Along with this development of a properly differentiated system of treating the delinquent population, has gone the growth of specialized institutions for dealing with the closely related class of defectives, which was once treated indiscriminately along with the delinquent classes when its members were guilty of criminal action. The State institution for feeble-minded at Polk, opened in 1893, and at Spring City, provided by an act of 1903, and the State Village for Feeble-minded Women at Laurelton, not yet available for use, are designed to furnish scientific treatment for large numbers of those who would today be confined in the state prisons or county jails, if the ideas and institutions of 1840 prevailed. Even an institution for inebriates was contemplated in an act of 1913.
But this vital and all important process of the differentiation, classification and specialized treatment of the delinquent and defective classes has now proceeded far beyond that most elementary stage of furnishing separate institutions for dealing with the most general classes of delinquents and defectives. It has been found that the terms defective, insane and criminal have only a legal significance and are practically useless when involving the problem of exact scientific analysis and treatment. Each general class of delinquent boys, of defective girls or of criminal adults, for instance, is made up of distinguishable and distinct types which demand specialized treatment in the same way that it is required for one general class as distinguished from another. Though it is as yet very imperfectly developed, the present tendency is for each institution to differentiate into a number of specialized departments, each designed to provide the proper treatment for one of these types.
Finally, within the last decade beginnings have been made in what is likely to be an important future development, namely the non-institutional care of the less pronounced and confirmed types of delinquents, particularly of delinquent minors. The developments along this line have, up to the present, consisted chiefly in the adoption of parole systems in all the State penal, reformatory and correctional institutions and in a more liberal use of the suspended sentence and probation. The recently established Municipal Probation Court of Philadelphia is a pioneer in Pennsylvania in this promising new development in the preventive treatment of the less confirmed type of delinquents.
Looking at the whole matter as it stands today, it cannot be said that conditions in Pennsylvania are in any material respect either better or worse than in other progressive States, except in the one matter of the useful employment of the convict population. Here, as elsewhere, some lucky chance has placed a man or a woman of exceptional qualifications at the head of an institution, one who has by his strong personal initiative made the best of a bad situation, as in the case of the Eastern Penitentiary, or who has, with something akin to genius, seized upon a new opportunity, as in the case of the Girls’ School at Darlington and the new Penitentiary foundation at Bellefonte. But these are sporadic and exceptional developments and have furnished no new principle of a revolutionary character to mark the dawn of a new era in penal administration.
Meanwhile the hopeless and demoralizing idleness to which most of the inmates of the Eastern Penitentiary and of most of the county institutions of the Commonwealth are doomed, is a spectacle in which the people of Pennsylvania can take nothing but shame. But even if this is remedied, as it should be at once by drastic legislative action, Pennsylvania will have done no more than reach the level of penological theory of the Quaker innovators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The step is an imperative one, but it will not restore to the Commonwealth the proud position of leadership which once was hers, which is still, by virtue of past achievements and by common fame, attributed to her.
While we have thus been dreaming, tardily and ineffectually putting into effect the aspirations of a long-distant past, a new penology has come into being, based not on humanitarian sentiment or on “the common sense of most,” but on the scientific study of the delinquent and his environment. New sciences of psychology, psychiatry and sociology have been forged to meet the conditions of the new day and these have furnished us with a new basis for penological experimentation. We have learned that the criminal is not merely a person who has in the exercise of an unfettered will chosen the evil rather than the good, but a person of complex personality shaped by heredity and environment to what he is, none the less a menace to society than the older conception made him, not the less requiring restraint and correction, but demanding and deserving individual treatment according to the nature which has been developed in him. We have learned from recent scientific study of the most rigorous and trustworthy sort that from 50 to 60 per cent. of the inmates of our correctional institutions are abnormal—feeble-minded, insane, psychopathic—to the point of irresponsibility, to all intents and purposes the same kind of people that fill our hospitals for the insane and institutions for the feeble-minded. We have also learned, from sociological case studies, that a very large proportion of those that the psychiatrist would class as normal are the victims of neglected childhood and of the depraving influences of the institutions in which they have spent a great part of their young lives.
It seems clear that this new knowledge makes for a new classification, based not, like that of the Elmira system, on behavior in confinement, nor, like that of the current penology, on the character of the crime committed, but on the exact study of the individual and that the treatment accorded him must be adapted to the results of such study.
Here, then, is the new opportunity for a further advance out of this slough of despond—an opportunity not inferior to that which this Commonwealth so superbly grasped in its heroic youth—to bring its penal administration into conformity with the newer conceptions of delinquency. Tinkering the old machine is not enough. It must be remodeled altogether. Adding to the powers of a board of inspectors here, curbing them there, setting up new boards and commissions to direct the doing of this, to restrain the doing of that—all these are but a part of the old game, which will after all continue to be played in very much the old perfunctory way. What is demanded is a genuine reconstruction of the penal system of the Commonwealth, one which shall, with as little disturbance to the existing management of the several institutions as possible, put at their service all the resources of the new knowledge of crime and its treatment. It is the purpose of this report to suggest the lines of this future development of our penal system.
III.
General Characteristics of Present Penal System.
As the foregoing outline indicates, the several State institutions of a penal, correctional and reformatory character, with the two Glen Mills Schools (which, though largely under private management, are essentially public institutions) have been developed at different times, under the influence of changing conceptions of social responsibility for different types of offenders. As a result of this circumstance each is separately managed by a board of inspectors or managers, which exercises complete control over the policy of the institution to which its authority extends. This Board appoints the Warden or Superintendent, fixes his or her compensation, determines the industrial and educational policy of the institution and, under the authority of the Legislature, disburses the funds appropriated for its maintenance. The disciplinary policy of the institution is almost invariably entrusted to the Warden or Superintendent and, as is natural, if that official happens to be a person of strong individuality and initiative, his policy in practice, if not in theory, governs the entire administration. Nowhere is there a centralized authority exercising a general control or an effective influence. The only approach to such a general agency is the State Board of Public Charities, which may investigate and require the submission of an annual report, and the Prison Labor Commission, which exercises a general supervision over the industries of the two penitentiaries and the Huntingdon Reformatory, but which has no effective power to carry its plans into execution. There is, accordingly, no uniform policy, even in the case of institutions like the two Glen Mills schools, which have a similar type of inmates and an identical aim, nor in the case of all the institutions under consideration in matters where their problems and needs are the same. That there are advantages in this policy of separate control cannot be denied. It gives to an energetic and progressive superintendent or board of managers a degree of initiative in reform and experimentation which, under a highly centralized control of all the institutions, it would be difficult to secure. On the other hand it may have the effect of depriving the individual institution, because of its poverty or because of the reactionary character of its administration, of the benefits of an advance which may have been made elsewhere. There could not be a better illustration of the unevenness of development resulting from this lack of co-ordination in the Pennsylvania prison system than the fact that the Eastern Penitentiary was compelled to wait for the initiative of its present Warden for the partial adoption of the congregate system, which had for forty years existed in the Western Penitentiary, and which had everywhere demonstrated its superiority over the system of solitary confinement.