“The first practical step which our reform institutions must take is the creating of the indeterminate sentence, which will allow the heads of institutions to keep their charges until they are in some degree capable of taking care of themselves. For instance, in Massachusetts a sixteen-year-old girl can be committed to the State Industrial School for Girls and be under its custody and its excellent training until she is 21. For the girl of 17, committing the same offense, there is only this institution, strictly penal in character and sentence, where she may serve a minimum of eight months and then be released.
“We have made some advance in this State in that the Parole Board never releases a girl if we oppose her release, so that we are able to keep the girls much longer than formerly, when they served the exact sentence and then were discharged. But it is very hard for us when a girl knows that her sentence is for one year and we keep her for two. She is resentful and uneasy all through the second year.”
Sweeping changes have been made in Sherborn since Mrs. Hodder’s arrival there three years ago. Sherborn is called a reformatory, but it is a prison, and, although Mrs. Hodder has removed many of the obsolete features of it, remnants of an old penology, she has not gone to the other extreme and turned punishment to pleasure and correction to play.
“What I hope to do,” she explained, “is to develop this reformatory as an ‘Industrial Training Institute for Women.’ We have had the handicap of ‘hard labor’ stamped on our commitments. This has tended to make of Sherborn a purely industrial plant.
“What I want to do before I get through is to put in commercial factory standards in speed and efficiency. Up to this time work here, like work in many of the prisons throughout the country, is little more than a stop gap. The training which the worker gets is practically no training at all. Hours are long, inspection is desultory. The worker who would go out from our machines into a white goods factory would not be able to measure up in speed and efficiency to any but the novice.
“The practical thing to do is to institute the factory standard, introducing some competitive basis. Then there must be correlation with the educational side of the institution. Before you can get up any interest from the women who sew on shirts they have to know something about shirts. They must be taught something about fabrics, how they are made, how to buy them—the condition of the industry—which they represent.
“Along with the shop course must go other things—domestic training, cooking, hand-sewing, millinery, and mending, and all of them supplemented by class-room training. In short, we must offer industrial training of a sort which would enable a girl to earn her living when she leaves us.
“This is the greatest difference between the policy which we are working out at Sherborn and the policy pursued by Dr. Davis at Bedford Hills in New York State. The emphasis at Bedford is, I believe, too much on the educational side. The emphasis on Sherborn has been, I know, too much on the industrial side. The two must be properly balanced.”
The reformatory at Bedford Hills can hardly be compared to the prison at Sherborn. The problem of the latter is much more complicated by reason of the fact that it is a prison for all mature offenders, including women of forty and over, while Bedford is nearer the Lancaster Industrial School, which receives girls under the age of seventeen. The older women criminals of this State are sent to Auburn.
Mrs. Hodder is energetically opposing the age grouping which our penal institutions have followed for many years.