The cover image was produced by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
VOLUME I, No. 3. MARCH, 1911
THE REVIEW
A MONTHLY PERIODICAL, PUBLISHED BY THE
NATIONAL PRISONERS’ AID ASSOCIATION
AT 135 EAST 15th STREET, NEW YORK CITY.
TEN CENTS A COPY.
SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS A YEAR.
|
E. F. Waite, President. F. Emory Lyon, Vice President. O. F. Lewis, Secretary and Editor Review. |
E. A. Fredenhagen, Chairman Ex. Committee. Charles Parsons, Member Ex. Committee. |
G. E. Cornwall, Member Ex. Committee. Albert Steelman, Member Ex. Committee. |
A. H. Votaw, Member Ex. Committee.
A VALLEY OF LIFE[A]
If some one of the prison officials of New York were to suggest the turning out of hundreds of the prisoners on Blackwell’s Island and Sing Sing into a colony in the fertile valley along the Hudson or the Mohawk river, under the care of a superintendent and a half dozen assistants without an armed guard, the inhabitants not only of New York state but of all the states in the Union would immediately hold mass meetings of protest and set their political organizations to work to have the official making the suggestion removed from office and incarcerated in an insane asylum. This would be the action taken in this far advanced, civilized country.
Yet in the Philippine islands this very thing has been done, and done with success. It has been done with a people said by leading officials of this country and other countries to be incapable of self-government.
To be explicit, there are today 1,423 prisoners, or “colonists,” as they are now termed—prisoners of all classes and sorts, serving terms of from five years to life imprisonment, and for crimes from petty thievery to murder—living without a guard in a small, fertile valley along the river of one of the islands in the archipelago just south of Luzon, the largest island, of which Manila is the capital.
Here the 1,423 convicts live, not alone, isolated as the prisoners of Siberia are, but much the same as they would have lived had they never committed a crime against the community—in peace, prosperity and happiness, with their families, engaged in the pursuit of agriculture-and the only guns on the place are those mounted at the superintendent’s office for saluting purposes and the “six-shooter” the superintendent keeps locked up with his cash in the safe of the penal colony office.
There is a guard on the reservation, but it is only a police guard, and the only arms its members carry are a small policeman’s club, which is more ornamental than useful.
With this lack of military display on the part of the authorities, there has been but one outbreak or attempt at escape, and that occurred soon after the colony was first established and before the valley had been drained and rid of malaria and cholera. Since that first outbreak and the subsequent capture of all but one of the nineteen who escaped (and that one died) there has been peace and quiet on the reservation.
It was in 1904 that George N. Wolfe, then warden of Bilibid, the “bastile” of Manila, now director of the bureau of prisons of the Philippine islands, found the prison fast becoming overcrowded. He had male and female inmates confined there who were serving sentences for all manner of crimes. He was confronted with the problem of finding an additional housing place. He took the matter up with the superintendent of prisons with the result that it was determined to establish a colony of prisoners under a guard.
Accordingly, in November, 1904, the superintendent of prisons appointed Warden Wolfe, Prof. William S. Lyon, horticulturist of the bureau of agriculture, and Dr. Arlington Pond, star pitcher on the old Baltimore Oriole baseball team in the McGraw and Keeler days, then city health officer of Manila, to select a site for a penal colony.
After hunting up and looking over several sites the committee finally selected Iwahig, a small valley on the Iuhuit river on the southern point of the island of Palawan and directly opposite the town of Puerto Princesa. The valley is about ten miles long and contains something like 270 square miles.
The site selected, sixty prisoners of all classes and confined for all manner of crimes, most of whom were hardened criminals, were sent there under an armed guard.
At first health and discipline were not good. Malaria and cholera made great inroads upon the little band. The valley, while of fertile soil, was covered with water more than half the year, and that which was not under water was densely overgrown with bamboo timber. The first sixty dwindled down to less than one-third that number. Others were sent to take their places and they, too, became either infirm or more hardened criminals. Conditions got worse, and one day there was a mutiny, in which nineteen of the prisoners made their escape. All but one of the nineteen were captured and sent back to the colony. Things became so bad that Warden Wolfe decided to make a change in the superintendent of the colony, and he made a request therefor to the superintendent of prisons.
At that time the penal institutions of the Philippines were under the jurisdiction of the secretary of the department of commerce and police. They were later placed in the bureau of public instruction and under the bureau of prisons.
The governor general of the Philippines in 1906 appointed Major John R. White of the constabulary superintendent of the colony.
Major White immediately set to work to cure the evils. He got several physicians and sanitary officers of the Philippine government to lay out general plans for draining the valley, so as to rid it of the malaria and cholera. He was more than successful; in fact, in 1907, when he turned the colony over to the present superintendent he had obliterated both diseases. Major White also started a radical reform in the system of handling the prisoners, and instead of driving them and herding them in a few buildings he used kindness.
The real change from a penal colony to a “Golden Rule” colony took place in the latter part of 1907, when Carroll H. Lamb was appointed superintendent.
Mr. Lamb had ideas of handling the prisoners that were different from those of his predecessors. He exercised from the first a humanitarian policy, and instead of asking for the worst behaved of the convicts of Bilibid he asked for the “trusties,” who were the greater in number. His requests were granted.
Superintendent Lamb consulted with sociologists and leading criminologists, after which he laid down for himself and the prisoners the following principles by which a good convict might be made a good citizen:
“Proper environment and association, fixed habits of conduct and industry, intellectual and moral instruction and industrial and practical teachings.”
He instilled these principles into himself and into the convicts, as the method to fit them soonest to return to society, cured mentally and physically, and to teach them to be law-abiding and self-respecting citizens.
Mr. Lamb devoted much study to the character of the Filipino and found him, as many others have found him, easy to manage, especially where tact and kindness is used. He also found that the primitive civilization of the Filipino people and their natural bent toward agriculture aided in the application of the principles he laid down.
He began by reducing the restraints and increasing the independence of the colony as a whole. He also began the utilization of agriculture as the burden of the convicts’ labors, and impressed upon them the idea that not only were they working for the government against which they had committed offenses but for themselves. He pointed out that they would not only gain virtual freedom at once, but would participate in the earnings of the colony.
His first lot of prisoners numbered more than 100, and they were, as in the early history of the colony, made up of all classes of criminals, but men who had been given certain liberties in Bilibid for good behavior. He had as assistants two Americans, the oldest of whom was less than 30, and the youngest of whom was but 21, a Filipino band director, a Filipino physician, a Spanish padre for chaplain, and a matron. The matron was necessary, as among his prisoners were some twenty women.
Today, three years since Mr. Lamb first went to Iwahig, there are 1,423 prisoners. He still has his two American assistants and the two Filipino assistants. In addition he has thirty-one petty officers, all of whom are prisoners. Two of these petty officers are “lifers,” serving sentences for murder in the first degree; two more of them are serving long terms for offenses almost as serious as murder, and the rest of the thirty-one are men who have more than five years yet to serve.
Every one of these thirty-one petty officers lives in his own home, has his wife and family, and is a director in the colony’s bank, established last year for the deposit of the colony’s funds and the gratuities saved by the prisoners. These gratuities are paid monthly, and as the convicts raise everything they use, even to beef and to the leather shoes they make from the hides of the cattle, their gratuities amount to a considerable sum.
Each of these petty officers is in charge of a certain number of prisoners called squads. The squads in turn are formed into brigades or battalions and commanded by the superintendent and assistants. The distribution of all prisoners is about the same as in a military garrison, where a company of soldiers is divided into squads in charge of a corporal and a sergeant.
The petty officer is responsible to the superintendent for the deportment of the members of his squad. The general orders, which are really regulations, are known by every colonist, and once a month must be recited by him to his petty officer.
In the Philippine islands there are many more holidays than in the United States, and on each of these holidays all work is suspended and the colonists are allowed to engage in sports, church fiestas and social intercourse. The American game of baseball is the principal sport. There are four crack teams in the colony, among the players being several American convicts. Each dry season the superintendent gives a pennant to the winning team and a small sum of money to be distributed among the players. The rivalry for the “flag” is sometimes as keen as in some of the games between teams in the United States.
The colonists have their own court, too, with the superintendent as a supreme judge. He acts finally and independently of the lower or convict court, but with one or two exceptions his action has always confirmed that of the lower court.
At this court are tried such cases as the police report to the petty officers. Last year there were 102 cases before this court, ninety-four of which were minor, or for slight infraction of a rule. The punishment meted out was generally a loss of gratuity and a mark against the individual to be used against him for any future offenses. In each of these the convict court sentenced the culprits to be returned to Bilibid, and Superintendent Lamb approved their decision and returned them. Six of the eight have since been sent back to the colony at their request and on their promise of good behavior.
A bill appropriating $50,000 for a reformatory for women, and authorizing the government to appoint a commission to secure plans and specifications has been proposed in the Connecticut legislature.
DEFECTIVE DELINQUENTS
[Abstract of Recent Article in The Outlook]
The undoubted presence among so-called juvenile delinquents of a considerable number of mentally defective children, the utter lack of proper institutions to which to commit such defectives and the inadequate provision made for a timely discovery of such defectiveness, were treated recently before the New York Academy of Medicine by Mr. Ernest K. Coulter, clerk of the Children’s Court of New York County. After calling attention to recent studies which show that 33 per cent. of the inmates of Bedford Reformatory for Women, and 39 per cent. of the inmates of Elmira Reformatory, are said to be mentally defective, Mr. Coulter, out of his own experience with 80,000 cases, adopted two per cent. as a conservative estimate of the proportion of mentally defective children among the total of those arraigned for conflict with the law.
This percentage would bring annually into the Children’s Court of New York County alone, two hundred defective delinquents. Mr. Coulter then stated that “while there are more than thirty institutions to which the court in New York County can commit children, there is not one where those of the mentally defective type can be sent on legal commitments.” The only course open to the court, therefore, is to thrust the mental defective into an ordinary reformatory institution. In providing no other treatment for this type, “the state is blind,” said Mr. Coulter, “to its cruelty to the child, the injustice to the institution, and the menace to the community. In this blindness and parsimony the state is thus sowing a continuous crop for its prisons and alms houses. If the public cannot be aroused to the human rights violated by this course, perhaps the money cost will one day stir it from its lethargy.”
There is no adequate provision for even the discovery of such deficiencies among those children who are taken into custody, said Mr. Coulter. “If while these defectives were still children,” he declared, “the causes of the abnormal mental condition which predisposed them to prey on society could have been removed, many of them would have been saved to useful citizenship. With such cases the time for relief, if curative or ameliorating remedies are possible, is in youth and at the first indication of criminal tendencies. * * * The causes of the overwhelming tendencies that array them against society may often be determined by pathological and physiological and psychological examination. Such causes, for instance, may be the existence of adenoids, which retard normal development, render the child irritable and mentally lazy; they may be the absence of thyroid glands, which brings about cretinism; they may be due to hereditary syphilis, which often results in a lesion of the brain. The children of this class are not responsible for the acts that lead to their commitment to reformatories. Taken in childhood, these causes may often be removed and the victim restored to society a normal being. A correct diagnosis is absolutely essential. Without a correct diagnosis no rational treatment is possible.”