Charles Reade’s great muck-rake book “It Is Never Too Late to Mend,” which drove the separate and silent system out of England, deserves the most careful study and thought. Victor Hugo’s valued “Les Miserables” cannot be read too carefully or critically. Dickens’ “American Notes” gives a most graphic account of the separate system, and his “Pickwick Papers” portray most powerfully the debtor’s jail.
Every report of the National Prison Association and the Conference of Charities and Correction, replete as they are with invaluable discussions of vital topics, should be read by every prison official, as well also as the different annual or biennial reports issued by the different institutions throughout the country, which contain points of inestimable value on conducting prisons.
In one of the offices of the model prisons of this country is a great round table capable of accommodating thirty or forty people. Around this table at intervals officers are seated to listen to lectures and hear and participate in discussions upon approved methods of accomplishing the best work. This might well be emulated in every similar institution.
There should be a fund set aside in every institution to defray the expenses of a number of officials, annually to visit other institutions for the purpose of observing how the work is done elsewhere, and thus by actual contact to obtain the most approved methods. And this ought not to be confined to the heads of departments alone, but should be open to even the humblest official in his turn. In addition to its practical value, it makes him realize that his work is a profession not to be despised or made light of, and that the curing of moral ailments, the helping of those who cannot help themselves, is a grand and a glorious calling, exceeded in its value to the world by no other.
THE OFFICERS’ SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS
When the day’s work is done officers should ordinarily leave the institution and its incidents behind them. They should participate actively and zealously in the outside social and religious matters of the community in which they are located. This balances them and gives them tone, and prevents pessimism, which may otherwise control them.
An officer’s usefulness is measured by the amount of good influence he exerts upon those under his charge. But every warden has at times the melancholy experience of observing that instead of some officers elevating and uplifting their men by their examples, the convicts’ influence has become the greater, and the officer’s ideals are gradually shattered, his resiliency lost, and his influence vanished. It is to guard against this melancholy possibility that officers should be urged to cultivate the best part of outside social, moral, and religious life.
All of the progress and reform that has occurred in penal legislation, prison rules, and procedure has come as a result of the study, care, thought, and efforts of prison officials and students of penology.
All the legislation that has taken away from prisons the gospel of labor, that has robbed them of the full opportunity of doing what was intended for them, has come largely as a result of the cowardice or lack of energy of prison officials who have not stood up against the unreasonable, unrighteous demands of thoughtless labor agitators, or who have not in time remedied and improved their labor systems and conditions so they might escape just criticism.
If there is a bad prison law on any statute book, or if a good one needs to be placed there, zealous, informed prison officials should never cease agitation until the defect is remedied. These reforms will come from no other source.