of the harvest of prison redemption.
The great poets have as their theme the loss and redemption of the immortal soul. Homer sings the wrath of Peleus’ son in the “Iliad,” and shows how one sin destroyed a building that many virtues support. Virgil sings the wandering of Anchises in the “Æneid,” and describes how youth sails afar, while maturity seeks out ports of peace. Dante sings of the soul’s stain by sin in the “Divine Comedy,” and preaches its purification and perfection. Milton sings of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of the forbidden tree in the “Paradise Lost,” and “justifies the ways of God to man” in the victory of “Paradise Regained.” Tennyson sings of the error that ruins the soul in the “Idylls of the King” and beholds the Divine Friend, whose ceaseless efforts recover the undimmed glory.
Victor Hugo sings of the sin which defaces the divine image and which sears the conscience in “Les Miserables,” and exhibits the melting mercy and lasting love which recover the pristine splendor. That book is unique among the world’s literature in showing that in the heart of the meanest man is a nucleus of good around which a noble character may be grown.
Victor Hugo could never have written this immortal work had he not known Jesus Christ. 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; let us be charitable.” As an apostle of justice, he declares, “The State that permits ignorance and darkness for the youth should now be sent to jail with the thief.”
Landlords close their doors to despised Jean Valjean. A woman casts her bread to dogs while he goes hungry. Coming to the bishop’s door, he is welcomed. “Sit down and be warmed, sir, and sleep and lodge with me. You are my brother. Take this money and never forget you have promised me to employ it in becoming an honest man.”
Conscience whispers, “Jean, you may go up by the bishop and be an angel, or stay below with the demons and be a devil.”
In that hour the sleeping virtues of his nature awoke, and he arose to return to God to sanctify his life. The thought of doing wrong went through him like a knife, and he became incapable of stealing. The bishop’s smiles filled his heart with unspeakable happiness, and the power of God transformed the sinner into the saint.
In the end, when emaciated by suffering, scarred by many battles with wrong, he lay down to die, he said: “My children, remember God is above. He sees all. He is Love.”
They saw him looking, like Stephen, into the open heavens, and heard him say, “I know not what is the matter with me, but I see light.”
And the waiting angels bore his spirit away to the land of eternal day.
EVENING
The evening session was held in Beth Ahabah Temple. Homer Folks, Secretary of the New York State Charities Aid Association, presented the following report of the Committee on Prevention and Probation:
“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.
“There are those, however, who challenge this view and deny it absolutely. 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; it is, as a rule, the last step in a long process. It is at once a symptom and a result; a symptom of instability, a result of deterioration. It is the appearance at the surface of a stream whose source is far back, but which is for the greater part of the distance entirely hidden or not easily observable. It is an unwelcome fruit, but it has slowly ripened, in our presence, and on a tree which we have permitted to grow. The process of deterioration ending in crime is the resultant of the reaction upon the individual of the sum total of influences, economic facts and associations constituting his environment.
“Seen from this point of view our subject becomes bewilderingly comprehensive. The prevention of crime is one of the important results hoped for from the long process of civilization. It is an end toward which many diverse influences are consciously or unconsciously directed. Many laborers in many fields, unknown to each other, are working for this result. 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; every employer who seeks to soften the iron law of competition—in short, all those who, in individual effort or in organization, are trying to build up a saner, more wholesome, better-knit community.
“As many forces are working for the prevention of crime; so also many are working for its production. 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. We may, nevertheless, single out two or three factors in the production of crime, as to which the time seems peculiarly ripe for corrective action.
“We would mention first the frequency with which the very agencies established and slowly worked out by the community for the punishment of crime, or for its prevention, become agencies for precisely the opposite result; and by their action tend to increase and to propagate crime rather than to diminish it. I have in mind specifically our criminal courts and our penal and reformatory institutions. Who has had opportunity for close observation of our criminal courts without being impressed by the extraordinary element of chance that enters into all their operations! How many chances there are that the offender will not be arrested at all; and how many chances there are that if arrested the technical legal proof will be wanting; and how many chances there are that if the technical legal proof be forthcoming the resources of an ample purse will be sufficient to tie up the proceedings in an endless tangle of complications which an ordinary lifetime is too short to unravel. 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.
“But when the law grips and the culprit finds himself behind the bars of the jail or the reformatory, what processes have we set in motion? I suppose that of all the factors that have entered into the production and encouragement of crime, the consensus of opinion among those competent to judge would place the county jail foremost. With what inconceivable callousness we have thrown into promiscuous association those not yet determined to be guilty of an offense (and of whom a goodly number will finally be declared innocent) and those against whom the judgment of conviction has been entered! With what inconceivable shortsightedness we have mingled those guilty of the least offenses with those to whom vice and crime have become second nature, and under circumstances of enforced idleness and enforced association! Worst of all, children arrested for even the slightest offenses, and occasionally for no offense other than homelessness, have been unintentionally made the pupils of adepts in every form of vice and crime. I am painting no imaginary or fanciful picture; I am describing the thing that has existed, and still exists, throughout practically the entire United States. 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.
“And as to our penal institutions for the care only of convicted offenders for considerable periods of time, what is the net effect of prison life upon the prisoner? We would like to think that the work of John Howard has been substantially completed. We gladly recognize the fact that a large and increasing number of prison officials, such as those present at this national congress, sincerely desire and earnestly labor for the good of their prisoners, but I suspect that they would agree with us that the inherent and almost unescapable tendency of prison life, even in the best institutions, is not to build up either the physical or moral stamina; and unfortunately not all officials of penal institutions are in attendance at this congress, and not all are represented by the spirit which is here present. The work of John Howard has to be done over again with each generation. There are only too many prisons to which the biting words of Oscar Wilde would apply:
“The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
“For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool
And gibe the old and gray,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
“With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell;
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.
“And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.
“The establishment of juvenile reformatories has always indicated a realization of the evils of leaving children uncared for and equally of the evil of committing those of tender years to penal institutions. Born of a benevolent purpose, to what extent have they in practice realized the intent of their founders? When we contemplate the extent to which prison methods have been reproduced in juvenile reformatories; the extent to which cells and bolts and bars have been deemed necessary; the severe and ofttimes brutal punishments inflicted; the mingling of those of tender years with those much farther along in the school of crime; the absence until recently, and in many instances at present even, of facilities for suitable industrial training; the woeful inadequacy of any system of care or oversight while on parole, we are obliged to admit that even the juvenile reformatory has not been an unmixed blessing; that many have learned within its walls far more about wrongdoing than they knew before; and that its régime has been too often far removed from that which would develop strength of purpose and strength of character.
“The recent revolution in the methods of some reformatories which find its most complete expression in the New York State Agricultural and Industrial School of Industry, near Rochester, N. Y., is the strongest evidence of the weakness of the other plan. At this institution the boys are subdivided into groups of twenty-two each. These groups are not placed closely about a central “Village Green,” but are scattered as widely as possible over an area of fourteen hundred acres of fine farming land. Each group has not only its cottage, but its barn, its live stock, etc. The boys lead as nearly as possible the life of the ordinary farmer’s son. You might drive through the grounds of the institution without recognizing it as an institution. Its work is commended to the serious consideration of all those interested in juvenile reformatories.
“At the outset we indicated, however, that the great forces for the prevention of crime are to be found not in institutions, but in influences; not in repression, but in development; not so much in discipline as in affection; not in coercion, but in care. To provide these things, it is not always necessary to remove the juvenile offender, even though he be a real offender, from his home. 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.”
The subject of probation was further discussed by the Rev. Dr. A. J. McKelway, of Atlanta, who spoke on “The Need of Reformatories and the Juvenile Court System in the South”; and by Henry W. Thurston, Chief Probation Officer, Juvenile Court, Chicago. Dr. McKelway said in part:
“It is time that our Southern States awoke to the crying need for the humane and merciful treatment of the children who go astray; it has only to avail itself of the experience of other States to meet the need. If it be said that our poverty is yet too great to undertake the additional expense, be it said in reply that we are too poor not to save to the State the criminal expenses that inevitably follow the lack of such reformatory institutions, and that the restoration of one child to a useful life, from a life of crime and shame, is well worth the attention of any civilized State.
“And when we learn to treat the young criminal properly, to consider the unfortunate environment which breeds crime, we should be led to the consideration of the larger problems involved and the reformation of the adult criminal, that he also may be, wherever possible, transformed into a man, instead of being hardened in iniquity.
“In the State of Georgia, during the investigation of the convict lease system, a pitiful case was presented to the attention of the legislative committee of investigation. A white boy, sixteen years of age, was sentenced to the chain gang for stealing a pot of ham. While at work on the chain gang he resisted the too near approach of one of the warden’s hogs, and threw upon the hog some of the hot coffee with which he was supplied. For this crime Abe Winn was beaten until even, in the judgment of the camp physician, he was fit only for the hospital, and he entered the hospital, to be removed in a few weeks as a corpse.
“There are many such instances of cruelty to young convicts, white and black, for which the State has provided no better reformatory than the chain gang, and yet people of the South are a humane people, abhorring cruelty.
“The final argument for the extension and complete adjustment of the juvenile court system in the South and for the building and proper maintenance of model reformatories is the development of the factory villages of the South, with their system of family labor, including the labor of the child. There are now some seven hundred or eight hundred of these communities in the South, either entirely separate from other communities or forming a separate section of our municipalities.
“It has been amply proved that the ranks of our criminal population are not being recruited from the schools, but from the army of neglected children, especially the army of the toiling children. It is a matter of commonest complaint of the managers of our factories where children are employed that both the boys and the girls, especially the boys, so soon become unmanageable.
“Their arguments in opposition to child labor laws really amount to the plea that these children of the factory villages must be sentenced to labor in the mills, either by day or by night, in order that they be kept out of mischief.
“I hold that the child labor system or the family labor system—in the one case the mother being kept at work and away from the duties of the home; in the other case, the children early developing, as bread-winners, first the spirit of independence, then of irreverence, disobedience and finally hoodlumism—is responsible for this state of affairs.
“We are making progress in the South in the correction of this abuse. At the same time there is urgent need for the proper handling of these children of the factory districts, under authority of the law, when they manifest their disposition to recruit the criminal classes.”
On the question, “What Should the Probation Officer Do for the Child?” Mr. Thurston said: “Two theories are now in conflict in the United States, one that it is enough to look after the child thirty, sixty or ninety days, keep it out of court, and then discharge it; the other, that if something is wrong with the child’s intellectual, physical and moral adjustment, this must be found and, if possible, corrected.
“The delinquent child is an embryo enemy of society as now organized,” he said. “The duty of the probation officer is far more than the collecting of fines, receiving reports and carrying out explicit court orders. He has an opportunity to get in close touch with the youthful criminals as few can.
“Of course, the child should be made to obey the law and live up to court orders. There can be no two opinions on this point, but mere external conformity is not real obedience, and the probation officer must strive to reach the sources of the child’s delinquency.
“It is therefore his duty to study each delinquent child as the physician studies his patient. Successful diagnosis is essential to intelligent service. It is not enough that a probation officer visit a child regularly. He must visit with definite plans in mind and make definite record of the same with results. At least these phases of the child’s life must be constantly attended to.”