After dinner they were put through two hours or more of active physical exercise. In the beginning this consisted of the drill employed in the case of raw recruits, supplemented by dumb-bell exercises. At first they were an awkward squad, slow to comprehend an order and deliberate in its execution. It was some weeks before they were able to march in line and to keep step.
On November 7th the class was discontinued, and the men were assigned to various shops and employments.
The results of this treatment were in every respect remarkable. As they slowly advanced in their studies an increased mental activity was noted, and the workings of the mind were less forced and laborious than at the beginning. In mental arithmetic they made progress, and were able, with comparative ease and rapidity, to add three or four single numbers. “The drill and discipline they were subjected to wrought an improvement in their physical condition. The baths and stimulation of the cutaneous system brought the skin to the highest degree of functional activity, overcoming the integumentary disorders of five noted in the beginning. The daily drill and dumb-bell exercises hardened and developed muscles that previously were soft and flabby, and the entire muscular system acquired firmness and power. The setting-up drill improved the carriage and conferred a rapidity of action not before indulged in. The aimless shuffling gait gave way to a carriage inspired by elastic muscles and supple joints. The faces parted with the dull and stolid look they had in the beginning, assuming a more intelligent expression, while the eye gained a brightness and clearness that before was conspicuous by its absence. With physical culture and improvement there came a mental awakening, a cerebral activity never before manifested in their prison life. The purely animal man with his ox-like characteristics seemed to recede before the intellectual. Their progress in school-work was not steadily onward, but intermittently progressive.” Whereas in the six months before the class was formed the men had obtained less than 10⁄11 of a mark (for demeanour, labour, and school) per man each month, during the six months that followed the breaking-up of the class the number of marks earned was 77⁄16 per month per man. There was a simultaneous and rapid improvement, moral, physical, and intellectual—an improvement that was common to all, although more pronounced in some, and which was very encouraging, considering the material of which the class was formed. A year later several had been released on parole, and were demonstrating their ability to maintain themselves honestly, while only two of them, still in prison, were not doing well.[108]
The results of this and similar experiments have been so satisfactory that a fully-equipped gymnasium and Turkish bath are now in course of erection at Elmira. “Here,” Dr. Wey tells me, “we propose to treat those who are in arrears both in body and mind, and prepare them for work and study in the schools of letters and trades. By this plan it is possible to impress later the mind to a greater degree than could be done by taking up its cultivation at the time the man comes to us.”
In 1888, when the Yates bill became law, the productive prison industries of Elmira had to be suspended. “Within less than a month,” writes Dr. Wey, “from the passage of the bill, all the men who previously were employed in productive industries (industries yielding revenue) were being drilled in military evolutions and tactics. In other words, idleness was avoided by turning the prison into a military school. The men received from four to six hours of drill daily, which was sufficient to prevent them from rusting in their cells. By this means the health of the men was maintained, and opportunity was afforded for increasing the scope of school-work, trades, and letters. A drum corps was formed, and instruction given others in instrumental music, with the sequence that to-day [29th October 1889] we have a drum and fife corps of about twenty, and a band composed of twenty or more wind instruments.[109] Two afternoons a week are devoted to military work, the balance being devoted to technical instruction. The effect of the military drill and discipline was so good in the way of a health measure and in improving the carriage of the men that I doubt if it will soon be discontinued. It was another phase of the application of physical training.” The report of the able superintendent of Elmira, Mr. Z. R. Brockway, fully confirms these conclusions.
Just now the industries of New York prisons are partially re-established. The Fassett bill, passed in the spring of 1889, enabled various industries to be apportioned to the various prisons, one prison not to compete with another, and the number of men engaged in any one industry in a prison not to exceed five per cent. of the total number engaged in the same industry throughout the entire state. The question of productive prison industry is still, however, far from settled.
The physical and industrial education is not the whole of the training given at Elmira. A third, and scarcely less important, factor is the moral and æsthetic training. There is no official chaplain at Elmira. “There is,” says Mr. Brockway, “in the minds of men, as observed during imprisonment, an unexplained but actual repugnance to professional, official, and stereotyped religious phrases, while for the noble character of the practical Christian, in common affairs, unheralded and unnamed, there is among prisoners a quick and favourable response.” Although there are no resident chaplains, various ministers and others—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—attend frequently, and hold services, lectures, classes, etc. The class in Practical Morality, originated a few years ago by Professor Collin, has been judiciously managed, and has proved a valuable feature in the work. The æsthetic culture has been chiefly carried on by means of the systematic study of literature. The results in this department have been unexpectedly encouraging. At first the men met the attempt with sullen stupidity as a new task imposed upon them. Gradually this impression was conquered; the men slowly began to acquire an eager appetite for Chaucer and Shakespeare, for Emerson and Browning. The applications for admission to the English Literature class became very numerous, and at one time there was so great a run on Jowett’s Plato at the Reformatory library that a special regulation had to be made concerning its issue. It is satisfactory to learn that this taste has, in many cases at all events, survived incarceration, as a wholesome recreation for leisure hours. “In my work with the class in English Literature,” writes the instructor in that department, Mr. Douglas, “I proceed on the basis that the earnest obligatory study—let me emphasise the word study—of mental and moral beauty developes or creates the mental and moral faculty of appreciation; and, furthermore, that mental and moral habits may be formed just as certainly as physical habits, and without any more conscious co-operation of the individual than is required in physical practice.” It has been mentioned already that a newspaper, the Summary, is published within the Reformatory; it contains both local and general news, as well as passages from good authors; the inmates contribute to this paper, and at one time it was ably edited by a prisoner. It has been said, with justice, that the Summary compares favourably with the average American newspaper published outside prison walls.
The prison, as Professor Collin remarks, must be “a moral hospital.” As Sir Thomas More said long ago, the end of punishment is “nothing else but the destruction of vices and the saving of men.” Mr. Brockway, and those who are working with him, have clearly realised this; the training they give is rational and scientific, and hence its success. During the thirteen years from the opening of the Reformatory to the end of 1889, nearly 4000 prisoners were received at Elmira on an indefinite sentence. Over 2300 of these were paroled, and of these 15.2 per cent. only are estimated as having “probably returned to criminal practices and contact.”
Elmira is at present the most promising direction in which we can turn for light on the treatment of the criminal. Its wholesome and improving discipline stands in favourable contrast to the lax indulgence and shameful neglect of the criminal which coexist generally in the United States. The system is not perfect, and it has been unfavourably reported on by some observers. It is undoubtedly a defect that the prisoner must be released, whatever his condition, at the expiring of his legal maximum sentence; this is, however, an inevitable compromise. Notwithstanding all defects, Elmira is full of encouragement, for it shows us a community awakening to an active sense of its duties, so long forgotten, towards those weaker members who, if neglected, become so dangerous to themselves and to others. “It is an interesting sight,” remarks Dr. Wey, “when the school is in session, to see a group of men, felons every one, gathered about an instructor, intently listening as he makes clear some step in the work in hand not fully or clearly understood, going through the various processes, one by one, and explaining until the dullest mind can comprehend. It is not expected that, with the comparatively limited time for instruction, these men will become skilled mechanics. But rather the idea has been to train the hand and eye, and teach the use of tools, to awaken an ambition to pursue a lawful calling, and appreciate the value of a practical knowledge of a trade, so that when the time shall come that they pass beyond the prison doors, and again come into contact with society, they will not be handicapped by the same conditions that formerly operated to their detriment; but with increased resources of mind and body will be enabled to occupy a higher and more self-respecting place.”[110] The example of Elmira is spreading in America; in Ohio, for instance, youthful criminals are being brought up on the broad basis of manual training, and among the branches of industry taught are farming, fruit-growing, carpentry, shoemaking, painting, tailoring, baking, laundring, housework, vocal and band music, telegraphy and printing. On the continent of Europe—especially, perhaps, in Germany—the system is beginning to attract attention; and while it would be too sanguine to conclude that Elmira has solved the question of the treatment of the criminal, there can be no doubt as to the value of its contribution to this difficult problem.[111]
It can scarcely be necessary to say that in any effectual treatment flogging can have no part. It would not have been necessary to say a word on this point if within very recent times an English Parliament had not been found so lamentably ignorant of historic evolution in this matter, of the results of experience, and of rational principles, as to pass a Corporal Punishment Bill. The objections to flogging are by no means of a sentimental character. We have seen that the instinctive criminal, although often cowardly enough, is by no means peculiarly sensitive to pain. Flogging is objectionable because it is ineffectual (as was shown long since), and because it brutalises and degrades those on whom it is inflicted, those who inflict it, and those who come within the radius of its influence. These facts are well known to those who have more than a superficial acquaintance with the insides of prisons, and should have been ascertained by those individuals who presume to legislate, before they voted in the face of reason and experience. To flog a man for whatever offence, however brutal, is to sanction his brutality. Capital punishment, which is brutal like flogging, is comparatively free from the brutalising influence of flogging. The method of flogging is so obviously unfit to humanise and socialise any human being, that the impulse to inflict it can only spring from a relic of savagery of the same kind as that which inspires the criminal, without his excuse of a morbid or defective organisation. It can only be said in excuse of those who advocate it that they have no experience in the matter. Those who have witnessed it have, however, recorded their experiences. Thus, to mention one instance, Sir Robert Rawlinson, after giving a vivid account of flogging as he has himself seen and heard it, adds:—“I will strive in my mind to judge those members of Parliament who now advocate the revival of corporal punishment charitably, by considering that they have never seen it as I have feebly attempted to describe it: the degraded man lashed to the triangles, the white clean skin of an Englishman exposed to the cool morning air, to be scored, cut up, and scarred into a pulpy, blood-smeared lump of living human flesh. Take the vision away: it is too hideous even to remember.” Even if there were less evidence as to the ineffectual character of flogging as a deterrent, and to its bad influence on the morale of a prison, we cannot afford to flog any human being. It is well to meditate on the words of Dostoieffsky, who was familiar with the various forms of flogging, and has recorded his convictions in his Recollections of the Dead-House. After giving his opinion that “the rods are the most terrible punishment in use among us,” and speaking of the demoralising influence of flogging on those who inflict it, he concludes:—“Let me add that the possibility of such a licence acts contagiously on the whole of society: such a power is seductive. A society which regards these things with an indifferent eye is already infected to the bone. The right accorded to a man to punish his fellows corporally is one of the sores of our society; it is the surest method of annihilating the spirit of citizenship.” Flogging has not yet reached among us the extension which it then had in Russia and in Siberia, but its character and influence remain the same, and the warning seems to be still needed.