(1) That municipalities as well as the Commonwealth and the political divisions thereof and all public institutions shall be required, as far as may be practicable, to supply their needs from the labor of the penal and correctional institutions;
(2) That the authority of the Commission or of any body in which its powers may be vested shall extend to the reformatory institutions at Darlington, Glen Mills, Morganza and Muncy and to all State, county and municipal institutions of a penal or correctional character;
(3) That the power of such Commission or body to regulate prison industry be extended to all forms of labor activity of the inmates of such institutions, including farming, roadmaking, land reclamation, forestry, etc.;
(4) That such Commission or body be empowered to determine the compensation of prisoners for industrial and other work performed by them and the method of applying such compensation to the use of such prisoners or their dependents;
(5) That the strict “State use” plan be modified by permitting the sale in the open market, at not less than the market price, of any surplus product resulting from the labor of the inmates over and above the product disposed of as provided in the act.
V.
The County Prisons.
In Pennsylvania, as in most, if not all, of the other States of the Union, the county jail is the despair of those who look for a better day in the treatment of the wrong-doer. The admiration which our experiments in the reformatory treatment of the young have excited in eminent foreign penologists has turned to loathing when their attention was directed to the county jails. Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the distinguished head of the English prison system, in an article published a few months after his visit to this country in 1910, described them in the following terms:
“In these gaols it is hardly too much to say that many of the features linger which called forth the wrath and indignation of the great Howard at the end of the eighteenth century. Promiscuity, unsanitary conditions, absence of supervision, idleness and corruption—these remain the features in many places. Even the ‘fee’ system is still in vogue. The gaolers are still paid by fees for the support of prisoners, and commitments to gaol are common when some other disposition of the case would have been imposed had not the commitment yielded a fee to the sheriff, who is usually in charge of the gaol. In many gaols there are not facilities for medical examination on reception, for ventilation, for exercise, or for bathing.... The foreign delegates were amazed at this startling inconsistency between the management of the common gaols and that of the State prisons and State reformatories. The evils to which I refer are well known and deplored by that body of earnest and devoted men and women in all sections of American society with whose lofty ideals on the subject of prison reform and generous aspirations for the humane treatment of the prisoner, the Washington Congress made us every day familiar, but they seem helpless and almost hopeless.... I was appealed to by leading men in more than one State, as British representative, to publicly condemn the system, and this I did, at a risk of giving considerable offense. Until the abuses of the gaol system are removed, it is impossible for America to have assigned to her by general consent a place in the vanguard of progress in the domain of ‘la science penitentiaire.’”
Your Commission desires to submit as its considered judgment that the foregoing statement does no injustice to many of the county prisons of this Commonwealth, and that the Legislature can do no greater service, nor one that will reflect more credit on the Commonwealth, than to sweep away the entire county jail system without delay.
Attention has been called elsewhere in this report to the deplorable conditions of idleness which prevail in the prisons of our Commonwealth. These conditions are at their worst in the county institutions. In the last six years the average daily number of prisoners in the county jails of the Commonwealth has been about 6500. Only about one-fourth of these have some form of employment other than domestic service. But when all of the returns are in with regard to the work accomplished, the number of days spent in complete idleness in the course of a year will average more than one million. If we regard the labor of the prisoners as worth fifty cents a day, the amount of waste thus exceeds $500,000 annually.