Rev. Samuel J. Barrows, to whom prison people are under so many lasting obligations for his invaluable contributions to prison literature, said no truer thing than when in his admirable address at Kansas City, in 1901, on “Jesus as a Penologist,” he said:
“The ideal discipline is that which educates and strengthens the will without breaking it, and which develops a man without crushing him.”
LABOR AS DISCIPLINE
The first and prime requisite to discipline is a proper labor system that calls for a reasonable amount of satisfactory, productive, remunerative labor from every convict fit to labor. It is altogether the greatest problem that confronts any prison, and is most vital.
Idleness in prison is grossly wasteful, utterly uneconomical, terribly demoralizing, and prevents almost entirely all plans for a regimen that looks to discipline. For those in health there should be no wasted hours at any time or any place in prison.
A score of idle or partly idle convicts can do more mischief, subvert more discipline, destroy more regularity and system than a regiment of men kept at proper, legitimate employment. So the key to discipline is a labor system that embraces in its scope every person in prison.
To devise a system of labor for an institution that will keep everyone sufficiently employed and underwork none (for strange to say, in practice, the prison that overtaxes convicts probably does not exist), is the hardest problem, requiring the most labor, care, and attention that could possibly be imagined, and means that the warden who accomplishes it and continues it will be the most severely taxed of all. It is not the convict that is likely to do an honest, just day’s work, but the management who undertake to see that this most vital and salutary agent of discipline is always in full force and effect.
THE CONTRACT SYSTEM
I have no sympathy with those who inveigh against contract labor in prisons. A contract system in which the State receives the proper compensation for the labor of convicts, and the convict receives a just compensation for surplus work, a system which eliminates the abuses formerly found in contracts, a system in which the government, control, and treatment of the men is in the hands of the prison officials only, and the amount and the kind of labor is adjusted by the warden only, may be the best practicable economic system.
The abuses formerly chargeable to the contract system, and possibly chargeable now in sections, are not necessary, and existed and exist only because prison officials permitted them or fostered them; and instead of abolishing the system, men should have been substituted who would prepare a proper contract, obtain the right compensation, secure rational treatment for the convicts, and get just conditions generally, and have the invaluable experience of expert manufacturers to teach the men deft and skillful labor at something they know becomes a factor in the world beyond the walls.