Two years ago the Legislature decided to put an end to the exploitation of prison labor as fast as the existing contracts expired. The contracts bring the State a revenue of practically $100,000 a year, two-fifths of the cost of running the prison. By abolishing the contracts, the State forfeits this revenue without decreasing the expense of the prison.
Employment for the prisoners must be found, and the State is committed to the principle of employing them for State use, and, at the same time, of providing healthful employment under the honor system in the hope that it will prove reformatory as well as physically and mentally beneficial.
Immediately two difficulties arise. One is due to the fact that the State law divides without clearly defining authority and responsibility. The attorney-general has decided that the keeper is responsible for keeping the prisoners, and the keeper demands that whether they are kept in the Trenton prison, at the State road camps or farm, they shall be attended by a greater number of guards than the inspectors think either necessary or for their moral good. There is here a question of expense, of the extension of outside work, of the moral effect of modern prison methods.
The inspectors are hampered, also, in the expansion of the State farm and road making experiments by the supervisor, who is responsible for keeping the contracts for prison labor; for the supervisor may requisition as many of the prisoners as he wishes for contract proviso of the law, of course; and the keeper must deliver them.
The second difficulty is that existing plans for their work offer employment for only a small percentage of the prisoners. At the expiration of the contracts—very soon—the great majority will be forced into idleness unless the contracts are temporarily extended. To meet this situation, the inspectors confess they have already broken the law in order to keep the prisoners at work.
No plan has been devised, no equipment has been installed, for furnishing labor to this great majority of prisoners. For this there are several reasons, none greater, perhaps, than the fact that the Trenton prison is not fitted for this employment unless the congestion there can be relieved very materially. It might be necessary to make provision elsewhere for two-thirds of those now confined there.
The Legislature has failed to make appropriations for installing a plant where the prisoners can make articles used by the State because no definite plan has been presented to it upon which agreement could be reached. The working out of the transformation of prison methods contemplated by the law of 1911 must be evolutionary. It will take time, and, meanwhile, contracts, it would seem, must be temporarily extended, regrettable as it is. What is needed, first and foremost, however, is a clear definition and concentration of authority and responsibility.
The First Woman Commissioner of Correction. New York City.—Miss Katherine B. Davis, formerly superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, took office on January 1, 1913, in New York City as Corrections Commissioner. She has thus been appointed by Mayor Mitchell as the director of the Tombs, the penitentiary, workhouse, three branch workhouses, the Brooklyn city prison, the Queen’s County jail, and a number of district prisons—enough of a task even for Miss Davis’s recognized ability. She also has the construction to attend to of the city reformatory for misdemeanants. She has associated with her as deputy commissioner, Burdette G. Lewis, a “social worker at City Hall.” Heartiest congratulations are being extended to the new heads of the Department of Correction. The readers of the “Delinquent” know Miss Davis well already.
“Was it as big as my fist?” asked the judge, concerning a stone which was responsible for a broken window.