A PRISON OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
By O. F. Lewis
General Secretary of the Prison Association of New York
[Reprinted from The Independent of May 18, 1914.]
The three-car train came out of the Canadian woods from the south and stopped by the stationless road. Twenty-five young fellows jumped down, formed in twos, and, led by an older man, and followed by two older men, walked up the road over the concrete bridge to the prison buildings. They were prisoners, convicted of crimes and serving time. That morning they had left the Central Prison of Toronto—left the forbidding old building, with its bolts, its gloom, its cells and corridors; and now, but a few hours later, they were hastening without shackles, without armed guards, without prison garb, toward the latest Canadian prison, the Central Prison Farm of Guelph.
This means a new era, this method of treating prisoners—an overturning of the old traditions of prison government, a serious break with the past, an almost scornful disregard of the cherished traditions of bars and cells, tortures and punishments. It means an amazing change in the attitude of society toward the prisoner, and a startling change in the feeling of the prisoner toward society.
You have read in recent months about the mutinies at Sing Sing in New York State; how the prisoners have been for almost a century forced into atrociously small cells, with insufficient light and air. You have read how prisoners have been doubled-up, two in a cell, because of the congestion of population. You have learned that prisoners have had to stay in their cells some fourteen hours out of the twenty-four; that these cells are carriers of tuberculosis and venereal disease. And many other terrible things you have read.
In the light of that story, hear this tale of a prison farm.
When I alighted from an earlier train I looked for Warden Gilmour in vain. In the road stood a man in civilian’s clothes. “I’m Sergeant Grant,” said he, “and the warden was to come on this train. He’ll come later, though, with the draft.” We walked toward the prison. On the way we crossed an attractive concrete bridge. “All built by prisoners,” said the sergeant, “and we had hard work to find the bottom for some of the piers. We made this macadam road, also graded up the approaches to the bridge, designed the balustrades, and even hydrated the lime that went into the concrete, after having quarried it from the limestone quarries up there.”
Approaching the prison I looked for the wall and found none. Not a thing apparently, to prevent the men from running away. I asked the sergeant how many escapes they had. “About one and a half per cent. of the population. We’ve lost from three to five this year. Fact is there’s nothing in the way of guns to prevent the men from breaking away any time. There isn’t a guard here that carries a revolver. The warden says: ‘We haven’t taken away the guns from the guards, because we haven’t ever given them guns!’ As a matter of fact, I carry a revolver,” said the sergeant, “but I’ve never used it in eighteen years. But I feel more comfortable with it.” Which made me smile, because it was an example of an age-long tradition dying hard.
The dinner whistle blew at 11:45. Here I saw what in the old-line prison would be the unbelievable. From all parts of the farm came the men in to dinner. It was the reverse of the usual factory procession. Here the crowd poured into the door of a factory building temporarily used as a dining-room and kitchen. There was absolute order. The garb was not unlike that of the average farmer’s helper. Even the customary vizored cap of many prisons was absent, and the old straw hat had taken its place. On the tables, for dinner, were meat and vegetables, tapioca, soup and milk—a liberal amount.
Meanwhile Warden Gilmour had arrived with his detail of prisoners. He has been in prison work for seventeen years; before that he was a physician. He is regarded as one of the best prison administrators in the country. He loves the land, not for what it produces alone, but in humanity also. The frequency, moreover, with which bits of biblical quotations drop from his lips leads one to believe that the injunctions of Holy Writ form a considerable part of his sanction for life, and for that of the men in his charge. There is nothing mawkish or apologetic in his adherence to Holy Writ as a guide. There is a certain severity of viewpoint in his daily work. Nothing is happy-go-lucky about the Guelph Prison Farm; it has all been thought out, and the warden is the dominant personality.
“Remember,” he said, “this is not run on honor, this prison. I don’t believe in the so-called honor prison, as the word is generally understood. This is a prison that is successful because the supervision is successful. Supervision will do what formerly guns and wall accomplished.
“We talk about the originality of a prison like this? Why, originality consists in doing what other people are afraid to do. I have not been afraid to build this prison without walls. But we are everlastingly watchful. Thirty miles east of Toronto, at Whitby, I have a hundred prisoners building an asylum for the insane on the cottage plan. The plaster, the lime, the sashes and the window frames are shipped from here. Here at Guelph we can perform with prison labor more than seventy-five per cent. of the building operations.
“Punishments? We don’t have them here. That is, if a prisoner gets bad here, disturbs the order of the place, and we cannot make him see that he must conform to the rules, we send him back to the Central Prison at Toronto. But most of the men prefer the life out here a thousand times. We take men that generally have still some months to serve. We have been taking men whose sentences run up to two years, but more recently we have received men with longer sentences. Let me tell you about one man who was here.
“I asked this boy, some time ago, who had been in the Toronto prison, what he found the greatest difference between the prison in the city and the farm out here. He said, ‘Warden, the getting away from that cell! To sit there,’ the boy added, ‘on Sunday, every evening and on holidays, and have that cell gate staring you in the face, is hell!’”
We walked toward the new building—all of them being built by the prisoners. Under construction, in a kind of hollow square formation, were kitchen and dining hall, several dormitories and cell buildings, an administration building and officers quarters. One of the largest and best dairy and hay barns that I have ever seen is already up; also a little creamery building. Most of the work is of poured concrete.
As we went through one building, where some score of prisoners were silently working at plastering, painting, carpentering and stone cutting, Warden Gilmour said: “You see, I have my cells only on one side of the central corridor. I mean that all the cells shall have southern exposure. Each of the cells contains eight hundred cubic feet.”
I thought of the twelve hundred cells at Sing Sing, still used, which contain less than two hundred cubic feet of air space, and have no windows opening to the outer air as at Guelph.
“Then we have dormitories,” continued the warden, “not the big dormitories of olden times, but comfortably small rooms that will accommodate from twenty-five to thirty men. We are trying the experiment. I don’t know yet how it will work out. We are expecting to have here ultimately about seven hundred men.”
I asked him about the expense of all this. “Are you saving money or saving men?” was his sharp retort. “Nevertheless, we are demonstrating every day the economy of using prison labor, as well as the economy of giving these men reasonable accommodations. I can’t give you as yet the figures you want. We are teaching these men how to work, and the usefulness of work. The bulk of them, when they leave here, are not going upon farms, but back to the cities from which they came. So we are teaching some city trades, but without neglecting farm industries. We are raising about all we need to eat, as well as the stock we raise for food. But a prison farm without important and diversified industries is a mistake.”
I looked around the eight hundred acres. There was a sweep of horizon, a tingling acid in the air, a quietude, a blessed monotony in comparison with the feverish city, a spaciousness of possibilities, as compared with the walled-in prisons like Sing Sing; in short, an approximation to the sanest kind of normal life.
“Work?” The warden smiled. “Why, we’re working here ten hours a day; seven to twelve, one to six. Each man that works here gets a gratuity of two dollars a month, but he loses a part of that gratuity if he offends against the rules of the place. They get the money when they go out. Our payments to prisoners amount to between one hundred and fifty and two hundred dollars a month. We discharge each month about thirty to forty men. They get, in addition, a ticket back to the place from which they were sent.”
I asked the warden if he was ultimately going to build a wall around the place. “Not if I can help it. I don’t think bars on cell windows are necessary; but supervision is. However, we may as well proceed with reasonable speed in our modern ideas. Ultimately we may need the protected windows.”
For the completed prison, Warden Gilmour is planning a number of industries, all directly related to the life of the institution. There will be tailoring, carpentry, shoemaking, a woolen mill, a machine shop, a tile factory and other industries. And as for recreation, plans are not failing. There is already a ball team that has beaten, with one exception, all the teams that have come from the surrounding towns. There is fishing and swimming in case of good behavior. And when the warden gets the prison all built, he is going to turn much of the land, which is not used for farming, in to a kind of natural park.
Up there, across the line, some thirty miles north of Lake Ontario, where the summer heat gets into the nineties, and the winter cold sends the bulb down to thirty and more below, there is going to be a radical overturning of old prison regime. Inevitably the influence of Guelph and of a dozen other prisons in the “States” will send the walls of the older prisons crumbling. For Guelph means nothing else than a reversal of the theories of prison administration.
The old prison believed in dungeons and bars. The new prison substitutes therefor single rooms and God’s outdoors. The old prison feared an escape like the plague. The new prison forces an escape into its proper perspective as a serious episode in the training of the prisoner for honest life. The old prison shut out life and hope by monstrous walls. In the new prison, walls for all prisoners are regarded as monstrous things. The old prison drove men like brutes to work and often to mutiny. The new prison blows the whistle at noon, and the men come in from all over the farm to dinner, and go to their rooms or to the dormitories afterward for a short rest, and then back to normal work. The old prison—and there are many of them still—believed in squeezing the life blood out of the prisoners for the benefit of the State and of private contractors. The new prison believes in the working of the men for State profit, if for profit at all. And the modern chiefs of new prisons are giving sober attention to a fairer division of the profits of prisoners’ labor between the prisoner and his compulsory employer, the government.
The old prison believed in wretchedly small cells, in a minimum of fresh air, in messes of poorly prepared food; in the lock step, the stripes and the shaven head; in punitive methods. The new prison believes in an ample cell and an outdoor life so far as possible; in decent food, the abolition of the lock step, a decent head of hair and a decent uniform—in reformation, if possible.
As to the future, who can tell? The new prison is an experiment. So far, it has worked in general remarkably well. Its sanction lies in the fact that it makes on the average mind the impression of being a common-sense proposition.