“The men should be divided into smaller groups,” said the superintendent, “and I believe the recreation room should be a part of the dormitory. I would not place more than 25 to 50 men in each group. That would give a chance to segregate the youths from the older men and permit keeping apart the more dangerous type from the man who is here on some comparatively trifling charge.
“Another of our greatest needs is the establishment of industries to supplement the work on the farm. We are going to get these. There should be a furniture factory, a canning factory, brick yard or other suitable industries where the men can be worked when weather conditions are bad or outside work slack.”
The greatest factor in the maintaining of discipline is the use of the honor system. There are good jobs on the farm and bad ones. And the good jobs go to the men who have the best records and have shown their ability to take positions of responsibility.
“You can’t tell me that you can run any prison with any such sort of discipline,” a prison superintendent recently told me. “There are some men who must be strung up and there are some who must be spanked. If we didn’t resort to extreme methods at times we would have a riot on our hands all the time.”
The best answer to this is found in the record of the Indiana farm. There hasn’t been a strike or a serious riot since the institution was founded. There are no guards standing or sitting around idle. The guards are working foremen who perform as much actual labor as any prisoner. The employed guards have guns in their pocket, but the guns are never used and some of them aren’t even loaded.
There is a provision in the State law of Indiana which permits the drafting from the penitentiaries of trusties to take jobs as foremen, sentinels and lookouts. Of course, this probably could not be done in Detroit, because the house of correction is a city institution. But in Indiana it assists materially in keeping down the payroll. It makes this difference—the farm colony at Occoquan, Va., has a payroll of about $5000 a month; the Indiana institution gets along with $1700. And the two institutions are very much alike.—From The Delinquent, March, 1917.
[A]THE CRIMINAL CODE OF PENNSYLVANIA.
William E. Mikell, Member of State Commission to Revise the Criminal Code.
Perhaps, in the true sense of the term, there is no criminal “code” in Pennsylvania. The whole body of the criminal law has never been reduced to a written code in this state in the sense in which this has been done in some of the States of the Union in which jurisdictions there are no crimes except those specifically prescribed. * * *
At the common law, crimes were classified as felonies and misdemeanors. Without going into nice historical questions we can fairly say that the term “felony” was applied to the more heinous crimes, “misdemeanors” to the more venial ones. In the statutory law of both England and of this country these terms have in general been similarly employed. In the Pennsylvania code the legislature has in the majority of cases in defining each crime designated the crime a felony or a misdemeanor; and following the general principle of the common law, affixed the stigma of “felony” to the graver crimes. Viewing the code, however, as a whole, there is an utter lack of principle in the grading of crimes as felonies or misdemeanors, either according to the moral heinousness of the offense, or the severity of the punishment.