“The farm does two things of great importance,” says Warden Codding. “The first is that it gives the men a new aspect of life as they are about to leave the prison. The farm work and a half hour recreation period have reduced the ordinary prison vices seventy per cent. The plan of working the men on the farm has not been going long enough to make any figures, but I believe that there will be a less percentage of men returned to prison for second terms now than under the old plan of keeping them confined all the time.”
The State of Jails in Massachusetts.—The state board of health of Massachusetts finds 45 jails in the commonwealth unfit for occupancy. They are unsanitary and not properly managed. Describing his incarceration in the Middlesex county house of correction in Somerville, Mass., Rev. E. E. Bayliss said in the Boston American of September 24th, that
“When prisoners are admitted they are given no medical examination whatever. The weak, the strong, the sick and the well are all one in the eyes of the prison officials. All receive the same food and the same treatment.
“The result is that there are any number of prisoners suffering from very serious and shocking diseases, who receive either no treatment or treatment of the most perfunctionory sort. In addition all these men use the same knives and forks, the same drinking cups, and the same towels as the rest of the men. They are shaved every day with the same razor.
“In other words no precautions whatever are taken to guard healthy individuals from contamination from diseases, the virulence and contagiousness of which are only too well known.
“The sanitary conditions of the jail are abominable. They are not fit to describe in print, and they nauseate me when I think of them. The bedding, walls and floors swarm with vermin, and the half-hearted attempt to get rid of them by an occasional sprinkling of ill-smelling powder only emphasizes their presence.
“Humanity, common courtesy, the slightest sympathetic realization that we are all human beings, after all, is unknown. There is no one to say a good word to the prisoners. During the three months I was there we had only two sermons, and these were perfunctory in the extreme, and delivered without the slightest idea of appropriateness and of crying spiritual needs of the listeners.”
Alien Criminals.—A study recently made by Joseph P. Byers, general secretary of the state charities and prison reform association of New Jersey shows that 35 per cent. of the prisoners in that state are foreign born. Of the inmates of the state reformatory, 23 per cent. are foreign-born and 45 per cent. are either foreign-born or of foreign parentage.
Alien prisoners in 1909-10 comprised one-fourth of all the inmates of the state prison of New York.