NEW YORK’S PRISON NEEDS.
In an interview in the New York Sun, O. F. Lewis, general secretary of the prison association of New York, said recently:
“The principal prison needs of this State are a separate cell for each prisoner in State prisons, employment for eight hours a day for all able-bodied men in State prisons, the marketing of all prison-made products in this State to the State and its political subdivisions, such as counties and cities; the introduction and development of industries in our county penitentiaries and jails; the centralization of administration of our penitentiaries and jails under a proper department of the State; the abolition of idleness and filth in many of our jails; the development of the women’s farm and the farm colony for vagrants and tramps; the creation of a separate institution or separate wings of an existing institution for feeble-minded criminals, not the insane criminals—and other things too numerous to mention.
“They had just such a jail situation in England thirty years ago, when the State took over all the local prisons, that correspond to our county jails. To-day all these institutions are under the management of the prison commissioners of England, a body that no one would think of accusing of the least bit of graft, and the institutions are run with regard to the rights of the prisoner and the welfare of society. That is our great need—that the state should manage the correctional institutions within its borders through boards of managers, at least in part.”