COUNTRY LIFE FOR CONVICTS.
For some years this subject has claimed much attention, and latterly on account of the successful issue of experiments in this direction, the reforming possibilities of such methods have been prominently brought into notice. Hence we have felt justified in devoting considerable space in this number to this topic. It is appropriate that the citizens of Pennsylvania particularly should have their attention called to the out-door life for misdemeanants, since the Managers of the Western Penitentiary have decided and have been permitted to remove that institution to some large tract of ground within the State.
The two following articles are from “The Review,” published by the National Prisoners’ Aid Association, 135 E. 15th St., New York City.
The Farm Treatment of Misdemeanants.
James F. Jackson.
Superintendent of Charities and Correction, Cleveland, Ohio.
The old type institution for misdemeanants failed to accomplish satisfactory results, mental, moral and physical. It seemed incapable of developing industry; it was unhygienic, without classification and with no adequate facilities for developing a man’s will or increasing his capacity to do right. There was no individualism. The old workhouse was typical of the most intensified institutionalism, and institutionalism for an adult is an assured failure. Neither the arrangements of the building nor the manner of life nor the administration were conducive to the rehabilitation of the man. The old type of workhouse was constructed to avenge the wrong and not to correct the wrong-doer.
When the failure of that plan was fully recognized, people cast about for a remedy. They saw the success and satisfaction attending the location of charitable institutions in the country, and the idea of similar locations for various types of prisons occurred to them. And the cry against prison-made goods gave impetus to the movement.
The prison did seem to be the last place to make real the fact that “a man’s a man for a’ that.” But when the plowshare and the pruning hook began to supplant the stripes and the dungeon, people were certain that at last the dignity of manhood would be realized and that life and immortality were come to light.
St. Paul and Minneapolis were among the first to adopt the farm policy. Various other corrective institutions were established upon farms in foreign countries and in this country, especially within the past twenty years. One of the best institutions for misdemeanants thus established was located at Witzwyl, Switzerland, in 1891. But I wish to-day to speak with particular reference to Cleveland’s situation, its old workhouse and its new correction farm.
The Cleveland workhouse was constructed over forty years ago on the old lines for 500 prisoners, two miles from the center of the city. In 1904 and 1905, about 750 acres were purchased by the city nine miles from its center. Upon this land building was commenced several years later. Thus far there is built only the “service building” which at present fulfills all purposes. Ultimately it is to be used for store-rooms and shops. There are also to be built dormitories for trusties and semi-trusties, cell-blocks for the least tractable, kitchens, dining rooms, a chapel, women’s industrial building, school building and a greenhouse, all within a high wall inclosing eleven acres. The present intention is that the buildings and wall shall be constructed by the labor of inmates. Unfortunately there are no funds in sight to proceed with this construction.
All commitments are made to the original workhouse in the city. There the women remain, but about two fifths of the men are transferred to the correction farm. On a recent day the 102 men at the correction farm were assigned to work as follows: On construction of the sewage disposal plant, 24; in the stone quarry, 7; on the farm, 10; in the garden, 7; driving teams (working the farm and hauling material to the filter bed), 12; care of horses and stock, 10; to work on the adjoining infirmary farm, 10; firemen, 2; carpenter, 1; barber, 1; and in the preparation and serving of the meals and care of the buildings and grounds, 18. Some of these last eighteen are unable to do heavy work, but all have fresh air and sunshine daily. At other times men do concreting, making artificial stone, fertilize and drain the land, which is not fertile, make roads on the farm and later they will construct the wall and buildings, plant trees and perform every sort of labor that will develop the land, and cause it to be highly productive and attractive in appearance. I also hope that later they will make and repair the needed wagons, tools and all the smaller farm implements; in fact, they now do some of that work, especially the repairing.
An apple orchard and much small fruit have just been planted under the direction of the state agricultural department. Last year by attention to pruning, spraying and smudge fires on cold nights, ours was one of the few orchards bearing fruit in all that region. Bee culture will be introduced and scientific forestration is to be developed. We are about to construct a dairy barn entirely by prison labor that will be a model of simplicity, sanitary construction and efficiency for the neighboring country.
We propose that the farm shall gradually become a model in all respects. In fact, this year we will produce certified milk for the city and the contagious disease hospitals. We plan, as soon as possible, that the correction farm shall produce the meat, milk, vegetables and fruit, both fresh and canned, for the entire workhouse and the public hospitals, while the adjoining infirmary farm will render similar service for its own use and that of the growing tuberculosis sanatorium.
From the standpoint of the prisoner, the farm policy is to give to each man the largest degree of liberty consistent with the well-being of others. The ultimate purpose is to employ as many without the walls as possibly can be trusted, and to employ out-of-doors within the walls all the remainder except those whose conduct imperatively demands closest supervision.
For years there will be work for all workers, no “idle-house” in any sort of weather or trade conditions. Every working day from twelve to twenty men are sent to work on the adjoining infirmary farm. Such transfer was one of the purposes of placing the infirmary on a great contiguous tract of land. But the plan works to the detriment of the correction farm, which for years, and perhaps always, can use to advantage the labor of all men committed to its care. No key is turned on these men during the day. The night guard and the locked door are more to remove temptation than to prevent escape. You realize this when you know that all these men, instead of sleeping in stuffy cells, sleep in large dormitories, giving them every facility for overpowering the night watch and making their escape. Prisoners arrive a typical bridewell company, drunken, dirty, diseased and discouraged. They go away bronzed, with regular habits of living, accustomed to work, with a new determination and a new grip. Of course, some fail and return, but we do not assume to insure immunity against all the wiles of the world, the flesh and the devil.
Americans seem in constant search for a cure-all. There is a great demand for some hobby for the alert philanthropist to ride. In their order institutionalism, organized charity, juvenile courts, medical charities and country life have had their turn in the spotlight. Each is efficient, but all together are not sufficient. It is urged that if a convict be sent out under the blue sky to breathe God’s pure air, behold green fields and hear the birds sing from the swaying boughs, he will become as one of the best citizens, especially if he digs in the dirt. But unfortunately the country does not afford the alchemy which converts men into angels. This is amply attested by the record of most diabolical crimes committed by country-bred men who would not know an elevator from a subway. The farm prison is no panacea, but it is tremendously worth while.
The men do not wear stripes in either prison. Consideration is combined with firmness in all our dealings, for it is the purpose that every requirement shall appeal to the fair-minded prisoner to be in his interest and for his benefit.
From the experience of the Cleveland correction farm several rather obvious deductions may be made; we are dealing with men, free moral agents, and a good physical environment does not guarantee their reform any more than does instruction in good rules for living.
We have learned that men are sent to the house of correction for a purpose. These men have faults to be corrected. These defects in the human mind are to be corrected, and no ordinary workhouse sentence will effect a cure of such defects as are hereditary or fully acquired. There is some concealed materialism abroad under the guise of environment, but the rankest exponent of environment should not expect to cure twenty years of bad surroundings accompanied by indifferent or bad actions even by a ninety-day period on a farm. And ninety days is in excess of the average period of confinement, although Cleveland “golden-rule policies” do not burden us with five-, ten- or fifteen-day men.
Our first appeal is to their sense of honor. Their appreciation of the confidence reposed in them often proves a potent influence for good. The transfer to the farm is such an expression of confidence. But it is given with discretion. Hardened criminals are not sent on distant missions unattended. In fact, they are rarely transferred to the farm.
As a part of their teaching the misdemeanants need discipline. It is necessary to keep the men on the farm for some time if they are to receive the needed development, especially the men who are sent for intoxication. Discipline is essential to instruction whether in the day school, the home or any other form of education. Many of these men are committed because of their lack of self-control and time is required for its development. We have learned that the men need to be taught the habit of industry and how to do some particular thing well. This is for their good while they are on the farm, and it is essential after they return to their homes. We have learned that not all men can be trusted, and we believe it has a bad influence on a man to attempt to get away, so we make him feel the bad result when he is caught. And the police are faithful to help catch deserters. Personality is a big factor; one man will accomplish far more with and for prisoners than another.
The farm does build up the body of the anæmic; it gives a good physical development. Moreover, the habit of industry can very much better be taught where results are being achieved on the farm than where work is being done at little or no profit in a factory. And efficiency is better developed on the farm. The farm has a direct physical value and an indirect mental and moral value. It clears a man’s mind and allows him to think straight. It affords a foundation for developing the spiritual structure, though of itself it will only slightly develop one mentally or morally. The man is now physically well, having had lessons in life. Here is the opportunity to further develop his will in order that he may do right. Looking to that end, we have introduced the regular presentation of the gospel in an orderly way. We intend to teach by example, but we need an official who shall be recognized by the prisoners as their friend, one who shall know them and make it his exclusive business to help them establish the desire to do right and aid them to be able to fulfill that desire. This seems one of the unsolved problems in Cleveland and in nearly all such institutions.
We have the parole system in operation, though there is not help enough for its most efficient execution. There is the Brotherhood Club for the men who have no home to which to go, established at the suggestion of a former prisoner. There a man may stay until he appears strong enough to live a normal life. The club is intended to be self-sustaining.
In my opinion the country is the place for the misdemeanant, for the very obvious reason that it affords plenty of light, pure air, a variety of good food and wide opportunity for productive occupation for the prisoners. There work is purposeful, not a time-killer. They work, eat, sleep, have recreation and religious teaching, all under approximately normal conditions. Every man is treated with kindness and consideration; discipline is not on parade. In short, the prisoner is treated like a man and to the extent that if there is manhood in him it will come out. The purpose is to develop honor and faithfulness, to accustom every man to useful occupation and to teach him to be effective. The officers are not armed, they are not even called guards. In fact, they act as teachers, foremen or farmers, as the occasion requires.
There is so much work to do in developing, enriching and cultivating the land, in erecting buildings, in making roads, that every feasible labor-saving machine is used. This of itself speaks to the man the appreciation of his work as a man and not a substitute for a machine.
The hope is that the farming and the making of its equipment, and incidentally the care of the prisoners and their quarters, will profitably occupy practically all the available labor in such manner as to make a man not only fit but anxious to work. It is hoped that a large majority will be improved and many rehabilitated in an environment which favors giving every man all the chance he will use to reform. Moreover, it will thereby be apparent that the government is not only strong, but so merciful and so genuine in its fatherly desire to help each man that in turn he will cease to be “agin” the government; that he will turn from being a consumer to become a producer of taxes, turn from being his own and other’s enemy to become a friend to men.
PRISONERS AFIELD.
Warden J. T. Gilmour, Central Prison, Ontario, Canada.
[Stenographic report of Dr. Gilmour’s address at the annual meeting of the New Jersey State Charities Aid and Prison Reform Association, April 1, 1911.]
When we speak of criminals we are very apt to picture in our mind’s eye the great criminals, those who commit atrocious crimes. But that class forms but a very small percentage of every prison population, and the methods of dealing with this class are much more clear and definite than dealing with the much larger class that are not quite so dangerous to society. When we speak of criminals we are apt to think of them en masse as a congregation of a few hundred or a few thousand men walled within a prison. Carlyle dissipates this view when he says: “Masses? Yea, masses, every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows—stands there covered with his own skin; and if you prick him he will bleed.”
In dealing with delinquency there are two basic facts: that the great majority of criminals are made in their youth and that the great majority of youthful criminals are handicapped in life’s race either by physical, mental or moral defects. That prince of sociologists, Victor Hugo, evidently appreciated these conditions when he gave us that beautiful injunction to study evil lovingly, and then, later on, he gave the key when he said: “There are no bad weeds. They are only bad cultivators.”
Two or three weeks ago a young man came into the corridor of our prison one day and asked, “Warden, will you take me out to the farm,” (A prison farm, of which I hope to speak a little later.) I said, “No, Smith, I cannot take you out.” Over in our country when we wish to conceal a man’s identity we always call him Smith, and if we are particularly careful we call him John Smith. This man was a repeater; he was doing his fifth term; the four previous terms he had been a very difficult man to get along with, but this time he had done very well. We could take no exception to either his conduct or his industry. He said to me, “Have I not done well this time?” I said “You certainly have.” “Well, then,” he said, “won’t you give me a chance?” Of course, he had me there; I couldn’t refuse him. I said, “Yes, I’ll give you a chance.” I took him up to the farm on a Monday; he worked well on Tuesday and on Wednesday; and on Wednesday night he skipped. The following Friday we got him again, in a town one hundred and fifty miles from home, and I pitied the poor fellow when he came back, he looked so dejected and so crestfallen; but I blamed myself entirely. I had imposed a burden of self-denial and a responsibility of conduct upon that man that he was not able to bear. He was one of that class, typical of a considerable percentage of our prison populations, that is on the borderland between sanity and insanity; and all the prison officials who are here to-night will recall scores of that class who form a part of their prison population.
As I say, I had made a mistake with this boy; but it only goes to show that penologists are not infallible, not even the youngest of them. If we were to stop to speculate upon the place that this element occupies in the divine scheme, we might tread upon very dangerous ground. It is enough for us to know that the God that made them is the God that will judge them; and herein lies our consolation. I had a man come into prison a few weeks ago to do two years, and yesterday afternoon, just an hour before I left home for coming down here, his wife came into my office leading a beautiful child five years of age by the hand. She came, as so many poor women come, to see if it were not possible to get some relief from her almost intolerable position. As the cruel truth dawned upon her that it was impossible for me to exercise clemency in regard to her husband, the woman turned to me and she said with much emphasis, “If they would only send me and my child to prison, how much better it would have been.”
And the woman expressed a great verity. This little episode I relate to show you that society has two obligations: one to the man shut up within the prison, and perhaps an even greater obligation to the poor woman and children dependent upon the man shut up within the prison. It is necessary to lock up a certain class of men that society may be protected, and that these men may be improved; but when we do that are we going to put their families in a position in which they will be impelled into either vice or crime? I think it is Milton who asks the pertinent question:
“What boots it, by one gate to make defense
And at another to let in the foe?”
In dealing with the wives and children, as well as with the prison inmates over in our place, we find an immense help from the Salvation Army. We have a prisoner’s aid association and they work harmoniously together; but the Army has one or two advantages in this work that no other organization possesses. In the first place, they are not sentimentalists. They detail one man to give his time to it. He is as free to go into our prison as I am, and I think he spends as much time there as I do. He is there at night, on Sundays, on holidays, at noon hours, and he is going from cell to cell—he becomes thoroughly acquainted with every inmate. That gives that man an immense advantage in dealing with those men when their terms expire. The prison worker that expects to meet the discharged prisoner at the prison gate the morning he comes out, is much more apt to be worked by the prisoner than he is to work the prisoner. In three cases out of five he is clay in the hands of a designing man. One of our governors some years ago said that Canada was a land of magnificent distances. The same remark applies to your republic; but we get prisoners thirteen hundred miles from our prison. The Army, learning the condition of the families dependent on the man within the prison, writes to the corps, the Salvation Army corps in the town or the city where the man came from, and they are able by their very extensive and highly perfected organization, to make a study of each family, in addition to having arrangements made there for the employment of that man when his term has expired. We try, just as far as possible, to get all of our ex-prisoners out of the city. We do not wish them to colonize; we try to get them back to their homes where they came from, for unless a man is willing to go back and face society and live it down, the chances are that he will be driven into what is wrong sometimes through fear.
A year ago now we started our farm. It is fifty miles out of the city; it contains 530 acres. I commenced by taking up a little detachment of 14 men, and I rapidly increased that until I had 180 men, housed in temporary quarters on this farm. The average term of the man on the farm was about five or six months, though I had several men there who had to do from one to two years. So far we have taken out to this farm 500 men, and out of that 500, 4 have escaped successfully and 3 or 4 have attempted to escape—unsuccessfully. The other day a minister in our city was calling and I gave him these statistics, and he looked very sad; he said it was a pity. I said it was; “but,” I said, “can you take 500 of your church membership and have 495 of them make good?” And he changed the subject.
I had a grand jury visit me the other day; it is a custom over in our country for the grand juries to come over a few times a year and tell us how to run the place (they sometimes stay an hour), and the foreman, before he went away, said to me, “Warden, I suppose you select the men whom you take out to the farm.” I said, “No, sir, I don’t.” He said, “How do you manage?” I said, “I select a very few whom I don’t take;” for I can take 90 per cent. About three weeks ago I was going into the farm one day, it was a cold, snowy, blowing, blustering day; the thermometer was about zero. When I came near to our building it was quarter to twelve o’clock, and I saw men coming from this direction and that direction, and from every direction pass alone; no officers with them at all, and it impressed me, perhaps, much more than it would another one not engaged in this work, for I asked myself the question, “How is it? These are the very men that I have had in Toronto behind bolts and bars, watched over by guns and guards, and here they are out here as free as this air that blows, and they are all coming in to sit down with each other at dinner.” I have asked our men on the farm—many of them different types, at different places, at different times—and I have asked them all the same question. “What do you find the greatest difference as between the prison in the city and the prison out here on the farm?” And without a single exception, in one form or another, those men have invariably given me the same reply. We give good board at the prison, but it was not that; it was not this liberty, comparative liberty. They have said to me: “Warden, to get away from that cell! To get away from that cell!”
I asked a boy two weeks ago, a young man, and he said, “Warden, to get away from that cell; for,” he said, “to sit there on Sunday, every evening and on holidays and have that cell gate staring you in the face, it is hell;” and he didn’t say it to be irreverent or disrespectful, but it was his pent-up emotions. I believe there is something debasing—debasing to a man’s personal manhood—about life in a cell that no one can describe. Our men plow, they harrow, they sow the grain, they reap it; there is no guard with them at all. Of course, these are men who are near the end of their terms, perhaps men who have three months or less to do; but every prison contains enough of that class to enable them to carry on this class of work, agricultural work, to a financial advantage. If we had to pay guard to be with these various men we couldn’t do it, but we don’t. There is an indefinable something in God’s out-of-doors that has a beneficial effect upon humanity. I cannot tell you what it is. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. So is every man that is born of the spirit.”
A few months ago a professor from the University of Kansas wrote a little poem of two or three verses, and one of the verses reads like this:
“A breeze on the far horizon,
The infinite tender sky—
The ripe, rich tint of the corn fields
And the wild geese sailing high;
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod:
Some of us call it autumn
And others call it God.”
Do you catch the spirit of those beautiful lines? They tell (what I should like to tell were I able) of the way God speaks to our delinquents out on the farm through the hazy atmosphere and the golden sunsets; they tell of the way God speaks to those poor fellows through the growing and the ripening grains, and of the message that God sends to them through the birds that sing and soar over their heads. It suggests that beautiful thought of Browning’s:
“This world, as God has made it,
Always glitters. And knowing this is love,
And love is duty.”
We are aiming at something definite in the construction of our new prison. We are going to try to give that large class of boys and young men that come to prison for the first time, one more opportunity of going through life without being immured in a prison cell. In the construction of our buildings our domicile accommodations will be largely of the dormitory type—small dormitories, accommodating fourteen beds, with a large, semicircular bay window on one side which will serve as a sitting room, attached to which dormitory will be a completely equipped bedroom and dressing room. The corridor, which runs along the side where the officers will patrol, is divided from these rooms that I speak of by a glass partition, so that our men are thoroughly under observation every hour of the day and night, and there will be no opportunities whatever for some of those things that penologists so much dread. In addition to that, we have a number of single rooms and a number of cells, but in a prison which is destined to accommodate 600, we are only putting in 40 cells. The men who behave and who demonstrate that they can appreciate that dormitory life and maintain the condition of it, we hope to give ultimately a single room, and the men who fail to appreciate this dormitory life and don’t behave as we wish them to, will then be demoted into a cell; but we are going to try, as I say, to get those boys through life, if possible, without the cell. Will we succeed? I don’t know. I don’t know. We have our critics, but this world will never be saved by the critics; it will be saved by the dreamers. The history of humanity is the history of indomitable hope. Emerson says that “Every thing is free to the man that can grasp it;” that “He who despairs is wrong.”
In dealing with delinquents, it is the personal touch that tells. Human nature craves for sympathy. Kingsley was once asked what the secret of his joyous, buoyant life was, and his ready reply was, “I had a friend.” Our Saviour was no exception to this rule, for as our Saviour approached Gethsemane, he yearned for a friend whom he could rely upon to wait and watch while he endured, and expressed it in that pathetic request to the drowsy Peter and his sleepy comrades. When we see a very simple duty staring us in the face in dealing with this class, we are too prone to say: “Lord, here am I. Send him.” It is an easy matter for a man of means to write his check, or give his cash, but it is an entirely different thing to carry that gift to some poor fellow who is down and out and sweeten it with the fragrance of personal kindness.
“Not what we give, but what we share;
The gift without the giver is bare.”
We have church service at our place every Sunday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon. One day our preacher failed to materialize; the men were in the chapel and I did not wish to have them return to the cells without saying something to them; as I could not preach, I thought I would do the next best thing, and I would read another fellow’s sermon, only I gave the other fellow credit for it. I was reading a book just then that interested me very much, and I went down to the office and got it and I read the first chapter, and when I finished I asked if I should read more, and they said, “Yes, Warden.” I read a second and a third chapter; I read as long as my voice would hold out; and as I had finished a man down in the audience said, “Won’t you be kind enough to tell me the name of that book and the author?” I was very glad to have them ask the question; I told him. The next morning when I was going through the prison industries, the officers kept asking me what book I read the previous day. I said, “Why do you ask?” They said, “The men are all talking about it.” I sent down town and got fifteen copies and sent them around among the cells, with instructions that no one man could keep it for more than a week. When we collected the books at the end of the first week I found that a great many men had taken paper and copied out portions of it. This was practically a non-reading population. They had refused a lot of good books we had put in our library which I had thought were fine, much to my disappointment. Perhaps you would like to know the kind of book they so much enjoyed, and, with your permission, I will just read you the first page of the first chapter.
“Man has two Creators: his God and himself. The first creator furnishes him the raw material of his life and the laws of conformity with which he can make that life what he will. His second creator, himself, has marvelous powers he rarely realizes. It is what a man makes of himself that counts. If a man fails in life he usually says, I am as God made me. When he succeeds in life he proudly proclaims himself a self-made man. Man is placed into this world, not as a finality, but as a possibility. Man’s greatest enemy is himself. Man in his weakness is the creature of circumstances; man in his strength is the creator of circumstances. Whether he be victim or victor depends largely on himself. Man is never truly great, merely for what he is, but ever for what he may become.”
Now that is pretty good meat. And that afternoon I was the one who learned the great lesson, for I learned that if we approach this subject in the right way we can waken, even in dormant minds, a desire for good literature. And my little experience of the afternoon revolutionized my method of dealing with the boys in this respect.
Dr. Jordan, of Boston, is the author of that book, and it is called “Self-Control.” Briefly and hurriedly I have just tried to sketch some of the phases in dealing with delinquency. Who are they for whom we should do these things? What claim have they upon us? What is our relationship to them? Did you ever hear the story of the Scotch girl, the one who was carrying a crippled boy over a street crossing in Edinburgh? A gentleman, seeing her burden, hastened up to assist and sympathize with her, and the girl looked up smiling and replied: “Ah, sir, I dinna mind it. He is my brither!”