IN PROGRESSIVE KANSAS!
ISABEL C. BARROWS
How hard it is for a man who has at heart the principles of prison reform to carry them out in an old institution that should be leveled to the ground! J. K. Codding, warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary, writing in his eighteenth biennial report, expresses a wish to repair broken men and remake defective ones by plenty of productive labor, wise and firmly administered discipline, proper bodily care, and such mental and spiritual training as is possible under the limited opportunities afforded by a penitentiary. Prison recreations he advocates “not solely for the purpose of giving pleasure to the prisoners, nor as a prison fad, but for the same reason that we give them work, discipline and wholesome food.”
But what can he do to carry out such a program in a prison where the cells are “little dingy, dark holes in the wall, damp, musty and disease breeding—an absolute disgrace to Kansas”? The prison physician echoes this complaint:
“If the institution hopes to make its inmates strive for better things in life it will have to set a better example. Compelling a man, after a day’s work to go into one of the little cells now provided, and sleep on a bag of straw only half wide enough, and almost as unyielding as the floor, will certainly never do it.”
Yet the power of personality is felt in spite of this. The officers are all under civil service and selected only for fitness. The warden says “a more courteous, prompt and efficient lot of prison officials cannot be found in any other penitentiary in the United States.” The prisoners themselves respond to the wise treatment they receive and show it “in their willingness and ability to do the work assigned them; in their almost uniformly kind and courteous treatment of the officers; in the absence of any destruction of prison property; in the few punishments and in their general cheerfulness and obedience.”
Kansas ought to give a good warden a good prison with plenty of land about it.