This radical revision of the army’s disciplinary methods is proposed in a recodification of the articles of war, dropping thirteen sections from the old code as obsolete and inserting provisions for a policy of suspended sentence and less drastic treatment of military offenders generally.
The bill makes no mention of the military prison on Alcatraz Island, San Francisco. In this connection the committee report says the Secretary of War is convinced that establishment of the detention barracks and necessary branches would make the maintenance of a military prison unnecessary. The elimination of Alcatraz Island from the bill would make possible the use of the islands as an immigration station, as desired by the immigration bureau.
The jurisdiction of courts-martial would be broadened considerably under the proposed new code, extending to capital offenses in time of peace which are beyond the reach of civil courts. The present code gives this provision only in time of war. On spies in time of war only would the death sentence be mandatory under the new code, and a two-thirds majority of the court-martial imposing such sentence would be required instead of a bare majority.
Frank Sanborn on the State Control of County Jails.—In a letter to the Boston Transcript, Mr. Sanborn writes as follows:
“The present agitation of the prison reform question in Massachusetts, and the number of those who support a better system of prison discipline, are interesting facts to me, who, as secretary of the first Board of State Charities, appointed fifty years ago last October, was the first permanent inspector of all our Massachusetts prisons that had ever filled that post. I devoted much time to it in the first years of my service of five years; and on the 2nd of March, 1865, my friend, Gov. Andrew, sent in to the Senate my long special report on our prisons, with suggestions for their reformation, most of which were subsequently inserted as laws in our successive revisions of the statutes. But one suggestion, then first made, has not yet been adopted and is urgently needed for adoption by the present legislature—the control and classification of the prisons in our fourteen counties by the State government. It is not practicable, without a change in the State constitution, to make this control quite complete, for our county sheriffs are constitutional officers and have certain legal and customary rights over the arrests and custody of untried prisoners, witnesses, etc., which no statute can take away. But all convicts in the counties—that is, all sentenced persons—should be under a uniform discipline in their prisons, which the State alone can establish and enforce.
“Fifty years ago we had no separate prison for women, no State reformatory for young offenders, no State asylum for insane convicts, and persons untried because insane; and no State asylum for placing reformed young offenders in private families. The next year after my report, a first step was taken towards State control by the creation of a State Workhouse at Bridgewater. This, which is now called the State Farm, contains at present more than a third part as many convicts as were in all the county prisons in 1864-5—only 6,563 in all. Adding to the Bridgewater prisoners the 800 insane convicts held in custody there, the total to-day is more than half the number in all the county prisons in March, 1865. The Women’s Prison at Sherborn, with its hundreds, the Concord Reformatory and the Shirley branch, with their 1,000 inmates, and the reformed young offenders now living under State authority in families and other convicts under State authority elsewhere, would add for an aggregate more than the 6,563 who were in the county prisons fifty years ago. To that extent the State has exercised its right of eminent domain over prisoners.
“But there still remain in the county prisons and the few county reformatories about 4,000 permanent or average prisoners—most of them convicts—whose proper classification is impossible, even in the larger counties, and practically out of the question in the middle-sized and small counties. And this average population of some twenty-five establishments represents not less than 30,000 different persons during the year, whose separation and proper care cannot be provided for in these twenty-five prisons, etc., some of which are always crowded, others usually empty or half filled, and all under a varying, partial, costly and practically useless prison discipline. State control would give all but a few hundred of the 30,000 comers and goers a safe, judicious and to a good extent reformatory discipline, now quite uncertain or impossible as things are.
“Our county systems, of which the outward and visible signs are the prisons and court houses, expend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year and are the natural nests and breeding places of county rings, which waste the taxpayers’ money, manipulate and corrupt our local politics, and make the administration of criminal law, in several of the counties sometimes a job, sometimes a farce, and by its delays and appeals a great revenue for lawyers and officials, pocketing fees and postponing or perverting justice, in a manner that every one familiar with county business, as I was while a State official knows, but to a degree that can only be revealed by investigation in each county, such as that undertaken in my own County of Middlesex, and threatened by the mayor and other official persons in Suffolk. Let these investigations go on; but, in the meantime, follow the recommendation of all well-informed persons, and give the State commission control of these nests of crime and vice, our ill-governed prisons.”
The Booher Bill Passes the House.—On March 4th, by a vote of 302 to 30, the House passed the Booher bill that virtually prohibits the shipping of convict made goods in interstate commerce. The measure adopts the principle of the Webb law which provides that liquor shipped into “dry” territory shall be subject to local and State laws prohibiting the traffic in alcoholic liquors.
The Booher bill provides that convict made goods “shall upon arrival and delivery in any State or Territory be subject to the operation and effect of the laws of such State or Territory.”