It was Mrs. Wilkinson and the “Pirates of Penzance” that brought one of the most refractory inmates of the whole two hundred at Sherborn up out of the punishment cell where she was confined at regular intervals. There was no question about it, the girl had a remarkable voice, and the opera had to have her, and she would simply have to keep out of the punishment cell. Which she did, and on Saturday sang the part of the Pirate King with a dash and a finish that brought forth a storm of applause.
She regards Mrs. Wilkinson as her especial charge. And, indeed, many of the girls have a maternal sort of attitude toward this little chaplain, with her wide blue eyes, her earnestness, her trick of asking advice from everyone, her intentness on her work, and her way of taking it for granted that everyone else is just as absorbed and just as enthusiastic as she is.
Mrs. Wilkinson has been at Sherborn a little more than a year. The “Pirates of Penzance” is by no means the first achievement. All the public holidays are celebrated. Last year “The Sleeping Beauty” was given by the lowest grade in the prison, in which eleven nationalities were represented, many of the cast being unable to read and write. Fourth of July is always a gala day, and the festivities include a minstrel show. This year the minstrel show, given out of doors in a charming little amphitheatre on the prison grounds, was a deviation from the usual half-circle, end-men arrangement. There was a little darky cabin, choruses of cotton pickers, and a substantial plot.
Every month there is a birthday party, given in honor of all those whose birthdays come in that month. An extra dish is provided for supper, and instead of regular chapel exercises there is an entertainment of some sort by the girls themselves. Folk dancing has been held under the trees, the kitchen girls danced “Pease porridge hot,” the sewing girls “Reap the flax,” and the laundry girls a Swedish clothes washing dance.
From all this it might be gathered that we were stepping rather far across the line and giving our offenders a better time in prison than they have out of it. The ultimate object of these entertainments, of all this work which seems at first glance rather irrelevant to correction of criminal tendencies is something quite different from the mere pleasure to those who take part.
In the first place, concerted action has been the slogan for every prison reformer. In all too many instances, however, it has been enforced concerted action, and that is of little or no benefit. In all the thirty-odd years that the women of Sherborn have been working in the shop, in the laundry, on the farm there was probably no spontaneous co-operation whatever. The best that could be said was that they were not sitting idle in their cells.
The most important contribution which Sherborn’s chaplain, more or less unconsciously, has brought to that curious community is a new sort of inhibition. Up to this time the correction of the wayward has been through the medium of morals. About the best thing that could be done while a woman was serving her term was to attempt to awaken in her a sense of her own responsibility, of her duty, of the standards by which other people lived and which were necessary for comfort and health and ultimate goodness. It was an attempt to get into working order that moral inhibition that keeps the greater part of us from forging checks when we need money, or murdering our enemies when we hate them.
Mrs. Wilkinson has a new inhibition—the æsthetic. Fifty per cent. of the women in Sherborn are there for acts which to the normal person would be unspeakably repulsive. The average woman is held back from filthiness by her æsthetic sense, even if she isn’t by her moral sense. By giving the women who for a year or two come under the State’s care an understanding of any one art, especially of music, which appeals most directly, a standard is given from which the individual never backslides. Moral standards depreciate, but the person who has been educated past ragtime and past bad pictures never really enjoys them again. And while the æsthetic inhibition has less direct bearing on conduct than the moral, while it does not always have force enough to be effective, it is one more chance for the girl who goes out from under the State’s supervision to stay out.
This is, of course, one of the greatest problems of the penal institution—how to hold the discharged prisoner to the standards which she has but just grasped during her term.
“If we could only keep them here until we had set them squarely on their feet,” said Mrs. Hodder, the head of the prison. “The great difficulty is in dove-tailing life here with the life that they meet outside. People are so merciless, so cruel—they force the girl straight down again into the life she came from.