CRIME AND ITS TREATMENT IN COLORADO
The wider resort to agricultural and manual labor as an educative and reformative force for young and old alike in our correctional institutions was urged at the Colorado Conference of Charities and Correction. Coupled with this was a plea for employment in the open and for training in useful pursuits. The institutions of Denver, it was declared, need more land that these things may be done.
Thomas J. Tynan, warden of the state prison, recommended that the state conduct a scientific farm and that it pay prisoners what their labor produces. It is the opinion of Warden Tynan that economic conditions affect the size of prison populations. For several years past there has been a steady decrease, he said, in the number of inmates in his penitentiary; this he ascribed to a general increase in prosperity. Men who commit daring crimes, requiring courage, make the quickest and most permanent reforms, he thinks, because they have the character to adhere to newly made resolutions. From the fact that there are now only nine women in the Colorado state prison and that the average heretofore has been twenty-six, Warden Tynan argues a decrease in crime among women in his state.