I looked around the eight hundred acres. There was a sweep of horizon, a tingling acid in the air, a quietude, a blessed monotony in comparison with the feverish city, a spaciousness of possibilities, as compared with the walled-in prisons like Sing Sing; in short, an approximation to the sanest kind of normal life.
“Work?” The warden smiled. “Why, we’re working here ten hours a day; seven to twelve, one to six. Each man that works here gets a gratuity of two dollars a month, but he loses a part of that gratuity if he offends against the rules of the place. They get the money when they go out. Our payments to prisoners amount to between one hundred and fifty and two hundred dollars a month. We discharge each month about thirty to forty men. They get, in addition, a ticket back to the place from which they were sent.”
I asked the warden if he was ultimately going to build a wall around the place. “Not if I can help it. I don’t think bars on cell windows are necessary; but supervision is. However, we may as well proceed with reasonable speed in our modern ideas. Ultimately we may need the protected windows.”
For the completed prison, Warden Gilmour is planning a number of industries, all directly related to the life of the institution. There will be tailoring, carpentry, shoemaking, a woolen mill, a machine shop, a tile factory and other industries. And as for recreation, plans are not failing. There is already a ball team that has beaten, with one exception, all the teams that have come from the surrounding towns. There is fishing and swimming in case of good behavior. And when the warden gets the prison all built, he is going to turn much of the land, which is not used for farming, in to a kind of natural park.
Up there, across the line, some thirty miles north of Lake Ontario, where the summer heat gets into the nineties, and the winter cold sends the bulb down to thirty and more below, there is going to be a radical overturning of old prison regime. Inevitably the influence of Guelph and of a dozen other prisons in the “States” will send the walls of the older prisons crumbling. For Guelph means nothing else than a reversal of the theories of prison administration.
The old prison believed in dungeons and bars. The new prison substitutes therefor single rooms and God’s outdoors. The old prison feared an escape like the plague. The new prison forces an escape into its proper perspective as a serious episode in the training of the prisoner for honest life. The old prison shut out life and hope by monstrous walls. In the new prison, walls for all prisoners are regarded as monstrous things. The old prison drove men like brutes to work and often to mutiny. The new prison blows the whistle at noon, and the men come in from all over the farm to dinner, and go to their rooms or to the dormitories afterward for a short rest, and then back to normal work. The old prison—and there are many of them still—believed in squeezing the life blood out of the prisoners for the benefit of the State and of private contractors. The new prison believes in the working of the men for State profit, if for profit at all. And the modern chiefs of new prisons are giving sober attention to a fairer division of the profits of prisoners’ labor between the prisoner and his compulsory employer, the government.
The old prison believed in wretchedly small cells, in a minimum of fresh air, in messes of poorly prepared food; in the lock step, the stripes and the shaven head; in punitive methods. The new prison believes in an ample cell and an outdoor life so far as possible; in decent food, the abolition of the lock step, a decent head of hair and a decent uniform—in reformation, if possible.
As to the future, who can tell? The new prison is an experiment. So far, it has worked in general remarkably well. Its sanction lies in the fact that it makes on the average mind the impression of being a common-sense proposition.
BOOK REVIEWS
Young Delinquents.—Mary G. Barnett, London 1913, Methuen and Co. Ltd., pp. 222.