CLEANING UP THE KANSAS PENITENTIARY
The newspapers of January 31 contained a dispatch describing an unusual special train that left Lansing, Kansas, bound for McAlester, Vinita and Atoka, Oklahoma. The 344 passengers, sixteen of them women, were handcuffed together in pairs and groups and as the train pulled out of the station, the dispatch states that "a great cheer arose from the convicts as they saw the last of the state penitentiary."
This special train was carrying away the "boarded out" convicts whom Oklahoma has been shipping to Kansas since the establishment of its territorial government. Criminals were aplenty in the old frontier days and the contract with Kansas was highly agreeable to the settlers who were glad to free Oklahoma of its "bad men." The territory paid the state forty cents a day for the maintenance of each convict kept in the Lansing penitentiary and adding to this the amount that the prisoners earned, Kansas received about forty-eight cents a day for each Oklahoma prisoner. The cost of food was about ten cents a day each.
From time to time stories drifted across the border about the treatment of prisoners, but not until last year when the territory became a state and when Kate Barnard became its first commissioner of charities, was anything done toward cleaning things up in Kansas. In August the new commissioner went to Lansing as a private citizen of Guthrie, Oklahoma, and inspected the prison with other visitors. Then she presented her official card and after considerable protest was allowed to inspect the jail as commissioner of charities of Oklahoma and the newest state in the Union proceeded to show her forty-eight-year-old sister what was going on in the Kansas penitentiary.
Miss Barnard found 562 men and thirteen women prisoners from Oklahoma. She spent a day crawling through the coal mines where the "props and supports of the roof were bent low under the weight of the dirt ceiling." She found that every prisoner who is put to work in the mines must dig three cars of coal a day or be punished for idleness. Three cars of coal a day is a good day's work for a strong man. Miss Barnard found seventeen-year-old boys who were unable to do their "stunt," as they called it, chained to the walls of their dark cells. She found "one Oklahoma boy shackled up to the iron wall of the dungeon. The lad was pale-faced, slender, boyish, and frail in appearance. I said: 'What are you doing here? Why don't you mind the authorities?' He answered: 'I don't know much about digging coal. I work as hard as I can; but sometimes the coal is so hard, or there is a cave-in, and it takes time to build up the walls, and then I just can't get the three cars of coal. I got over two cars the day they threw me in here.'"
The coal that is taken from the prison mines is used to supply the Kansas institutions, it is said. About 1,500 tons are mined a day. As there are some dozen institutions to be supplied, this makes over 100 tons a day for each of the state institutions.
In the prison twine factories the contractors are allowed to say just how much shall constitute a day's work, and as all men are not equally skillful, the inferior prisoner is pushed to the limit by fear of punishment, while the more capable ones fare much better.
Miss Barnard found that the "water cure" is in regular use; that the "water hole," "where they throw us in and pump water on us" is in operation; that the "crib" where refractory prisoners are kept with hands and feet shackled and drawn together at the back, was doing active service. She found unprintable immoralities existing in some parts of the mines and she found that since August, 1905, sixty boys from Oklahoma have been imprisoned with the men in the Lansing prison.
Miss Barnard's report seemed incredible to Governor Haskell. He sent another investigator who came back to Guthrie with new stories of the Lansing prison to add to Miss Barnard's.
And then the governor appointed a commission to make a thorough investigation of the institution and ex-Governor Hoch named a Kansas commission to co-operate. The latter body made its investigation before the Oklahoma delegation arrived. It made eighteen recommendations changing the whole prison management, but declared Miss Barnard's report true "only in minor details." The Oklahoma commission found that her report was true to fact and that the Lansing prison was not fit for a murderer, much less for a sixteen-year-old boy.
There is no state penitentiary in Oklahoma and the prisoners must be kept in the county jails for the present. This is another strong argument for the passage of the bill now before the Oklahoma Legislature for the establishment of a reformatory. It may be possible to arrange with the Department of Justice to transfer the prisoners to the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth.