We have learned, too, the value of the farm colony for the open-air employment of almost all classes of public wards. This has been applied to the insane in Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Indiana; to epileptics in New York, New Jersey and Indiana; to feeble-minded in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Indiana; to both dependent and delinquent children in many States, and more recently to certain classes of prisoners, including all kinds of misdemeanants of both sexes. What is being done at Cleveland, at Occoquan and at Guelph is well known. The most recent development of this movement is the New York State Farm for Women Misdemeanants. The simple, inexpensive, yet substantial form of buildings, the freer life and the opportunity to contribute in part at least to their own support, make it far better for the inmates and cheaper to the taxpayer.
In Indiana the first step in this direction came about through the establishment in 1907 of a State workhouse for women misdemeanants as a branch of the Women’s Prison at Indianapolis. The institution is entirely in control of women. Then the Board of State Charities began a vigorous campaign for a state farm for male misdemeanants. Conditions in the county jails were shown forth in the following paragraph:
HOW PRISONERS LIVE AND LEARN IN INDIANA COUNTY JAILS.
They live in idleness at the expense of the taxpayer.
They learn vice, immorality and crime.
They become educated in criminal ways.
They degenerate both physically and morally.
In 1913 an appropriation was secured, the land has now been purchased, and work on the buildings will soon begin. The law contemplates that the construction work shall be done largely by State Prison and Reformatory men. The new institution is for men who have a jail sentence of sixty days or more, and prisoners may be transferred from the State institutions whenever room for them exists at the farm. Eventually there will probably be several such farms in the State, and this movement, with proper amendments to existing laws, should in time do away with the use of the county jails for the confinement of convicted offenders, and leave them only as places of detention.
We now look forward to the time when we shall have a form of indeterminate sentence for misdemeanants. The success of this form of sentence for felons in Indiana as in many other States justifies our belief that it will prove valuable in the treatment of misdemeanants. Certainly some improvement can be made over the present illogical short sentence, which benefits neither the individual nor the public, in whose name he is held.
New York has already taken an important step in this direction. Misdemeanants between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one are to be committed under an indeterminate sentence to the reformatory for this class of offenders, authorized by the legislature of 1912. The site for this new institution has not yet been located. It is the purpose of those interested to place it on a farm and to make it one of the most complete and modern of reformatories.