“The first requisite for a girl as she enters the Home is occupation, not work only. It may mean work, but instruction is given along all lines most necessary and useful to every woman in order to fit her to be a housekeeper and home-maker.” A chapel, in which two services are held each Lord’s Day, a schoolhouse and graded school with eight teachers, a hospital and trained nurse, a sewing school, a cooking school, a dressmaking department, a greenhouse, and an orchestra and brass band composed of girls, form part of the equipment. There is no wall or fence around the Home, but a clear open space and beautiful lawn, with walks and flowers, shrubbery and trees. The results obtained have been most satisfactory, at least seventy-five per cent. of the girls so far received having turned out good, true women, many of them being devoted wives and mothers.
EVENING
Mr. Alexander Johnson, General Secretary National Conference of Charities and Correction, Indianapolis, Indiana, spoke on “The Reformation of Jails.” Many county jails, he declared, are a blot on civilization. Should this be the case when we seek the reformation of the prisoner? Reform has begun at the top of the prison system, but the jails have made little progress upward, and a great number deserve to be called “schools of vice.” What is the remedy? The physical condition of the county jail must be improved. Each prisoner should be separately confined. The fundamental error is that the jails are used for two dissimilar purposes: for men awaiting trial, and for men who are sentenced. The two do not belong together. I have seen these two classes together in the same cell, and treated perfectly alike. When a man has been convicted he no longer belongs to the county, but to the State, and should be sent to a State institution. Then the jail would remain only as a place of detention for those awaiting trial. But why the State? Because the county would hardly be justified in going to the expense of supporting a real work-house. Another reform imperatively needed is speedier trials. It is infamous to hold a man in jail for months awaiting trial. “I hope the time will come when the question will be, ‘What kind of a man is this, that we may fit him for society.’ When we make our prisons hospitals for the moral reformation of men, we will realize that the jail will be the place in which to begin.”
“The Juvenile Court: Its Uses and Limitations,” was the title of a paper by Dr. Hastings H. Hart, Superintendent of the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society, Chicago. The juvenile court is an evolution. Some twenty States have juvenile court laws—all within about six years. This evolution is still in progress, and the matter still in its infancy.
The juvenile court is founded on three great ideas: 1. The value of the child for its own sake and for the community. 2. The abandonment of the lex talionis, i. e., the infliction of a punishment commensurate with the wrong done. This is impossible as well as a wrong. No man is wise enough to adjust the punishment accurately to the crime. 3. The recognition of the responsibility of the mother State for the children, especially for the erring and neglected ones.
The first essential feature of the juvenile court is the breadth of its scope: it deals with delinquents and dependents. The second is the character of its proceedings. “What is the best possible thing to be done for the good of the child?” This is the question which the juvenile court endeavors to solve every day. A third feature of the juvenile court is that it places the child in such hands as will do what is best for it. Having such a high character and such noble purposes, no jurist is too eminent to serve as a juvenile court judge. Another distinctive mark of the juvenile court law is the probation officer, who is the very heart of the work, and who not only learns to know the child in the home, but also represents it in the court. Finally the juvenile court recognizes the great fundamental principle that the home and family, when properly constituted are the great molders of character.
Thursday, September 20
MORNING
From the proceedings of Thursday morning the following admirable paper by Mr. C. E. Haddox, Warden of the West Virginia Penitentiary, Moundsville, is selected and reproduced in full: