THE “PIRATES” AT SHERBORN REFORMATORY
[Here is a fine human interest story about the Women’s Reformatory Prison in Massachusetts, and the remarkable success the inmates achieved in “The Pirates of Penzance.” The story is from the New York Times of June 21.]
“When a felon’s not engaged in his employment,
His Employment,
Or maturing his felonious little plans,
Little plans,
His capacity for innocent enjoyment,
’Cent enjoyment,
Is just as great as any honest man’s,
Honest man’s.”
This sums up pretty fairly an affair at Sherborn a few days ago. Sung by the ordinary policeman chorus of any ordinary Gilbert and Sullivan revival, the sentiment would seem trite enough. Sung by the felonious themselves, by forgers, by the “enterprising burglars,” it takes on a keener significance. It comes home.
It was an amazed audience that sat in the chapel of the Women’s Prison at Sherborn, Mass., and listened to “The Pirates of Penzance,” presented by fifty-five of the two hundred women who are “doing time.” It was an audience which did not always get its cue as promptly as an audience should, for in several places where the Gilbert and Sullivan Company intended it should laugh it openly dabbed its eyes with handkerchief or blew nose violently.
In the first place, it had gasped over the grim humor of “The Pirates of Penzance” as presented by a set of offenders against property and public order anyway. It gasped again when a lusty opening chorus of attractive “pirates” demanded that somebody pour, oh, pour, the pirate sherry—for it was “sherry” that landed on a lot of them in Sherborn. And it could not for the life of it smile when the jolly pirates explained to it that,
Although our dark career
Sometimes involves the crime of stealing,
We rather think that we’re
Not altogether void of feeling.
And a few in the audience realized that the pretty little Mabel, with her long, dark curls and her clear soprano voice, was an old offender, serving her third term at Sherborn. A few remembered, not without a shiver, that the pirate at the end of the row, splendid in a blue and white striped cape slung from his—her—shoulder, a dagger stuck in her belt, had assisted at having her husband cut up in pieces, and, missing the electric chair by a minute and a half, was here in Sherborn for life.
It was hard to realize that one was within prison walls. These girls, most of them girls of the streets, supposedly the “dregs” of society, looked and acted like anything but dregs. Accustomed to the cheapest sort of music, the cheapest sort of amusement before they came here, they had nevertheless entered into the Gilbert and Sullivan spirit. They managed the difficult choruses superbly; they attacked their recitatives with understanding.
They had been branded, most of them, as unmanageables, incorrigibles. Yet they had been trained to a point of almost complete co-operation. The mentally defective were not only managing difficult alto, but getting around the preposterous vocabulary of the “Pirates,” such as the square on the hypotenuse and the crimes of Heliogabalus. And more than one in that audience leaned over to say to his neighbor: “If they can be trained to do this, they can certainly be trained to do something else.”
It was this realization that brought the audience, made up for the most part of prominent social workers and city officials from Boston, to its feet at the closing ensemble with all fifty-five on the stage. Policemen and pirates took off their hats and waved to the applauding audience that crowded around the stage, and the audience clapped and waved back. It was a recognition of a fact that both sides too often forget, the fact that criminals are not, after all, so different from non-criminals. It is largely because the criminal does not realize his relation to the rest of society that he breaks with it, and as for society, it forgot the human bond when it began clapping its offenders into dungeons and treating them as complete aberrations.
Mrs. Perle Wilkinson is the reason why Gilbert and Sullivan have invaded Sherborn. Mrs. Wilkinson’s official title is “chaplain.” But no chaplain ever took to himself such an amazing set of duties, and Mrs. Wilkinson admits the name must be changed.
Probably the girls themselves, as they rehearsed for the past eight or nine months under the “chaplain’s” direction, have not realized that they were enjoying an advantage which no other amateur performers in the country could command. For Saturday’s production of “The Pirates of Penzance” contained the original “business”—the “business” witnessed by those of us who saw the first presentation of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in this country.
Mrs. Wilkinson was one-time chorus mistress for the D’Oyly Carte troupe, her husband singing the principal baritone roles. She has for many years had experience in chorus and choir training, and in addition had charge of the House of Refuge at Randall’s Island at the time when both boys and girls were admitted to that institution. It is a curious combination, and one which has brought results of the most amazing nature.
The girls have been working since September on the “Pirates.” It should not by rights have taken so long, explained Mrs. Wilkinson, but the voices were in bad shape. Most of them were hard and inflexible, patterned on the nasal attainments of the cheap vaudeville performer. An understanding of the music had slowly to be created. Then, just as everything was within a few weeks of completion, the parole board would descend and release the chief soloist and five or six of the best voices in the chorus, and work would have to be begun all over again.
This might have happened a week or so ago, for the prima donna’s time had expired and she was free to go. Which would have meant that “Pirates” would again have been postponed, probably for a much longer time, for Mabel’s part is difficult and requires a real voice. Mabel sent word to her family and stayed another week.
It was not only the fifty-five who actually took part in the opera who presented the “Pirates.” The whole prison, two hundred women, gave it. Long ago khaki skirts and blue prison dresses were piled up on one side of the machine room, and the most amazing materials took their place. Turkey reds and purples, tinsel of silver and gold, gauzy pinks and yellows surprised those machine needles, which for thirty-six years have been bobbing up and down through sombre colors. A visitor, looking in to see those who had been sentenced to “hard labor,” would have been amazed to see them putting gold braid on three-cornered hats, sewing buttons on policemen’s uniforms.
All the women attended rehearsals. They brought their crocheting, their bits of sewing, and sat quietly while the picked fifty tackled long words and difficult choruses. This in itself was a big concession. The women were all supposed to be in their rooms, and it was argued that they would be restless and unmanageable, given so much liberty. But they weren’t. They looked forward with the keenest enjoyment to the rehearsals, and it was because the company was accustomed to playing before an audience that not a member showed the slightest evidence of “stage fright,” or even of self-consciousness, at the final performance.
While the performance was going on the rest of the women were working on the prison grounds, in the kitchen, in the laundry, in the machine rooms, but they were as excited about the event as though they were to be present. Whenever a matron appeared, or Mrs. Hodder, the head of the prison, stopped to say a word to them, they asked eagerly about the guests, were there many of them, had the Governor arrived, did they get a sword for the Major General?
Upstairs in the chapel a squad of girls worked for several hours before the performance, setting the stage. The scenery had been painted by the girls themselves and would have done credit to Granville Barker. Towering rocks, a rolling ocean in the back, a cave that looked as though it might harbor any number of murderous pirates, and real trees. Little birches had been cut down, and the girls worked long and earnestly setting them in pails of water behind “rocks.” In spite of a couple of savage onslaughts, one from the pirates in full force with daggers drawn, and one from the energetic police, the trees stayed upright with only a couple of quiverings.
The team work displayed by these outcast members of society, who do not fit into our “organization,” was something of a revelation.
“Get out of this dust, Julia,” cried the stage hands dragging birch trees to their places, as the pirate king appeared in the chapel doorway. “Don’t you know dust will ruin your voice?”
“Mis’ Wilki’son, don’t you touch them trees, you’ll get your hands so rough you can’t play this afternoon,” and, “Mabel, I thought you was goin’ to lay down and get rested—you’ll be all worn out.”
“Emma, don’t let Mis’ Wilki-son sweep the floor—Mis’ Wilki-son, let us have a matron up here and you go and get some rest, we can fix everything now.”
What this means will be realized fully only by those who know the general temper of the women confined in our penal institutions, who have seen the sullenness, the bitter vindictiveness, the complaining spirit of the greater part of them. The girls of the old-style reformatory or prison have much time to themselves, and they put in every minute of it inspecting and piling up their grievances. Even when they are occupied they are thinking about themselves; naturally, they take little interest in doing kitchen or laundry work, or in running machines.
Sullenness and distrust, a hardened suspicion of everything that is done for them, are the biggest difficulties in the way of the woman who tries to “get at” the girls. Mrs. Wilkinson has shifted the emphasis. She does not think so much about “getting at” the girls. She tries rather to get them away from themselves.
She does not bother with the girls’ little sordid histories. She sees in them so many voices, so many dancers. Her mind is intent on just one thing—the operetta, the minstrel show, the Easter chorus that is in progress. Her enthusiasm is unlimited. The girls see her up at 5 o’clock in the morning getting ready for rehearsals, trying out voices, arranging tableaux, planning costumes down to the smallest detail, as if this were the most important thing in the world, and they gradually forget to sulk, and turn in to work.
It was Mrs. Wilkinson and the “Pirates of Penzance” that brought one of the most refractory inmates of the whole two hundred at Sherborn up out of the punishment cell where she was confined at regular intervals. There was no question about it, the girl had a remarkable voice, and the opera had to have her, and she would simply have to keep out of the punishment cell. Which she did, and on Saturday sang the part of the Pirate King with a dash and a finish that brought forth a storm of applause.
She regards Mrs. Wilkinson as her especial charge. And, indeed, many of the girls have a maternal sort of attitude toward this little chaplain, with her wide blue eyes, her earnestness, her trick of asking advice from everyone, her intentness on her work, and her way of taking it for granted that everyone else is just as absorbed and just as enthusiastic as she is.
Mrs. Wilkinson has been at Sherborn a little more than a year. The “Pirates of Penzance” is by no means the first achievement. All the public holidays are celebrated. Last year “The Sleeping Beauty” was given by the lowest grade in the prison, in which eleven nationalities were represented, many of the cast being unable to read and write. Fourth of July is always a gala day, and the festivities include a minstrel show. This year the minstrel show, given out of doors in a charming little amphitheatre on the prison grounds, was a deviation from the usual half-circle, end-men arrangement. There was a little darky cabin, choruses of cotton pickers, and a substantial plot.
Every month there is a birthday party, given in honor of all those whose birthdays come in that month. An extra dish is provided for supper, and instead of regular chapel exercises there is an entertainment of some sort by the girls themselves. Folk dancing has been held under the trees, the kitchen girls danced “Pease porridge hot,” the sewing girls “Reap the flax,” and the laundry girls a Swedish clothes washing dance.
From all this it might be gathered that we were stepping rather far across the line and giving our offenders a better time in prison than they have out of it. The ultimate object of these entertainments, of all this work which seems at first glance rather irrelevant to correction of criminal tendencies is something quite different from the mere pleasure to those who take part.
In the first place, concerted action has been the slogan for every prison reformer. In all too many instances, however, it has been enforced concerted action, and that is of little or no benefit. In all the thirty-odd years that the women of Sherborn have been working in the shop, in the laundry, on the farm there was probably no spontaneous co-operation whatever. The best that could be said was that they were not sitting idle in their cells.
The most important contribution which Sherborn’s chaplain, more or less unconsciously, has brought to that curious community is a new sort of inhibition. Up to this time the correction of the wayward has been through the medium of morals. About the best thing that could be done while a woman was serving her term was to attempt to awaken in her a sense of her own responsibility, of her duty, of the standards by which other people lived and which were necessary for comfort and health and ultimate goodness. It was an attempt to get into working order that moral inhibition that keeps the greater part of us from forging checks when we need money, or murdering our enemies when we hate them.
Mrs. Wilkinson has a new inhibition—the æsthetic. Fifty per cent. of the women in Sherborn are there for acts which to the normal person would be unspeakably repulsive. The average woman is held back from filthiness by her æsthetic sense, even if she isn’t by her moral sense. By giving the women who for a year or two come under the State’s care an understanding of any one art, especially of music, which appeals most directly, a standard is given from which the individual never backslides. Moral standards depreciate, but the person who has been educated past ragtime and past bad pictures never really enjoys them again. And while the æsthetic inhibition has less direct bearing on conduct than the moral, while it does not always have force enough to be effective, it is one more chance for the girl who goes out from under the State’s supervision to stay out.
This is, of course, one of the greatest problems of the penal institution—how to hold the discharged prisoner to the standards which she has but just grasped during her term.
“If we could only keep them here until we had set them squarely on their feet,” said Mrs. Hodder, the head of the prison. “The great difficulty is in dove-tailing life here with the life that they meet outside. People are so merciless, so cruel—they force the girl straight down again into the life she came from.
“The first practical step which our reform institutions must take is the creating of the indeterminate sentence, which will allow the heads of institutions to keep their charges until they are in some degree capable of taking care of themselves. For instance, in Massachusetts a sixteen-year-old girl can be committed to the State Industrial School for Girls and be under its custody and its excellent training until she is 21. For the girl of 17, committing the same offense, there is only this institution, strictly penal in character and sentence, where she may serve a minimum of eight months and then be released.
“We have made some advance in this State in that the Parole Board never releases a girl if we oppose her release, so that we are able to keep the girls much longer than formerly, when they served the exact sentence and then were discharged. But it is very hard for us when a girl knows that her sentence is for one year and we keep her for two. She is resentful and uneasy all through the second year.”
Sweeping changes have been made in Sherborn since Mrs. Hodder’s arrival there three years ago. Sherborn is called a reformatory, but it is a prison, and, although Mrs. Hodder has removed many of the obsolete features of it, remnants of an old penology, she has not gone to the other extreme and turned punishment to pleasure and correction to play.
“What I hope to do,” she explained, “is to develop this reformatory as an ‘Industrial Training Institute for Women.’ We have had the handicap of ‘hard labor’ stamped on our commitments. This has tended to make of Sherborn a purely industrial plant.
“What I want to do before I get through is to put in commercial factory standards in speed and efficiency. Up to this time work here, like work in many of the prisons throughout the country, is little more than a stop gap. The training which the worker gets is practically no training at all. Hours are long, inspection is desultory. The worker who would go out from our machines into a white goods factory would not be able to measure up in speed and efficiency to any but the novice.
“The practical thing to do is to institute the factory standard, introducing some competitive basis. Then there must be correlation with the educational side of the institution. Before you can get up any interest from the women who sew on shirts they have to know something about shirts. They must be taught something about fabrics, how they are made, how to buy them—the condition of the industry—which they represent.
“Along with the shop course must go other things—domestic training, cooking, hand-sewing, millinery, and mending, and all of them supplemented by class-room training. In short, we must offer industrial training of a sort which would enable a girl to earn her living when she leaves us.
“This is the greatest difference between the policy which we are working out at Sherborn and the policy pursued by Dr. Davis at Bedford Hills in New York State. The emphasis at Bedford is, I believe, too much on the educational side. The emphasis on Sherborn has been, I know, too much on the industrial side. The two must be properly balanced.”
The reformatory at Bedford Hills can hardly be compared to the prison at Sherborn. The problem of the latter is much more complicated by reason of the fact that it is a prison for all mature offenders, including women of forty and over, while Bedford is nearer the Lancaster Industrial School, which receives girls under the age of seventeen. The older women criminals of this State are sent to Auburn.
Mrs. Hodder is energetically opposing the age grouping which our penal institutions have followed for many years.
“Segregation and classification,” she says, “this is the next practical move in our prison reform. What classification has been done has been for the most part according to chronological age, which is absurd.
“An examination of 427 cases from the reformatory showed that, should all women under fifty be grouped in one institution, the long-sentence women—almost invariably first offenders, and of a much higher type of intelligence than short-sentence women—would be classed with a large number of alcoholics and some of the worst of the sex cases, together with a number of definitely feeble-minded. In fact, almost every type of criminal would come into the under-thirty class, and by no means are the young offenders the least hardened and the most reformable.
“Segregation, as we are fast coming to realize, must be according to degree of viciousness and according to intellectual and not chronological age. And the classification must be greater. The cottage plan is the only one by which successful reform work can be accomplished, such a plan as Dr. Davis has worked out at Bedford Hills, for example.
“Under such a system, which allows for very small groups, the women can be carefully graded, the downright vicious woman kept from the one whose weakness is nothing more than alcohol or vagrancy. Under such a system we can care for the extreme cases, which are always the most perplexing problem—those violent cases for which we now have to employ the punishment cell. For these women, who are often border-line cases, should be prescribed steady out-of-door work. My idea is to have a sort of movable shack and a cage where a violent case of this kind could have the opportunity for solitary confinement, which undoubtedly is the best treatment, and for working in the ground, making things grow.
“Of course the prison should not have its progress clogged by these border-line cases any more than it should be hampered by care of the distinctly feeble-minded. Out of 427 women 17 per cent. of those below 30 years of age were found to be definitely feeble-minded, 25 per cent. mentally subnormal, making nearly half of the number with some marked mental defect. These should, obviously, be separated from those who are mentally sound and given special instruction, which would be the case were we to classify according to intellectual age.”
Sherborn Prison is, because of lack of funds, a long way from the cottage system—it is still a prison, built on the dormitory plan. But its “cells” are fair sized rooms, clean, and with a large window to let in the sunshine. There are colored pictures and postcards tacked on the whitewashed walls of most of them. The room of one of the “lifers” was unusually attractive, potted plants at the window, a rocking chair, and a table covered with a spotless cloth, edged with a border of the finest kind of crochet made by the prisoner herself.
And just before lights-out time Saturday evening it was curious to go down the corridor and see outside of each barred door a neatly folded policemen’s suit and helmet, or a pirate’s gay colored cape, with dagger and cocked hat on top. And behind the barred doors could be heard, in a subdued undertone:
His capacity for innocent enjoyment,
’Cent enjoyment,
Is just as great as any honest man’s,
Honest man’s.