There is a wide difference between a seasonable encouragement of attempts to amend one’s life, and a blind confidence in professions and promises. A kind look or word at a propitious moment, in the progress of penal suffering, changes the whole influence of it. A frown or a repulse will freeze into impenetrable hardness a heart that might be melted into penitence by timely compassion and sympathy. If prisoners are treated with less tenderness by Inspectors than is shown to the wild beasts of a menagerie, we must expect them to resemble wild beasts in ferocity when they are let loose. The true light in which Inspectors should regard themselves is, as protectors of the public against danger from such a source. They are appointed to superintend a process by which the ferocious passions of a man may be subdued—his vicious inclinations changed and right moral feelings and habits implanted. If the highest and best object of penitentiary discipline is attained, he who is received under it as a tiger, is discharged from it as a lamb. The infrequency of such a transformation might not be so striking if Inspectors executed their functions in a proper spirit. Not only would their personal and official influence contribute more directly to this result, but the whole economy and discipline of the prison under their charge would take the same direction.
V. We have only to add, that no political influences or considerations should be allowed weight in the appointment of prison-inspectors. We need not say that this remark has no local application, though we have no doubt that it would receive the hearty concurrence even of those who may regard the avoidance of such influences as quite impracticable. Political parties live by power and patronage. Offices of honor or emolument are the bribes that tempt men into the strife for party-supremacy, and upon a due distribution of these depends its maintenance, when it has been attained. But there are some posts which involve labor rather than honor. The emoluments of them but poorly compensate for the pains and self-denials they impose, and the duties require qualifications so peculiar and so rare, that we cannot afford to restrict the field of selection to any party. It is difficult enough to fill them properly, “with the world before us where to choose,” but the difficulty is rendered almost insuperable when a large portion of the community, and possibly an actual majority, are excluded, as out of political caste.
The choice of Prison Inspectors and School Commissioners and overseers of education and reformation should uniformly fall on those who are, on the whole, best qualified to serve, irrespective of all political relations and considerations. If we must have a new set of officers introduced into our prisons, and a new set of teachers and text-books into our schools, whenever a revolution occurs in the position of political parties, neither our prisons nor our schools will prove to be of much value. When we can trace all the ignorance and all the crime of the community to the door of one political party, we may be disposed to charge on them the burden of taking care of dolts and rogues; but so long as both are common to all political parties, it seems more wise and equitable to draw from all the best skill in the greatest force they can yield to enlighten the one and punish or (if possible) extirpate the other.
VI. There is another negative qualification of prison Inspectors—not mentioned last because we esteem it of the least consideration—and that is the absence of all morbid and whimsical philosophy about the origin of criminal acts. There are some people who may, with comparative harmlessness, indulge their fancy in framing theories to account for crime, without involving criminality. They may amuse themselves by analogies between the irregularities of the skull and the proclivities to particular crimes, or by tracing a disposition to larceny, robbery and murder to some physiological mal-formation, for which the offending party is no more responsible than for his stature or complexion. Or they may discover a process by which to lay the blame of all crime on society, and show to their own satisfaction that when a foul murder is committed, “Society” should be hung as the real offender, and not the poor wretch whom (as they would say) the “state of society” has betrayed into the commission of the deed!
This is not an imaginary supposition. Our own ears have heard a man of much repute for active philanthropy, and sharing quite generously in the confidence of the community, assert in an address to a large public assembly, concerning a woman who was then under sentence for the wilful murder of her child, that she was not the blame-worthy party—“She went,” he said, “from door to door, and sought work. All objected to employing her because she was incumbered with a child. Finding this incumbrance a bar to her success, she threw it into the Schuylkill river, and who would blame her?” asked the popular orator. “Those who turned her from their doors are the guilty ones, and should now be where she is, and in her place suffer the extreme penalty of the law!”
Now, a prison Inspector needs to be free from all such fancies. He has nothing to do with the origin of crime or the blameworthiness of those who are under his inspection. All these points were settled before the convict came under his notice. All he has to do is to see that the sentence awarded by legal authority is duly executed. He has a share in the oversight of an institution established for that purpose, and his simple duty is to see to it, that the penal purpose of his confinement is fulfilled with due regard both to the dignity of the Commonwealth and the rights of the convict—for a convict has rights as well as a freeman—and the Inspectors stand between the parties, not to theorize or speculate, but to oversee the process of punishment, that it may be conformed in all respects to the provisions of law.
Art. III.—THE OLD ULCER OPENED AGAIN.
If there is any one point settled in the science of prison-discipline, it is that which is embraced in the motto of this Journal, viz., that the separation of each convict from all other convicts, is the only basis on which we can rest a reasonable hope of making him better rather than worse;—or, to give the converse of the same proposition,—the most skilful doctors of the body politic have uniformly admitted that the association of convicts is sure to breed the most pestiferous and incurable moral ulcers in their patients.
We had supposed this doctrine was so clearly established, and its fundamental importance so generally admitted, that in Pennsylvania, at least, it would rule. But either through the negligence of the proper authorities to furnish the needful accommodations, or from the overstocking of the prison with a class of persons for whose reception and oversight no proper provision is made, or from a disregard to the positive requisitions of the law, association is still allowed in some of our prisons, and the mischiefs which have always sprung from that source are re-appearing among us. The old ulcer has re-opened, and the State doctors must see to it, and check it in season, or it will become malignant and uncontrollable.
The following incidents are furnished on indisputable personal authority.