In some institutions they meet a day or so each month, in most institutions not so frequently. Their duties while at the institution may or may not be largely perfunctory, and as they are generally active business men at home in other channels, the day or two a month or quarter is apt to be regarded by the unthoughtful as a respite or surcease from other duties. The main duty of a Board of Directors or of Control may be said to be the determining of the general policy upon which the institution shall be conducted, and a cursory oversight of the conduct of its affairs.
THE WARDEN.
The warden or superintendent is the one official who can give tone, expression and color to the institution. He is distinctly and positively its actual managing head, and upon his intelligence, interest, zeal, tact and discretion will depend, almost entirely, its weal or its woe.
He must be a man of intelligence, and be willing and anxious to increase his fund of knowledge and information.
He should be a profound student not only of the ordinary subjects that attract the student, but of prison systems, of laws, business, government, society as it exists, and of human nature in all its many phases.
HE MUST BE AN ORGANIZER.
No difference how elaborate a system may be found in any institution of this kind, the warden will always be an intensely busy and greatly occupied officer.
If he would prevent chaos and confusion and obtain from every official the highest and best work of which he is capable, he must organize every department thoroughly. Every officer and every inmate must know his exact duties, so far as it is possible to know them, and be made responsible for those duties and the warden must be enabled to appreciate a high order of talent and the accomplishment of good work, and to locate the blame for omissions and short comings, and provide for their correction.
Thorough system in every detail will conserve the capacities of all his subordinates and leave him in a measure free to observe the actual conditions and to plan and to put into effect improvements along moral, industrial, physical and financial lines.